Choose a Topic

Working online is an ideal choice for working at home. There are a wide variety of opportunities for working at home, but building your own website or blog is one of the best. This sounds great — but where do you start? The best place to begin is by picking a topic.

Choosing a Topic for Your Site

There are a lot of different methods out there for picking a topic for your website. I highly recommend you spend some time thinking about this. There’s a good chance that the topic you pick will be influenced by the kind of website you hope to create and how you’d like to make money from it.

If you’re hoping to make money simply via advertising programs, such as Google’s Adsense, you can pick from many topics that bring in a group of interested people who are likely to click on ads. A site on a popular vacation destination is an example of this kind of site.

If you’d like to create your own products, such as an ebook or video how-to course, you’ll pick a topic that would be likely to sell such a product. A site focused on photography could do well with these kinds of products, for instance.

So Where Do You Begin?

Begin with interests. Both of the examples I gave above, a vacation destination and photography, can come from something that has interest to you.

You can pick a topic purely on its profit potential. There are people who make money like that every day. For some people, the money is the big motivation and it keeps them going.

I don’t advise that, however, especially if you are trying to create a successful business while balancing all of your other responsibilities in life. If you pick something just for the money, chances are you’ll burn out working on it. If you feel interested in something, even “passionate” about it, you’ll be able to keep going, even when the going gets tough (and sometimes, it’s tough).

Pick something that you have an interest in and has profit potential.

Where’s the Money?

Even though I think you should start with something you’re passionate about, you should also be realistic about the profit potential. You may have an intense interest in collecting ceramic Siamese cat figurines… but in the end there probably isn’t a huge market for this topic. Try to expand out to something related to your beloved Siamese.

How do you get an idea if your topic is profitable enough? I recommend you begin by checking Amazon.com – it’s a great place to research. Do people buy books on your topic? Are there magazines? Do people buy products related to your topics?

Look again at the photography example. People buy lots of photography books. There are plenty of magazines. People buy cameras, lenses, software, and more for their photography hobby. It’s a pretty safe bet that it’s a profitable topic.

There are many profitable hobby topics, or niches, as they are called in the internet marketing world. Topics related to health and wealth also tend to be very popular and lucrative.

Narrowing it Down

Going from these more broad ideas to a narrow focus is important, and it can be one of the most challenging parts of getting started. I recommend you use a solid keyword tool at this point. It will help you run and analyze numbers to get a feel for if your topic is a the right one for you.

My favorite way to research a site topic and build a website is with Site Build It!

You can also take a different approach, using WordPress or a similar blogging platform and a keyword tool such as Market Samurai. Click here for a keyword research video tutorial I made for you using Market Samurai.

I use both SBI!’s Brainstormer and Market Samurai and find both of them to be useful.