Note: This is an archived version of the original thread just for the archive section of WB so it is closed for discussion. To reply to this thread and discuss, please go to the live version of this thread in the Brainstorming Forum.
Since most people come to this forum ultimately looking to make money online, I thought I'd create this sticky to give you a few guidelines for choosing a topic for your website. Reading this will save you a lot of time, energy, money and frustration.
You Need a Strategy
It's easy to think of the idea or end result. "I want a forum", "I want to build a community or membership site" or "I want a site with video uploads." How many threads have we seen like that in this forum alone?
Generating ideas is fine and the first logical step. However, people often forget to think about how they are going to draw traffic to their sites. And since people don't just stumble upon websites and start using or buying from them,
you need a strategy. Deciding on the kind of site you want is
not a strategy, it's just an idea.
Great ideas don't draw traffic to websites automatically, but well thought out strategies and solid execution does. Instead of
only focusing on the idea and rushing to build your site, you have to ask yourself two important questions.
1) Who is my audience?
2) How will I get people to visit, participate and re-visit my site?
When you address these questions
fully, you
begin to develop a strategy and your plans begin to take shape and make sense. You also need to understand the fundamentals for how people use/surf the web. And if you are ignoring these questions because you feel you already know or you don't think they are important, you may wind up like Abe below...
Abe The Musician
Abe is new to creating websites, but wants to create a membership site for musicians. His future site will have a place for musicians to login, upload music, photos and interact with other members.
Abe decides to hire a programmer to build this site because he doesn't have the technical expertise or desire to build it on his own. Abe pays a developer $5,000 to create this site for him. He is ecstatic and ready to launch and welcome new members.
About one month after launch, Abe is sorely disappointed. He is having a heck of a time drawing traffic to his website. He's posted in a few musician related forums and submitted his site to a few directories but the traffic is very minimal and he's only had 2 people sign up for a membership. Now Abe is out of $5,000 and no clue how to build activity to his website.
Abe paid a developer a large amount of money to create a slick, powerful community website. It's a pretty cool site. There's nothing on the web like it, so why is he having trouble building traffic? What did he do wrong?
Looking at the 2nd scenario may provide the answer...
Carl The Musician
Like Abe, Carl loves music and wants to create a community/membership site for musicians to share music and interact. Carl remembered reading an article that discussed the challenges of launching membership sites prior to having an audience. So while keeping his long-term community website as his main goal, he decides to create a content site that will act as a doorway (traffic generator) to the community/membership section of his site.
Carl loves to play the piano. He taught music lessons for years and thought an instructional site on how to play the piano would make a great doorway to his site.
Carl begins writing how-to articles on playing the piano and recording instructional videos. After uploading a few videos to YouTube, Carl immediately begins to develop a following. He expands his tutorials and also begins developing instructional videos for other instruments he knows how to play.
Carl takes advantage of his YouTube profile page and directs people back to his site. Suddenly 30% of his site traffic is now coming from YouTube and it didn't cost him a cent. After two months of hard work, not only are his YouTube videos generating traffic, but he also starts getting found in Google for a handful of piano-related keywords thanks to the search engine optimized articles on his website. How did he do that?
Before writing each article for his site, Carl diligently checks the
Google AdWords Keyword Tool for keyword search demand and writes articles that focus on many
long-tail keywords. He also spent a little time studying upon basic SEO (search engine optimization) to give his pages the best chance of ranking well in the popular engines.
Long-tail keywords are very specific and less competitive keyword phrases that people search for online. They may not be searched for as much, but they are much easier to get ranked higher for because there is less competition. For example, if your niche is golf, trying to rank high for a broad term like golf would be tough because it's too competitive. But a term like left handed golf is much more narrow and may be easier to rank high for. The term left handed golf would be an example of a long-tail keyword.
Six months later, traffic is building nicely. Carl now has a FaceBook fan page for his site, a trafficked YouTube channel, traffic from the search engines and he has discovered how to use Twitter to network with other musicians. His following continues to increase. He's also found a few online piano lesson tutorial packages to promote on his site where he earns a commission for each sale he generates. He's also joined AdSense and is now making about $250 per month just for displaying contextual piano-related ads on his site.
Things are looking good for Carl and he believes he now has a large enough following to move on to the 2nd phase of his website -- the community/membership section. Remember, that was Carl's main goal in the first place.
Because he has worked so hard at building a following through his content (SEO), YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter, Carl now has an audience to promote his new community/membership website to. Fortunately, he has been collecting e-mail addresses on his website since day one, so he has a list of people he can e-mail to announce his new community website.
After about 4 months of promoting his community/membership section, Carl now has 250 members and the activity on his site is growing. He still continues to create YouTube videos and use Twitter and FaceBook because he realizes that is what helped him funnel traffic to his main site.
Abe vs. Carl
Let's compare Abe and Carl. They both had the same idea, but one had a strategy and the other didn't. Abe was so focused on his
IDEA, he didn't really spend time on a marketing strategy and execution. This is a very common problem with newcomers who want to create websites. They get so caught up in the
idea and building the site, they don't put much thought into marketing because they believe the great idea will take care of itself.
Carl did his homework and knew that it was a bad strategy to launch a community website with no traffic base. So he created a niche-site that ultimately funneled traffic to his membership website.
As I said before, people don't just don't join or interact with websites just because you launch them. If that was the case, every site would be a success. Not only do you have to deliver quality content and have a solid presentation, but you have to develop a strategy for marketing and execute, execute, execute.
I don't care what kind of site you want to create, content will always be king. Searching for information is still the number one task performed online. So if you want to get people to your site, find a way to deliver information related to your niche that can draw traffic to your site first.
This is especially true if you want to build an interactive site that depends on the activity of other people. Community-based/membership websites are more challenging to generate traffic to because they require user participation. And if you want people to participate on your site, not only do you need value and freshness spilling out of your ears, but you also need enough traffic coming to your site to give it a chance to succeed.
It's a gradual process, but well worth the effort in the long-run. Just ask Carl, who was able to quit his 9 to 5 job after just two years of running his website.
What About FaceBook and MySpace?
I know what you're thinking. If content is king then how come sites like FaceBook and MySpace got so big? There isn't a lot of content there.
First of all, MySpace and Facebook were pioneers in the social networking scene. They've taken over the market. The average Joe does not have the income to market and compete with sites this large and popular. So if you want to build an interactive website, it's much better to start with a niche site like Carl did above, and grow from there. And you don't have to hire a programmer, you can use a CMS like Joomla or Drupal which comes free with most regular hosting plans these days. Be sure to research all your options before diving in.
Note: All characters are fictional and were only developed to illustrate a point. 
However, Carl's story is a very realistic approach to building a successful site or niche community. In fact, a lot of this was taken from my own success story.
Note: This is an archived version of the original thread just for the archive section of WB so it is closed for discussion. To reply to this thread and discuss, please go to the live version of this thread in the Brainstorming Forum.
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