Hello Friends. You might have read few of my articles here in DP or somewhere in sitepoint or owners forum. I am a new entrepreneur as par as web is concerned. I am basically a research and education consultant. Needless to say, I do earn something that runs my family well. But I also want to establish a powerhouse site. This is still beginning phase. Hence though I am confident, I thought of consulting few of DP's Gurus. 1) My theme is "GEEK" Grasshopping for Education Entrepreneurship and Knowledge. My Site is www.grasshoppernetwork.com The theme is, a) To guide the student in their academic projects b) Offer many readymade projects that we developed over the time c) Offer Technical Papers, Resources d) Explain Technologies e) Offer Help to young entrepreneurs in their startup. --------------------------------------------------------- Since we started the site, I am getting many more consultation offer. But traffic as a whole is bit low as you might expect from a technical site. I have no complaints with my AdSense revenue either. I have optimized it and getting decent proportion of hits par unique visitors. Infact hits are on higher side itself. But As I read various articles here and other forums, the success of a site also depends upon the niche that we select. Something like insurance, online money making and so on. I have no passion for there areas to say the least. Should I consider set up a subdomain and bringing up couple of sites that gets more hits or search queries? I would not be able to sustain them though, purely by myself. Even as 40 day old site, we are appearing in first page of Google, babylon in many queries. I am bit confused. Do my theory of "Do what your passion drives you" Helps or should I focus bit on the "rich keywords" also? Ofcourse my online earning is .5% of our whole revenue. But when you dedicate time online, invariably you do tend to think about opportunities. Stats: Unique visitor: about 90 a day New Visitors: about 60 a Day Page Views: about 1000 a day average CPC: between .23-.41 average CTR: average 7% Traffic Split: 40% Bookmark( Direct Marketing), 33% Search Engine, 13% from forums, blog comments, articles, remaining others. ( I do not higher a SEO, no plans of it either) Guys please clear the clouds from my mind can I grow this online business or should I really consider it as a hobby as few friends are suggesting!!! PS: I have decent followers from US, UK and Canada. So Low CPC from third world countries is also not a concern. Only thing is low voloume of traffic.
Thanks for the reply. But what I am looking for is some realistic projection of the said site to prosper! Some criticism are also welcomed. Please friends, give me some opinion regarding the possibility of such a theme to be successful.
You should build a niche website. And choosing a niche topic is most important thing. You can view my articl on this topic SEO Tips: Getting keywords that will rule Google
Got you! Need to create some other accounts and distribute the postings across the accounts. Right. Got you friend. I will work on it. Thanks a lot and lot and lot for that observation. Your observation rocks. I am on!!
One more point is not all the threads are strated by me, I do make a point to post the answers of the queries earlier so, just has "admin" as the last poster everywhere. But hey you saved my day...
I suggest going with your passion as your primary endeavor. If you are passionate about it, it helps you through the resilience stage which is where most startups loose hope and give up. This is more likely and more common when there is no passion for the subject matter. In the resilience stage, it may appear that you are putting in a lot of work with little rewards. However, the difference is with passion, you will forge ahead. If there isn't, then you will abandon the entire project at this stage for something "better"
It's a hard one, you need to ideally incorporate both but I know this is not necessarily always possible. In the long term passion is better but if there's no way in can make you any decent money (at least with adsense) you may be better going for a high CPC niche.
e) Offer Help to young entrepreneurs in their startup. you can't even help yourself whether you want to grow this to a business or stay as hobby
I would not disagree with your criticism and would not try hiding facts either. Look I am into consultancy business for over 9 years. We are from programming and research. I do not have much exposure for online business. True, my online presence have helped our offshore business and plenty of work coming In. I did not start the site with any monitory goals in mind either! so the site was kind off to have a platform for communication between me, my students and clients. Then I focussed a bit on monitory aspects. and tried changing it's technicality. if we stick to a project, the project invariably succeds. 9 year into consultancy teach us that and we do come out of hardles. My question was "can a low paying Niche, from a low paying CPC demography be considered as primary business? has anybody have a success in such cases in DP? as par as supporting entrepreneurship is concerned, a startup would never have 10 years of consultancy and trying to make a career in web will they? But guess , you are right. if we dedicate even an hour in a project, we should see through it that we get there!! thanks buddy. I will post my story of success for sure one day and thank you in advance for that day buddy!
it doesn't matter if the keyword is high paying or not, what matters is your stuff is not crap and people actually want to read and will come back for more. That's what drives traffic and potential sponsor advertising offers. That's where the money is. You get paid for just having a link to the sponsor's site what can beat that? not to mention the compeitition with those high paying keywords
Thank a lot @Project Mobious. That is what I was looking for. a) If the sites contents are unique and are chased by traffic, not only adsense, but also many advertisers will approach directly. b) Even if the actual niche is not high CPC, once the site draws 1000UV/daily, some related sub niches can be added. c) Premium membership could also be incorporated. So if I can keep putting the good stuff with my team visitors through referal will also increase. So sustained quality of a site with any Niche has a good chance of success. Right Sir?