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.