Narrowing Down Topics and Keywords

Here is the research that I did sometime back to figure out which topics to focus on and have a feel of the competition and the monetization potential.

I'm a systematic person, so here are the steps that I took:

a) List the keywords - it is best to be a topic which you are at least somewhat interested in; otherwise, it will be a chore to write sufficient articles on it.

b) Find out how many people search the keywords per day; this can be done using a free tool by wordtracker. From there, you get a feel of how many people are interested in the topic.

c) Check out the amount of competition, that's where I record the "No. of Pages". So for instance, you can see that many more people searches "Learn Chinese" as opposed to "Learn Mandarin" but there are also more web pages (110m vs 5m)!

d) To know whether the competition is strong, you can check out the page rank of the top site. You can download various free pager ank tools and see if your top competition site is very strong in your selected keywords. The lower the score the easier for you to overtake.

e) Then if you are interested in earning advertising money, you can check out Google Adsense/ Adword and see if the topic you selected will have advertisers willing to pay more $ for as well as the list of current advertisements. (Google Adsense allows you to place ads of other companies on your site and earn money when people click on them; Google Adwords allows the vice versa, that is, other people placing your ads on their site and directing the traffic to your site) I also came up with my own weighting system for the advertisement by giving less weight to a lower $ advertisement.f) Finally, I prioritize the keywords and as you can see, learning Chinese has higher advertising income potential compared to learning Mandarin.

Hopefully, the above will give you an idea of the basic homework to be done before jumping in to create a blog/site around a topic that won't make you as much money as your next interest.