So what happens if you build a huge website and no one is really searching for your topic in the search engines, but that website is still very useful?
Then you have made a serious error.
This has happened several times to many people and is something you want to avoid. If you put effort into creating a website then you want to make sure that there is plenty of traffic potential there before you waste too much time.
So how can you check this out beforehand?
I would start with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Do a search for your root keyword of your topic and see how many broad matches there are per month. I would avoid anything under 50,000 or so as a general rule.
Second of all I would do a few google searches for your topic and take a look at the websites that come up. Are they big websites or small? Are they monetized? How? Are the people who own them adding content every day, or are they old, untouched websites? More monetization and more new content would generally indicate a thriving market.
Finally, a popular approach that some people have used is to build a “starter site” and give it about 5 to 10 articles and throw some links at it and wait a year or so. If traffic shows up then you have a winner and you build the site out. If nothing shows up then you let it die and go with a different topic. This approach sounds like a lot of work but it actually produces the best results by far. If you start one new site each week for a few months straight and then let them all simmer for a while, eventually a few of them will pop their heads up as being clear winners. Then you take those few sites and build them up while letting the rest just die.
That last method also works better than the others because in many cases the numbers from the Google tool and such will be dead wrong.
Another thing you might do is to leave the door open for expansion. Say you start a website about getting out of debt. What you might do is to buy a branded domain that covers the entire topic of finance, something like “financeWizard.com” or something. Then you start writing about debt. If the topic does not have enough volume, then you can always expand your topic and cover other areas of finance as well.
By the way, “getOutOfDebt.com” is not as desirable as a branded domain like “financewizard.com” any more. The search engines probably have tipped in favor of trusting the branded domain more rather than the keyword stuffed domain name. Just a suggestion. Go for branded!
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