Working at Home on the Internet - Picking a Topic

by D. David Dugan

Published on this site: March 10th, 2007 - See more articles from this month

This can be harder than it sounds and is probably the most important decision you'll make with your work at home internet business. There are two major considerations in choosing what your website will be and both are extremely important. Some will argue that one is more important than the other, but in
they end they are equal.

The first thing to consider when picking a topic for your site is picking a topic you enjoy. What's that have to do with making money online you may ask? Well, if you don't like it, you won't spend time on it. Yes, the desire for money will help some, but your success online is in direct proportion to how much time you spend on it. Quite simply, if you like something you will spend more time on it. Don't ignore my advice here, be sure to identify your hobbies and interests and pick one of them to make a site about. The more popular the better.

I gave a hint at the end of that last paragraph about the next consideration. It's popularity. Let me explain exactly what that means in this context as it's a little tricky. To give you the full story though I have to jump ahead a little.

Once your site is up and running you'll need to get some ads on it. Online advertisers pay for visits to their site and exposure of their ads. They amount they pay varies wildly based on topic and the number of bids for your ad space. Yes, that's right, advertisers will bid for ad space on your site. It's very much
like an auction, the highest bidders ad is the one that gets shown. So, the more popular your site (and topic) the more advertisers will bid on it and the more money you will make from the ads.

There's a catch to this though. Not really a catch I guess but more of a flip side. Your site is probably not the only one out there on it's topic. There's probably quite a few websites out there that will be in direct competition with you. That's oK though, remember McDonalds and Burger King. The down side
though is that the more popular your topic the more choices advertisers and web surfers will have. This has the effect of lowering the amount of money you will make.

As you can see, knowing how popular your topic is is very important. There are two ways I recommend in researching this. One is our free keyword search tool located at the work at home site referenced below. You can enter up to three keywords or phrases into it and it will show you how popular they are as
well as list similar ones. It's a very useful tool. The second way is a pay way but it offers much more. It will show who is using the keywords and what other keywords they are using. You can put a website in and the will show you what keywords they are using, how popular they are and even how successful they
are. It's an amazing service and worth every penny. You can check it out there as well.

Back to picking your topic. The trick is to pick one that you like and is popular, but not to popular. Once again this is an important step, but don't take to long on it. There's still a lot of work ahead.



David Dugan - frequents a work at home website http://workathome.divinfo.com/ that has great resources like a forum and a blog. It's an excellent place to visit for help with your home business or working from home in general.