Tips for Choosing Your Niche (Topic) For Your Website

Like I told you, choosing your website’s topic is a very important step. Today, I am going to help you with that.
You should consider the following points while choosing a niche:

1. If you like the topic on which you are going to make your website, that’s a great thing.
2. Enough people must be buying products related to the niche or spending their time knowing more about your niche.
3. It shouldn’t be too competitive.
4. If you can find some products to promote (from affiliate networks we joined before) in your niche, that’s even better.

Let’s consider the above points one-by-one.

You should like the topic yourself
To be able to create value, fill a void. Otherwise you might get bored and won’t be able to contribute much. It can grow really well if it is your hobby you absolutely love.

Are enough people buying or looking for more information in your niche?
If you like something, but if there are not many people looking about it, your website won’t get much traffic.

Is your niche too competitive?
Your niche shouldn’t be too broad that your direct competition is with big companies. For example, if you like cooking, a blog on ‘recipes’ will be too broad. I’ll recommend that you should rather make a blog on ‘vegetarian recipes’ or maybe can go even narrow to ‘healthy vegetarian recipes’. So if you like cooking, you can make a website on ‘healthy recipes’, ‘protein rich recipes’, ‘weight loss recipes’ etc.

If you like fitness, you can make a website on yoga, bodybuilding for newbies etc.

Are there enough advertisers to promote?
If there is nothing to recommend and gain commissions from in your niche, it will be harder for you to monetize your website. You can always place ads (example: Google Ads) on your website. But, we hardly recommend choosing a niche with enough advertisers to promote. For example: Goon ebay.com and amazon.com and see their best-selling products.

Here are some topics/nichesfor you to brainstorm:

- Accessories - Cosmetics/Fragrance, Handbags, Jewelry - Shoes

- Art/Photo/Music - Art, Music, Photo

- Automotive - Cars & Trucks, Motorcycles, Parts & Accessories, Rentals, Tools and Supplies

- Books/Media - Audio Books, Books, Magazines, News, Television, Videos/Movies

- Business - Business-To-Business, Marketing, Office, Productivity Tools, Travel

- Careers - Employment

- Clothing/Apparel - Children's, Malls, Men's, Women's

- Commerce - Auction, Classifieds, E-commerce solutions/providers, New/Used Goods, Telephone services, Utilities

- Computer & Electronics - Computer HW, Computer Support, Computer SW, Consumer Electronics, Peripherals

- Education - Children, College, Languages, Professional

- Entertainment

- Family - Babies, Children, Entertainment, Teens, Weddings

- Financial services - Banking/Trading, Credit Cards, Investment, Loans, Real Estate Services

- Food & Drinks - Gourmet, Groceries, Restaurants, Tobacco, Wine & Spirits

- Games & Toys - Electronic Toys, Games, Toys

- Gifts & Flowers - Care Packages, Collectibles, Flowers, Gifts, Greeting Cards

- Health & Beauty - Bath & Body, Cosmetics, Health Food, Nutritional Supplements, Pharmaceuticals, Self Help, Vision Care, Wellness

- Home & Garden - Bed & Bath, Construction, Furniture, Garden, Home Appliances, Kitchen, Pets, Real Estate, Utilities

- Insurance - Commercial, Personal Insurance

- Legal Services

- Marketing - Business-to-Business, Network Marketing

- Medical - Equipment

- Phonecard Services -Online/Wireless

- Recreation & Leisure - Astrology, Betting/Gaming, Communities, Events, Matchmaking, New Age, Outdoors, Party Goods

- Sports & Fitness - Exercise & Health, Professional Sports Organizations, Sports, WaterSports

- Travel - Accessories, Air, Car, Hotel, Luggage, Vacation

- Web Services - Advice, Banner ads, Domain Registrations, Email Marketing, Internet Service Providers, Intranets, Search Engine, Web Design, Web Hosting/Servers, Web Tools

5 steps to get your own website

In our last session, we learnt how the web works. Now, we will move towards getting your own domain name and getting your own website.

This involves the following steps:

(We’ll cover every step in detail later on, but today we’ll give you an overview)

Step-1: Choosing your niche

Choosing your website’s topic is a very important step. Start making a list of what you like to do, what you are really passionate about and what topics you can make a website on. It can be about almost anything - cooking, health, fitness, skin care, travel, finance, sports, gadgets, technology, games etc.

Step-2: Getting your domain name

Of course, you’ll have to register a domain name for your website. Make sure it is brandable and easy to remember.

Step-3: Getting web hosting space

Your website will be hosted here (i.e. stay here on the Internet so that anyone can reach it).

Step-4: Creating your website in HTML and/or creating your WordPress blog 

HTML is the basic language your website will be built it. In addition to HTML, we’ll teach you how to build a WordPress blog, which is a very powerful and an easy way to create your website.

So, in the above four steps, you’ll have your own website on the Internet accessible by everyone. Once your website is up, we’ll start working on various online marketing techniques.

That’s it for today. We’ll soon help you to choose a niche/topic for your website
.

How web works

Now that we have covered the basics of affiliate marketing and introduction to digital marketing, we’ll move towards the next major step – building your website.

To get your website live on the Internet, we need to register a domain name, get a web hosting space, create a website and upload it on the web server. To get a better understanding of these things, we first need to learn how the web works.

Our goal in this entire course is to teach you things in the simplest way possible. We’ll keep that in mind as we move along.

The Internet is made up of tens of millions of computers. A website "lives" (or is “hosted”) on just one of them. When you visit a website, how does your computer know which one of those millions of other computers has the website you want?

First, it's very important to understand that each computer on the Internet has an "IP Address". "IP" stands for "Internet Protocol". IP addresses are similar in many ways to a phone number. Like every phone has a phone number,similarly every computer has an IP address.

IP addresses are made up of 4 numbers ranging from 0-255, each number separated by a dot or period. For example, 231.12.139.112 is an IP address.

If you want to call a phone, you dial its phone number. If your computer wants to talk with another computer, it uses its IP address.

So, whenever you visit a website, a system (called DNS) automatically converts that domain name to the IP addresses of the computer (web server) where that website is available (or is hosted).

Your browser requests the website, and receives the website files (HTML) and displays the website in your browser.

This is how it happens:

1. You open a domain name in your browser (for example: Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox etc.).
2. DNS converts the domain name to the IP address of the web server where the website is hosted. (DNS first connects to the DNS server, and then determines the IP address of the web server)
3. Your machine requests the website from the webserver.
4. The webserver delivers HTML files (with other content like images etc.) to your browser.
5. Your browser receives the HTML files, reads and understand them, and displays them on your screen.

Here are some of the terms we learnt today:

Domain name: A domain name is a way to identify and locate computers and resources connected to the Internet. Every company or organization that wants to be on the internet will register a domain name for use as their online identity. Every domain name has a suffix that indicates which top level domain (TLD) it belongs to.

For example: in the domain “google.com”, “.com” is the top level domain (TLD), also called as domain extension.

DNS (Domain Name System):Domain Name System, or DNS, is the most recognized system for assigning addresses to Internet web servers (aka "Internet hosts"). Somewhat like international phone numbers, the domain name system helps to give every Internet server a memorable and easy-to-spell address.

DNS Server:A DNS server is any computer registered to join the Domain Name System. A DNS server runs special-purpose networking software, features a public IP address, and contains a database of network names and addresses for other Internet hosts. When we purchase any domain name, we need to link it to the DNS server of our web server. (We’ll explain this in detail later on.)

Website:A website is a set of related web pages served from a single web domain. A website is hosted on a web server. All publicly accessible websites collectively form the World Wide Web.

Web Server:A web server is a computer where the website is stored, and that helps to deliver web content that can be accessed through the Internet.

Web Browser:A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser) is a software for retrieving, presenting and traversing information resources (including HTML documents) on the World Wide Web. It is responsible for opening websites on your computer.

HTML:HTML or HyperTextMarkup Language is the language for creating web pages and other information that can be displayed in a web browser. Thus, a website is made in HTML.

I hope today’s session gave you a basic understanding on how the Internet works.