Tips and techniques to help create a website

Selecting your niche

Sep 13, 2008 Selecting a Niche

When I asked Jay Berkowitz if he was interested in doing a podcast on teaching me how to setup a website from start to finish, I wasn’t completely sure what I wanted the website to be about. As it started getting closer to doing the podcast, I decided to make it into a website that teaches how to setup a website from start to finish from the very basics, all the way to marketing it, etc. Therefore, while Jay instructs me, I’ll be posting on how to do each step along with other tips and tricks I learned from other podcasts that I listen to. In a future post, I’ll provide a list of all the podcasts I listen to.

The first thing that needs to be done is decide the topic or “niche” you want your site to be about.

To find that niche, I suggest selecting a topic that you are familiar with. What are you good at? Write it down! Make a list. Select something you enjoy doing. There’s no sense in writing about something if you don’t enjoy the subject. That would grow old very fast. If you’re good at a dozen things, write them down in list order. Carefully go through them and pick 3-4 of your favorites.

Now, go through those few that you selected and pick the one you are most passionate about. By selecting this one topic doesn’t mean you’ll throw away your other niche ideas, you can build those later. This first topic will be your test site. This is where you will learn the basics, make mistakes, learn from them and move on. This will be practice for you. This site is not going to be abandoned at the end, it’s just almost impossible to build something like this and not make some mistakes. It will be changed, adjusted and tweaked as you go along.

Now, if you were going to search for your topic, what keywords would you use to find it? What keywords and phrases do you think users might enter into the search engine? Write them down! Make a list of about 20 keywords and keyphrases then sort them by order of importance. A keyphrase is nothing more than single search with multiple words in it, ie: “leather saddle for horseback riding” instead of just the word “horse.” You can use the free version of this keyword tool to find your keyword and keyphrases.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/keyword-suggestion-tool.html

Enter your keywords in the entry box and select the “Hit Me” button. You’ll get about 100 keyphrases that are related to your topic. Select about a dozen that are relevant and write them down. Create a list and save those words for the future steps.

Go to the Google link below and type in your keywords. Google is great with all the information they provide. Not only do they give you other keywords to use, but they provide data on how many searches were done and at what time of year.

http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This will be a good starting point that will allow you to pick your niche. The next post will show how to register a domain name and register the site with an Internet service provider (ISP).

Tags: Build Website, keywords, Niche