Photo Credit: Spencer E. Holtaway
I’m finding my experience with My Multiple Incomes to be much easier than when I started The College Investor. I think it is from the lessons I learned building that site. I look back on The College Investor, which started in 2009, and realized that I didn’t really even get readers until the end of 2010. I didn’t know what I was doing, how to go about promoting, and everything else website related. So here are some things to think about before starting a website.
Consider Your Topic (i.e. What Are You Going to Write About)
For most sites, you want to be consistent with having a central theme. At The College Investor, that theme is primarily investing. I believe that you should write about your central theme at least 60-70% of the time. You should then think about the larger category that your theme fits into. In my case, it is personal finance. I then write about personal finance about 20-30% of the time. The last 10% should be personal, so that your readers have a vested stake in your site. It doesn’t have to be personal as in what you ate for dinner (unless your niche is food), but a good personal topic is setting goals for yourself and your site, and sharing that with your readers. For example, I just checked in on my College Investor 2011 Goals, and it is fun to keep my readers informed and be supported by their positive comments.
I started my new site, My Multiple Incomes, because I had a lot of ideas I wanted to write about that didn’t really fit into The College Investor’s theme. I really wanted to share about my goals to create multiple income streams, and while investing is one of those streams, it really overlooked several other large ones (such as side businesses and blogging). So that is the central theme of this site – multiple income streams.
Consider Your Niche
It is important to really consider your niche when starting a blog. By niche, I mean the larger community in your space, and who would be looking for your content. In some spaces, like personal finance, your competition could be huge. There are currently hundreds of personal finance blogs, so for me, it was important to stand out by selecting a less covered topic – young adult investing and personal finance. Not many blogs are targeted to college students and young adults, even though the topics apply to nearly everyone.
You can also look at how many people are searching for specific keywords, and the competition for those words. To do this, you could use a tool like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. That is how I found My Multiple Incomes. I was originally searching for “income diversity”, because that is how I usually reference the overall theme of my personal finance idea. However, only about 500 people worldwide were searching for that phrase each month. I actually used a thesaurus to discover synonyms, and soon discovered that the phrase multiple incomes was being searched by over 10,000 people each month, and when I ran my search, I saw the competition was minimal. In fact, if you run the search yourself, I’m currently ranking #4 on Google!
Blog Name
Now that you have found your niche, and have an idea of the keywords you are going after in your niche, it is important to decide a blog name. You need to register your domain name, and you blog name and domain name should match, and should include your targeted keywords if possible. BlueHost has a great tool for searching to see if domain names are available. You should also try to keep your domain name short and memorable. My Multiple Incomes is a little long for my taste, but I think it is catchy and memorable, so it has those going for it.
It Takes Time
So now that you have a name, and niche, and are going after your target audience, it is important to remember that a blog or website takes time to create and build a readership. As I stated above, it has taken years for The College Investor to gain traction. The time commitment will involve setting up your site, writing content, networking in your niche by commenting on other sites, writing articles and guest posts for other sites, and everything else like a small business would demand. Check out How To Create Multiple Incomes While Working to read some strategies to balance this load.
It will also take time to actually generate cash flow from your website. Whether you plan to make money through advertising or by selling a product, you need to have built up your readership first. If your site doesn’t rank highly in Google, there won’t be visitors to click on your ads or purchase your product, since that is where most website customers come from.
For The Readers
What other advice do you wish you had before you started your website? Did you successfully overcome any of these obstacles quickly?
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Time is probably the most frustrating factor when setting up a website. but the second time around is much easier. I really wish I would have known about setting up the url with the actual keywords, I’m sure my organic traffic would be a lot higher, but with Miss Wallstreet I am already ranking high because of what I’ve learned from the first site.