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I am starting to think that the hardest part about starting a new website is finding the topic/niche.  Like I mentioned before I am going to be smarter about my online business.  I am going to make a business model for all of my websites, and therefore when starting new ones I have to be sure that I have a possibility of making money off of them even before I start.  That means that I have to do a lot of research on every topic that I come up with.

My problem right now is that every topic that I can think of, well the ones that I am interested in actually building a site around, aren’t getting through the initial weeding phase.  Basically my ratio target for sites/searches is still WAY off, and this is getting frustrating.  I have all of this energy to start something but I can’t figure out what to start.  It is like a writer staring at a blank piece of paper or an artist staring at a canvas.  I need some inspiration.

If anyone out there has an idea, and wants to help a guy out send me a note.  If I make millions with it I will give you a cut.  Or if you have a “process” that you use for brainstorming for ideas send me a link.  I am running out of options.

It was soo much easier when I was just jumping on any bandwagon and spending money on sites thinking that it would just happen.  Sure I usually broken even, but that was before I started keeping track of the time that I am spending on any one project.

A friend on mine messaged me the other day to try LineRider.  Is it ever cool.  There is not much to it, you just draw a line and watch the buddy on the sled go down it.  I even managed to make a loop in one, but be careful he speeds up really fast.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

One of my sites is a forum.  I have been running the site for sometime now, but since it is basically a hobby site I haven’t really done any good business work to it.  This is something that I am going to change.  There are a number of things that I am going to do to double the traffic by April, and double it again by this time next year.

1. Create a new front page. Currently the site looks like a forum, I need the site to look like a news source WITH a forum.  To do that I am going to re-create the front page.  The front page is going to have a number of “news” stories that I will pull for different sources, or write myself.  It will also have the recent links that were added to our News Links engine.

2. Create more content.  The next thing that I am going to do is write better stories.  These will be picked depending on what keywords I want to target.  Usually the keywords will be something someone searched for already or something that i think that people who will want to write in the forum would be interested in.  I am going to strive to create at least 1 page every 2 weeks.  These pages will be huge, with LOTs of information.  I will also be searching for links to these pages with wild abandon.

3. Make site SE friendly  This is one that I am not sure if I am ready for yet.  Currently the siet is as friendly to the SEs as I can make it without adding MOD-Rewrite support.  I may actually have to do this in the near future, but the best way to do that costs a fortune (for a site that makes little to nothing).

4. Write more posts.  The only way for the forum to become active is if it looks active.  To do that I am going to have to do more posting myself.  I am planning on  10 posts a day till April, and by then I should have enough to cut back and work more on promotion.

5. New look.  In April I am going to give the entire site a NEW and IMPROVED look, from a PAID designer.  Currently I am using free styles that really don’t fit my site.  I am also going to be working on a new logo, name and brand.  In the coming months I am going to brand the site like branding is going out of style.  I am going to make cards to give to all my friends, I am going to get T-shirts made to wear to the gym, in public, etc.

6. Contests, I am going to be running monthly contests and guess what 1st prize is going to be….A T-Shirt and a spot on the winners board.  That’s right I am going to have the community create my content and promotion and then for a prize they will get some more promotional material

So that is my plan, I will give you an update in April to let you know how it went.  I am hoping that everything goes smoothly from here on out.

Not much to say, other than Niche researching is not fun.  That is all that I did today (I didn’t have a lot of work at the day job) and I have come up with only a couple of ideas.  In case you are interested I am only using two tools at the moment, and they are both Google.

One is the Google Adwords KeywordTool, and the other is Froogle.

Froogle is great for getting ideas on what may be a good niche, you just refresh the home page often and see what the recently found items were.  The good thing about this for a starting point is that you know that at least someone is interested in these items.

Then from there I use the Adwords Keyword tool to find out if the topics that I picked out are already saturated, or is there room for one more :)  This is the part that gets sticky.

Right now I am looking for a topic that I am going to build a site around, and the other I am looking for topics/products that I can use for PPC arbritage.

Anyway, have a great weekend.

I have been spending a lot of time researching what topic I would like to build a website around.  There are a lot of things that have to be considered, what I like, is there money in the topic, is there a lot of competition, etc.

However I have also been thinking about doing some more work in PPC arbitrage at the same time.  The plan as it is now is to spend approximately 50% of my time on this until I finally come up with a topic that I feel that is worth the time and effort to put in.  Then I will cut back to be about 25% with the rest of the time being put into my new site.

I am going to pick one product a week, and spend that week testing to see if it is going to be worth my while.  I will be using AdWords to do my testing and if it looks good there, then I am going to try MSN and Yahoo for traffic.  As for the landing page I will buy one from a reputable designer.  I will then test, test, test.

I will let you know how it goes.