Web Empire

If you are creating your first website, the subject matters hardly at all. Just so it has a coherent subject that interests some people, you have a start. Maybe down the road you will find it is not a very profitable topic — you can use the site to funnel traffic to a more profitable related site. In the process you will have learned a lot about creating, managing and monetizing a website. The important thing is to learn from that experience, and make sure your next site is more profitable.

We think of topics as individual ‘things’, but just like the Internet they are more like a tangled ball of strings, all frayed at the edges. Those threads all lead to related topics. Your website is like that ball of strings, with links being one type of frayed edge. Other frayed edges are less visible, like obscure terms that cause a reader to go off to a dictionary (or ansers.com) looking for a definition. Or mention of an interesting person that causes a person to go off looking for more information than you have provided.

Some of the frayed edges are advertising links, and those are the easiest to track, since they usually report information back to you regarding how many people followed them. Other frayed edges are visible in your log statistics — look at your ‘exit pages’ and see which external links are available on those pages … those are frayed edges.

Other people linking to your site, search engines, and other promotion of your site provide frayed edges on those sites that lead people into your site. You need to pay attention to where people are coming from, what part of your site they are visiting, and as much as possible, where they are going when leaving your site.

That information will provide clues as to what the topic of your next site should be. Of course, once that is built, you will feature links to it prominently on the first site, especially on those most visited pages and most common exit pages.

People will always leave your site, that is inevitable. You want them to either follow a link that pays you, or leave for one the other sites on your Web Empire. You can never be 100% successful at that, but the larger your empire, the more you are offering, and the better the odds that you will have something of further interest for many of your visitors.

Get started today. Build a site. Create a blog or two on subjects related to your site. Put some Adsense ads on there first, because it is easy and will provide clues about which parts of your topic people are willing to pay for. Join an affiliate program or two and add links or advertisements. Watch the results. Find the most profitable related topic. Within a few months you should be finished working on your site, and the related blogs should only require occasional ‘feeding’ with new posts. Study your progress and you should be able to find another topic that will be more profitable than the first, but still related so you can feed traffic from the less profitable to the more profitable. Repeat.

For each site you build to add to your Web Empire, you need to answer two questions before you even register the domain name. First — What is the site about? What is the topic or subject you will cover? Secondly — what do I want the site to do?

Now some people think the answer to the second question is always ‘make money’ — but that is not always true if you are building an empire, rather than a single site. Any site should be able to make a little money, but that may not be a sites main purpose.

What else might be the main purpose for a site? Yesterday we mentioned the benefit of earning good pagerank, which you then pass on to other sites in your Empire through links. Another site might exist to attract pre-qualified traffic — people likely to be interested in a product or service. A blog or information site helps you build a relationship with the group of people interested in that subject, who are then available for making special sales offers, or passing on to your sales site. This is very similar to ‘list building’ for email sales, but uses web content to draw people instead of a subscription based newsletter.

Of course many of your sites will exist primarily to earn money directly. That is OK. You still have to provide good content, in most cases, to attract potential customers. The only exception are sites consisting of a single sales page — and we will discuss those another time.

So, returning to the first question — what should your site be about? There is a lot of discussion about niches on Internet business related sites. For this sense of the word, the dictionary defines niche as:

A special area of demand for a product or service.

Well what does that mean? It just means that your subject needs to be something people are willing to spend money on. Some people interpret niche to mean a small or specialized area of demand, but there is no such restriction in the definition — they are confusing another, totally different definition of niche, where it means a small recess in a wall. An economic niche may be large or small, the important thing for our purpose is that people are willing to spend money on it.

It is much easier to work with a subject you are interested in — you will likely already know something about it, and learning more will be an adventure, rather than an unwelcome task. Don’t worry about finding out if there is much competition for your subject area — the more competition the more interest there is! There is always room for one more.

Nor is there any way to tell for sure how profitable a particular subject is — the profit will probably vary widely from one site to the next depending on various factors. Most people are not going to tell you how profitable their site is — particularly if you are planning on becoming part of their competition!

Studying keyword values is one clue as to how profitable  a subject may be — but it can be very misleading as well. If you can attract tens of thousands of visitors to a site that has a keyword worth only five cents, you can earn more than a site with a five-dollar keyword that attracts only thirty or forty visitors per day.

There are so many people analyzing keywords and popularity for subjects that ‘discovering’ an un-tapped or under-utilized niche is unlikely. Your effort will be better spent building a site with good information on a subject that interests you. The amount of competition you find for that subject is a good-enough clue to the value of the subject.

The important thing, and our subject for future posts, will be to rise to the top of the pack in whatever subject area you choose. That is best done by building a series of related sites that provide better or more easily used information than your competition. Do that by building a Web Empire, and profits will follow.