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By mondala
Published: April 30, 2007
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EmailIt was asked in the forum, if a niche can be to small and how to promote and generate content for a small community website.
There is no niche too small.
It really depends on what your goals for the website itself are but the answer is probably no.
Monetization:
If the goal is to make lots of money, then choosing a bigger niche is better, but not too big.
However, even the small niche topics can be very profitable if it involves an audience that has money to pay for a service or product you offer, or if you have say contextual advertising that will display advertisements on high paying keywords.
A service or product that you might have is direct advertising to local business. This can be a good revenue source, not just a little income. Your keywords in contextual advertising programs probably WILL pay well, because local advertisers often do not optimize their campaigns and overpay for all keywords. It's money in the bag.
Example monetization possibilities,,, I run a local City website myself and the revenue possibilities are very good considering how easy it is to own that niche (which is actually your real question, though I am off topic now, I will get back to that shortly) How to make money on a local city/town website? With direct advertisements, sponsored classified listings, contextual advertising such as the Google Adsense program, etc etc. To be honest, a community website for a small town with a small population of 15,000 can still turn several thousands dollars a month in pure profit once established. (when you are the myspace or facebook of YOUR niche)
Interest:
If you are creating this site purely for interest, passion, local involvement etc then you are actually in a great position because the monetization will follow your efforts down the road. The important thing to remember is that establishing your website as the number one destination for you niche takes time. It takes time to build the community, it takes time to gain the confidence and creditability of the search engines, and it takes more time to do it right. Ultimately you just need to keep plugging away and the rest will take care of itself.
Here are some top considerations to keep you moving forward:
It really depends on what your goals for the website itself are but the answer is probably no.
Monetization:
If the goal is to make lots of money, then choosing a bigger niche is better, but not too big.
However, even the small niche topics can be very profitable if it involves an audience that has money to pay for a service or product you offer, or if you have say contextual advertising that will display advertisements on high paying keywords.A service or product that you might have is direct advertising to local business. This can be a good revenue source, not just a little income. Your keywords in contextual advertising programs probably WILL pay well, because local advertisers often do not optimize their campaigns and overpay for all keywords. It's money in the bag.
Example monetization possibilities,,, I run a local City website myself and the revenue possibilities are very good considering how easy it is to own that niche (which is actually your real question, though I am off topic now, I will get back to that shortly) How to make money on a local city/town website? With direct advertisements, sponsored classified listings, contextual advertising such as the Google Adsense program, etc etc. To be honest, a community website for a small town with a small population of 15,000 can still turn several thousands dollars a month in pure profit once established. (when you are the myspace or facebook of YOUR niche)
Interest:
If you are creating this site purely for interest, passion, local involvement etc then you are actually in a great position because the monetization will follow your efforts down the road. The important thing to remember is that establishing your website as the number one destination for you niche takes time. It takes time to build the community, it takes time to gain the confidence and creditability of the search engines, and it takes more time to do it right. Ultimately you just need to keep plugging away and the rest will take care of itself.
Here are some top considerations to keep you moving forward:
- Your niche is not an easy one to tackle, don't think it is. Keep working.
- Your niche is a very rewarding one and once you tackle it, it will probably be yours for a long time. Keep working.
- You site needs to be the number one source of information on your niche. Bait new users and try to keep them. See: Web dev soap Opera; how to get traffic
- How do you bait users? The real question would be, who is your audience? Local company Employees? Local businessmen? Couples/Families? Singles? Consumers? Men? Women? etc If men, what kind of men? Men who play sports, Men who drive certain cars? Men who listen to certain music? Married men etc. If local company employees, where do they work? Unionized? Any events coming up? Issues in the news? Car pooling options? Sponsorship stories? Community involvement? If Singles, where do they go? where can they meet people? what are they doing? If couples/families, do you have information on entertainment? dining? schools? health? city news? crime reports? warnings? events? etc etc etc. Try to think of everyone that you need to target and give them any and every reason you can to visit the site and come back... and of course tell their friends. With a community site like this, it really is only a matter of time before the world spreads. Adding a 'Tell a friend' feature to your site might encourage users to tell others. Local advertisements and local networking of course will help you. See: 25 inexpensive ways to promote your online community offline
- How to keep users. Well this is the fun part and the difficult part... here are some good starting ideas. Create polls/surveys, offer any incentives, offer interaction of any kind, be up to date, all content updated and revolving as much as possible. ... Contests are always a great way to keep users involved.
Community Building and Social Networks
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum103/587.htm
Link Development vs. Traffic Development and Staying with the Times
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum12/3047.htm
Community Building Primer
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/com...uilding-primer
Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/partic...nequality.html
25 Ideas for Inexpensive ways to promote your online community offline
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=64111
Link Building Tips and Resources
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=224828
People Optimization vs SEO -The web dev soap opera; how to get web traffic
http://www.gustoes.com/web_development/p2_articleid/27
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