Affiliate Content

April 24th, 2008 · Comments

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Q: What kind of information do I put on a Web site once I decide on a niche?

A: That’s sort of an unusual question. I would think you’d typically pick a niche where you have some background knowledge.

My topline advice would be that you should develop some original content.

Rather than pick a niche, because it is hot and sexy and trendy, pick something you know about, so you can write from your experience and knowledge-base, instead of just trying to manufacture content.

Pick something you know and add your unique take to the coverage of that area.

One method for generating content is to create a site similar to what I do with AskShawnCollins.com.

Anybody can ask a question about affiliate marketing, and I answer it via video and text.

Try that and you will eventually have a regular flow of new questions to help generate your original content.

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James Newton 5 months ago 1 point
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This is something I'm also curious about and to be honest, I'm a little disappointed in your answer; it's basically the same one I see everywhere. May I challenge you to look at this from a slightly different point of view?

I'm no genius, nor am I especially experienced, but I have lived a few years and had a number of adventures in very different areas. When it comes to writing about something I know about, there are a LOT of choices. Not that I know everything there is on any subject, but I do have valid and potentially valuable experience in a lot of areas. So the question stands: What niche should I pick?

Now, I wouldn't pick a niche that I know absolutely nothing about; for example, I'm totally clueless when it comes to fashion or interior decorating (as my wife would tell you). But my experience does range from programming to war to gardening to car repair to sex to teaching logic to mental health to customer service to cooking to public speaking to singing to being a father to being a friend of Bills and on and on.

If you pick a subject, the odds are better than half that I can carry on an intelligent conversation about it. And if you give me a list of subjects for web pages that people want to advertise their product on or that could lead to product sales in some way, I'll bet I can find one or two that I really do know something about.

So it has always sort of bothered me that Google, et all, will not really tell you what are the top paying keywords in AdSense. I understand why they don't, but along with the scammers, there are legitimate people out there who could genuinely provide valid content on those subjects if we just had a clue what they are.

I hope Google doesn't mind my posting this :) I swear I'm not going to try to game the system!

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Shawn Collins 5 months ago 1 point
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Hi James -

Fair enough - I don't think you have to be an authority on a subject - just that you need to "know" it.

Aside from having the background to discuss it ongoing, I think this is key, because then it will hold your interest for the long term.

If you pick a niche that is slightly interesting to you, it may well lose appeal for you after a month.

That said, I would suggest doing some homework to pick the most lucrative niche that interests you.

Examine Google Trends and run keywords of topics that interest you through WordTracker to see the relative interest in the keywords.

This will give you a sense for which are most frequently searched, thought not necessarily which pay best.

If you wanted to take it a step further, go into Google AdWords in start setting up campaigns for these niches and see what it would cost to buy the traffic. ;-)

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James Newton 5 months ago 1 point
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Just wanted to take a second to say thanks for the pointers and to eat some of my words: Google's hot trends page is great, but I must admit that I have no clue about most of the items that seem to come up there. Who the heck is "jill nicolini" for example? And there are other topics that I just refuse to talk about like "skimpy prom dress" or "detergent suicide recipe"... I mean, come ON!

Almost everything that is hot is a flash in the pan, absolute fluff, driven by some news event, TV show personality, or sound bite. It makes one rather sad for the country. Making a page on those sorts of topics is, I assume, going to get one burst of traffic, a few hours or days at best, and then fade into obscurity.

It's also interesting to me that there is little congruence between the hot topics and high AdWords payouts. The advertising dollar is chasing consumers who are chasing fluff. People don't seem to search for information on the latest model of car, prescription drug, or consumer product.

Most of the pages on my current site are related to "how to" and technical education. Long term, but very low level of interest to the general public.

So long story only slightly longer: I guess I was wrong. I can't carry on an intelligent conversation about the things that advertisers want to sell and users want to search for... Today at least.

It strikes me that the things I could write about are probably in the list of the 1,000 or 10,000 hottest topics of the past year rather than the past month. Which brings me to my next question: Is anyone aggregating the Google hot topics list?

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