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.