You can't just create a website about anything, it has to be a specific topic on which you have a decent amount of knowledge and interest. Otherwise, you won't know what you are talking about and it won't be any fun. So - let's get started!

The first step, before we can ever build our site, is to figure out what the site is actually going to talk about. We will be creating one "niche" website. Niche is a word that refers to a small, profitable corner of a market. This means that your site will be very specific and focused on one topic. Your goal will be to dominate this "niche" or small area. Does that make sense? Let me give you an example.

You may have previously worked in law enforcement, you have an interest in this topic. Through the process outlined below, you decide that something within this topic is the right angle for you. You don't create any old website about law enforcement in general. No. You narrow it down to a very specific piece of this topic (a niche). Through your research (again, this is just off the top of my head), you may find that it would be best to make a website about the training process of becoming a police officer. Now, THAT is a "niche". If you were the #1 resource on that specific topic, it would be something that could be very profitable for many years to come.

So, you may be thinking "Why should I narrow it down so much? Wouldn't it be better to go after the entire law enforcement industry?" If you are thinking that, I appreciate your optimism, but that just won't work. Let me explain. If you do a Google search for Law Enforcement, it shows that there are 41 MILLION websites about that topic. But something like Law Enforcement Degree only has 16 million. Still a lot, but much less than Law Enforcement in general. Got that? This means that there is far less competition the more you narrow down your topic. And the less competition, the greater chance you have of dominating your topic. We will expand on this in a minute, but now let's figure out HOW to actually choose a topic that is right for you.

Make a list of everything you are passionate about - write them down! Then, it's time to research which of those passions/interests would make the best website. To do this, we want to figure out two simple things. 1) how many people are interested in your topic and 2) how many other websites there are on this topic. There are simple, free online tools that we can use to figure all of this out.

Okay, step number one is to see approximately how many people are searching for your topic. This gives us a rough estimate of how much demand there is for a website on this subject. Let's run through an example. Please do this example with me as we go. Visit the "Google AdWords Keyword Tool". This is a free tool provided by Google. It will let us know a rough approximation of how many times someone typed any topic into Google.com.

Imagine that one of your passions on the list is Knitting. Visit the website above, type in Knitting in the box and click Get Keyword Ideas. What shows up is a listing of all possible searches related to our term of Knitting. You can see those on the left side. On the right under the heading "Monthly Search Volume" is a quick estimate of about how many times this term was typed into Google during the last month. Pretty cool, huh?

We see that there are other terms that show up related to knitting. I have found that the topics with 25,000 - 75,000 searches per month are usually best for the type of site that we will be creating. There is less competition but still plenty of visitors. So now we need to scan the list and find some potential topics.

Why are we doing this? Remember, we want a niche. Something that is not too broad, something that is focused on one specific corner of the Knitting market, for example.

I see that "beginners knitting" and "learn to knit" both fall within our range of 25,000 - 75,000 searches per month. And they are related to each other, which is even better. So far, it looks like building a site on learning how to knit for beginners could be a winner. If we were interested in knitting, we would write these terms down on a piece of paper along with the search volume numbers. Now we have a legitimate niche within the market and a vision of the possible site is starting to come together...

While you are on this webpage, spend some time playing with this tool and learning how it works. When it comes time for your homework, you will go through this process again with each of your actual passions.

Now that we know that it is possible to make a site about learning how to knit, we need to check the supply (i.e. the number of webpages on the internet that already talk about this specific topic). Of course, if we find that there is 100 million sites about learning how to knit, we need to go back to square one and find a new topic.

To find this information, all we need is Google. Visit this site and type in our term from the example: Learn to Knit. Now you look at the blue bar towards the top right of the page, where it says "Showing results 1 - 10 of 931,000". This means that there is only 931,000 web pages on this term. It may seem like a lot, but this is pretty good. Because in reality, only a handful per million are quality sites. I have confidence that our knitting site can easily beat the others.

Repeat this process with our other term that we thought might work: Beginners Knitting. We see that this one only has 680,000 pages. Even better. With a little practice, you will naturally be able to judge whether or not the supply / demand ratio is in your favor. If there are 1,000 searches and 100,000,000 pages about this topic, that's not very good. But if there are 50,000 searches and 50,000 results, that is fantastic.

Don't be shocked if there are millions of results. Google is scanning the entire internet for any page that contains your term, so obviously this is going to be a big number. However, only a fraction of these are quality sites dedicated to the topic. Those are the only ones you need to worry about.

Now, take a deep breath! This was a long and in-depth article. If there is anything you did not understand, please take the time to read this again and try out the tools in more detail.

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