Choosing A Topic For Your Site?

We all know choosing a topic for a website can be hard. Everyone wants to be unique or have their own thing to talk about. Well, that is if you know what you want to talk about.

You probably wished you were the one who created MySpace or FaceBook.

After all, it seems so simple, right? Pick out an idea and just expose it to Yahoo and Google, by the time you know it, you’ll be rich. Wait!

This concept may have worked for some people, but this isn’t going to work for everyone out there. Take a look!

Make Money?

You want to make money right? If your goal is to make money with your site then I always recommend the simple approach.

Making a site such as MySpace seems easy, but you know what, it does take the time to program and maintain the site. If you don’t have the time to do all that work, it's not a good idea for the average person.

Even if you are going to pay a programmer to create your site, it would cost you thousands of dollars. I don't think people realize the amount of resources that go into creating a site that offers user interaction and profiles.

Not to mention you'd probably need dedicated hosting space, which can cost you hundreds of dollars per month. You can forget the $10/month hosting plans.

Yes, these sites look cool on the surface but there are a lot of hidden headaches the average person does not see.

So what do I mean when I say "the simple approach?" I'm encouraging you to do what I've done for the past 10 years.

I don't own any fancy MySpace-like websites. I don't have a lot of Web programming skills. I just create sites on topics that interest me, draw in traffic and make money from affiliate programs like Google Adsense and other companies that sell products that relate to my topics.

Say you love to prepare desserts. You could create top-notch-cake-recipes.com where you offer all your favorite cake recipes. You'd create your site and then spend time learning about SEO (search engine optimization) so your pages get found in Google, Yahoo, etc.

Then you could make money from Google ads and refer other products that your audience may find interesting. For instance, you could join Target.com's free affiliate program and refer some of their cookware.

Target provides you with the links to put into your site and you would earn a commission on every sale your site makes. They send you a check at the end of the month! There are thousands of affiliate programs like this.

An affiliate site like this is much easier to create and maintain than some large, programming-intense MySpace-like website. If you really want to do the work, grab Dreamweaver and start building!

Or you can use a program like Site Build It!, which was created to help people make money from hobby or personal interest websites. Their entire focus is to help you earn an income no matter topic you choose.