New Webmasters > Planning Issues > Choosing A Topic For Your Website

Choosing A Topic For Your Website

By corbyboy ⋅ July 19, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

Plan your topic in advance

These days on the Internet, almost every topic is covered to the point of saturation. They key phrase that you will always hear is “find you niche market”.

Niche markets are highly focused, very specialised sections of the market. The idea is that you want to tap into a demand that has not yet been fully exploited.

If you are thinking about selling books online, you will never be able to match Amazon for price or selection. What will your site ever be able to offer that Amazon can’t? However if you focus on selling, say, computer programming books, you will be able to compete more effectively. You can use your product knowledge to recommend books and review the newest releases. Since you will focus on a smaller selection, you can get to know you suppliers and hear about the newest releases. Maybe you will even get to know some of the authors. This, therefore, will be your niche market. Your can cover a specific topic in much more detail than Amazon ever could because you are focusing on just a small subset of the items that Amazon sell.

An additional point to consider is how highly targeted your traffic will be. Whereas the visitors to Amazon will just be interested in buying “just books,” visitors to your website will be interested in buying “computer programming books.” This allows any advertising you wish to introduce to be extremely targeted. You will be able to produce articles based on your extremely targeted content and you know specifically what your visitors are interested in.

Do One Thing And Do It Well

This is a summary of the philosophy of Unix programming, but it rings very true for building websites too.

Focus your website on the topic you know about. Don’t deviate from your chosen topic because you know it is not what your visitors are looking for. If you are using the programming book seller analogy mentioned above, why start selling cookbooks? Spend your time building more relevant content. Find more titles to sell and focus your time in becoming the best website in your niche. Your time is precious and you shouldn’t waste it.

Getting links to your website is without a doubt the single most important things you can do to make your website more findable in search engines. It is easier to get linked to if you are the authority on your topic. When people want more information on a topic they would rather visit a site that goes into great detail on a specific topic. Portals and search engines are not the content of the Internet. High quality, well written, authoritative articles are.

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