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Insider Tricks for Finding the Perfect Subject
publication date: Jul 13, 2006
People want to join subscription websites because they want good quality, honest and highly relevant information in one place.
 Therefore, when researching a topic for a subscription website, spend time looking on the internet at what is already available. If there is a lot of information on the net, it indicates good demand. If there are already one or two very good websites, think about how you can position yourself against them, or maybe work with them.
Simple But Effective Research Techniques
If you have chosen a subject that you know well, you probably have a very good idea about what your members want to know.
The most successful subscription websites are the ones that know what problems and issues their members have, and give them accurate, relevant and factual answers to those problems.
However, if you’re unsure or need clarity about your prospect's issues, here are a few simple techniques to help you find out.
TECHNIQUE #1 – About.com
A very good place to start is the website About.com (www.about.com)
Here, you’ll find thousands of topics with articles covering everything from Attention Deficit Disorder to Zoology.
This site is free and makes its money from advertising. It’s a wonderful resource for you.
The articles are mainly written by volunteers and approved by professional editors. The content is usually very good, sometimes excellent and just occasionally rubbish.
Look at your proposed subject area.
How many articles are there? Is the information good quality, well written and relevant? How active is the forum? Could you use some of this content to help plan your website’s content?
Also follow the links to discover other relevant sites.
If it is not covered on About.com, start to question whether the demand exists.
TECHNIQUE #2 – Become a Discussion Forum Detective
Discussion forums are a fantastic resource when researching just about any subject. People go to these forums to ask questions. All you have to do is study the questions, particularly the ones that seem to crop up over and over again.
These can become headings for your first articles.
There are three simple ways of finding forums relevant to your subject area.
If there are lots of active forums about your subject area, it means that there is an internet audience hungry for information. An excellent sign.
If there are no forums and few websites about your subject area, you should be concerned.
Example of a forum search:
If you were planning on setting up a website about living in France...
A series of searches using the search phrase ‘living in France’ reveals about 10 - 20 relevant discussion forums. Immediately, a list of 50 – 100 questions can be built:
From this search, you both have an idea of how active the community is, and what issues your potential audience has.
TECHNIQUE #3 – Researching Ezines, Newsletters or Mailing Lists
There are over 100,000 ezines or newsletters on the internet.
There is one covering just about every subject you can think of. Most of them are free to the reader. They make their money either from selling advertising space or by driving traffic to the owner’s website, where visitors are encouraged to buy products or services.
Looking at what ezines are available for your market provides good insight into demand for your subject area.
To get on an ezine mailing list, a subscriber has got to proactively give the ezine owner their email address and click a button that says ‘add me to your mailing list’.
This shows that the subscriber has an active interest in that subject and wants to read a regular email about it. They have stuck their hand up and indicated they are a potential client for you.
As part of your research you should look at what ezines there are that target your market and how many subscribers they have.
The first thing you need to do is find a relevant ezine.
First, try the search engines with the search terms:
· [your subject] ezine
· [your subject] newsletter
Second, try one of the many free directories. Do a Google search on “ezine newsletter directory”. A good example is:
· The Ezine Directory (www.ezine-dir.com )
This is not always successful, so you may have to sign up and pay to join an ezine directory. This investment should be useful going forward, as you will be using the ezines as a core part of your marketing tactics.
The one that I use is the Directory of Ezines (www.directoryofezines.com). At the time of this writing, a lifetime membership is $147 (approximately £80).
Another paid-for directory is the Ezine Editors List (www.ezine-editors-list.com).
Study the lists of ezines carefully and estimate how many of the subscribers could be potential members for your website. If you were to advertise in closely aligned ezines, assume you will convert between 0.5% and 2% to become a paying subscriber of your site. How many members does that make?
Note: The one problem that you may encounter is that most of these ezines don’t indicate where their members live, so if you are aiming at just a national market, the results of the search would provide a top level indication of interest, but no specific information for your particular country.
TECHNIQUE #4 – Look at ClickBank
Click Bank is the leading sales site for eBooks.
Go to their website – www.clickbank.com – and see whether there are any eBooks about your subject. The more popular a book, the higher its ranking on the ClickBank site.
ClickBank won’t say how many of each book has sold, but you can be sure that if a book is ranked in one of the first three or so pages, then the volumes are very high.
This again gives you a simple indicator of the demand for an information product related to your chosen subject that people are purchasing over the internet.
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