Established Webmasters Question

**s2kinteg916** · 12-05-2006, 07:49 AM

I think this will be a really useful thread but my question is as a new webmaster its hard to decide what project or projects to do so you get the most ROI on your time.

For established webmasters such as chris and others if you were to start fresh with the knowledge you have now where would you start? Im more interested on seeing how more experienced webmasters think rather than what website they create.

Ill be the first to answer but im not really a established webmaster by any means it took me a long time to understand the basics.

To me building websites is about being prepared

50% planning
30% not procastinating/data entry
20% developing

The most important thing to me is choosing a niche and considering the facts above.

One of the best things i ever did was i grabbed a white sheet of paper and with my gazillion ideas i jotted down my top 10 site ideas that i thought were the best. I than made categories such as traffic potential, how hard to get traffic, how hard to get users, content , competition, pr, and so on. I started making a simplified basic rating system for each one.

If you do this you will see at least 80% of your ideas are gonna involve more time or money than its worth for your most effective ROI

Once you have your niche the most important thing is are you passionate about this niche at all ? For example if your a pet lover you shouldnt build a site about the lamborgini diablo just because it makes revenue. Once you get down to the grinding part of the development it will just bore you out of your mind.

You also need to find out if this niche even has users. The only way to make money is via traffic and if you dont get traffic its gonna be a big obstacle. This falls back to the above where its 50% planning so be sure to plan plan plan.

Now to the development stages i think the most important thing for new webmasters with not much experience such as myself we think we are creative geniuses and want to build a website with 10,000 features. One idea leads to another idea and your spending all your time thinking of ideas rather than actually do it. One thing i realized with alot of sites that i see that make good potential money is they all have one thing in common. Providing the end user with good content in a simple fashion. So if you dont have much technical abilities keep it simple stupid and it will work wonders for you.

My last words of advice is just do it. Get something up , get going on content, just get the ball moving.. just do something. If you sit around and plan to long your just gonna lose passion for the niche and move onto another niche.

Well i think this is my first useful post in the 3 years i been a member

**Chris** · 12-05-2006, 10:14 AM

I think if I had to go back and do things differently I would have chosen a more profitable niche. Also, not waiting and getting things done is important too as the number one issue for success generally is how old your site is.

**Mike** · 12-05-2006, 02:00 PM

If I was to do things differently, I would cut out all of the wasted hours on making the small content sites, and put that time into making the larger ones that make good money.