Choosing a niche for an information site
But first a little intro. What is an information site and why do it?
Suppose you are a freelancer, you have a favorite business that brings a certain income. Of course, the level of this income is different for everyone, but for most freelancers it is common that earnings are very unstable and depend on the availability of customers. It often happens that at some period orders pour in one by one, you hardly manage, work around the clock, the money flows to you like a river – and suddenly everything, calm and lack of money. Sometimes it is not clear what causes such fluctuations in the demand for your services, they are unpredictable and pretty annoying. Stability is what the earnings of many and many freelancers are missing.
What is required
If you know your situation in this description, if you want to have a small but permanent source of income that will allow you to live peacefully during periods of forced downtime – think about creating an informational, or content, website.
Information site: what is it
In simple terms, this is a site that contains useful information on any specific narrow subject: how to bake pies, how to catch crucians, how to grow orchids. People will find such a site on search queries, and if the information contained on it is like them, they will return again and again, and your site will go higher and higher in search results, and traffic, that is, the number of visitors, will grow.
The more traffic – the more revenue you can get from it. There are quite a number of ways to monetize the site, you can use one or several at once. It is quite possible to achieve an income of several tens of thousands of rubles, or even more. A good increase in freelance earnings, right?
But I don’t want to deceive you: the path of a successful owner of income-generating content-keeper is long enough and labor-intensive. Creating an information site will require you to invest certain resources:
Of money. In the most minimal variant, if you do everything yourself, it is the cost of the domain and hosting, about 1,500-2,000 per year. At the very maximum, if you delegate the steps of creating a site to specialists – annual cash infusions can reach amounts with four and five zeros. About how much you have to spend, I wrote here.
Labor and time. Very clearly, in the case of creating a website, the time-money formula works: the less money you plan to invest in your project, the more you have to work yourself. Deal with technical issues, select a design, write the texts of articles – these classes can easily absorb all your time. But even if you delegate most of the work issues, you will have enough, at least an hour or two a day, but it will be necessary to devote your brainchild. Consider also that it will take several months, or even a year, before the site begins to bring the first profit.
Knowledge Creation, promotion, monetization of the site – all these areas require certain knowledge, which you will have to acquire either independently, breaking through the Internet and wasting your time (see clause 2), or buying some courses (see clause 1). . In addition, trends in these areas are subject to very rapid changes. You need to constantly keep abreast, be aware of everything – and continuously learn.
Not scared? That’s right, you don’t need to be afraid, but you should start this business with your eyes open, realizing that success will not come right away, and it does not smell like a freebie. However, the likelihood that you will be able to achieve a result, namely, the desired numbers of earnings on the site, if you do not give up halfway and have patience and perseverance, is large enough.
How to properly launch your project, minimizing all costs and maximally approximating the time for receiving the first income? About this I will tell with the help of checklists. There will be several of them, and the subject of the first check-list is Niche Choice.
Niche selection
The very first thing you have to do after making a fateful decision to launch a content project is to choose its theme, in other words, a niche. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this stage: if you choose an unsuccessful, uninteresting niche, no visitors will come to your site. And if you take a popular topic, but one in which dozens and hundreds of sites work, the result will be no better: you will not be able to break through the fence of competitors. Let’s proceed to the step by step selection of a niche and see how these dangers can be avoided.
Which site will be successful
1.Preliminary stage
First of all, think about what your soul is for. To become successful, your site must be useful to people: they will come to get answers to their questions, and the content of your resource must contain these answers in the most complete and easy-to-read form.
If you are close to the subject of the site, if you are well versed in it or even interested in it, if you know what your future visitors care about, it will be much easier for you and, more importantly, it is more pleasant to create this project.
