If there’s one huge problem that a smart webmaster should fight as hard as s/he can, this is it. This can never be stressed enough: grab any and all good opportunities that you find on the web as soon as you can. And once you start, do not give up so easily.

I’m going to tell you a real-life story to illustrate my point:

K. started surfing the web because she wanted to have some fun and research her favourite subjects. As time went by, she naturally made friends with other Internet users, joined forums, mailing lists and became a loyal visitor to various sites in a specific niche.

One day she realised that there was a certain type of website missing in that niche. So, she decided to fill this gap with her own web project. It was totally amateurish… yet it soon became pretty successful, because of three major factors:

1. She was a sort of pioneer, because she detected a need in her niche and was the first one to do something about it.

2. She really knew what she was dealing with and even devoted part of her time to expanding her knowledge on the subject, so she could improve her website on an ongoing basis.

3. She had good networking skills, so it wasn’t hard to spread the word about her site.

However, she wasn’t able to make a single cent from that site and eventually took it down. Why did this happen?

* She stopped investing in networking and promotion.

* She believed that the niche was about to collapse, so she lost the motivation needed to keep her site up.

* She thought a site like that couldn’t be effectively monetised.

This is what happened afterwards:

• She eventually realised that the webmasters which persisted and kept their sites alive are now recognised as true authorities in that niche, because they’ve been around for a long time. Consequently, they don’t have to spend much — if any at all — time with promotion.
• The niche never collapsed. Much on the contrary: it’s still growing and there are no visible signs that it’ll be stopping any time soon.
• Several new monetization techniques have been made available to webmasters, even to those who deal with smaller sites and restricted niches.

Talk about missed opportunities!

Had she persevered, now she wouldn’t have to use her own story as an example and alert for other webmasters.

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As a result, I’m going to share with you a short list of broader niches and related subniches that can be found inside each of them. Hopefully, after reading this article you’ll be able to apply and/or adapt its concepts to your own needs as a webmaster.

Ready? Let’s start then:

1. Writing

Since I’m a writer, I can’t help but using this niche as my first example. “Writing,” in this case, is the broader niche. So you could build a site on general writing topics. Or you can stick to just a single or a few aspects of the writing world.

Some possible subniches: article writing; SEO writing (which could either be attached to the previous one or result in a stand-alone site); fiction writing (you may create a blog about fiction writing in general or pick only one genre, such as fantasy or romance); journaling; inspiration, creativity and/or writing prompts; grammar and punctuation.

2. Anime & Manga

This is a very popular niche among both the general audience and webmasters. I’m an anime and manga fan myself. If there’s one broad niche where it’s extremely easy to spot subniches, this is it.

Some possible subniches: specific anime and/or manga series; specific characters, couples and/or seasons within a series; fansites about an author or studio; fanworks (fanart, fanfiction etc.); parodies; games; computer stuff (icons, wallpapers, screensavers, skins and the such); site and blog templates; quizzes and memes; soundtracks; voice actors; drawing lessons.

3. Mythology

This may be a pretty unusual niche to consider, but I’ve included it here because many webmasters do deal with unusual or less commercial topics. Actually, Mythology can be seen either as a broader niche on its own, or as a subniche derived from History, or perhaps from Religion/Spirituality.

Some possible subniches: specific deities; specific types of deities (war, fertility, family, wisdom, health etc.); myths from a given country or continent; role of women in various myths; relations between myths and historical facts; beasts; Mythology in Arts; Mythology in pop culture (films, TV shows, games and the such); Paganism and Neo-Paganism.

Now it’s your turn: take your desired subject and try to divide it into derivative, related topics, until you find something that you deem to be worth using on your web projects. And don’t be afraid of mixing subniches on a same site. Taking the first niche as an example, I might say that a blog which offers grammar tips and writing prompts at once will be likely to attract a good audience.

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One large site and nothing else

Some people pick a niche and put all their time, money and efforts in a single website, hoping that it will eventually become a dominant force on that topic.

The best thing about this practice is precisely the fact that you concentrate everything you have in one project. There won’t be any parallel sites to distract you from your aim. This is especially recommended to disorganised individuals. Besides, if you have to devote part of your time to a day job, or to studies, or to spouse and children, having a single site may be better than adding yet more duties to your already tight daily schedule.

Then main problem about this approach is represented by that old saying: “Don’t put all eggs in one basket.” If your only project fails, what are you going to do?

An ever-growing site network

Several bloggers and webmasters believe that when it comes to building web properties, the more, the merrier. They have one or more networks formed by dozens of small sites. None of them is intended to make more than a few bucks per day. But together, all those sites build up and eventually generate great profits.

The best thing about this approach is precisely this diversity. You put your eggs in many different baskets, thus reducing risks. If a few sites fail, no problem, because you’ll have many others to make up for them. This gives you the freedom to experiment a variety of promotional and monetization techniques. With the lessons learned, you’ll improve and expand your online business even more.

However, there is a disadvantage to this scheme: it’s time-consuming and requires self-discipline to work. If you have time-management issues, a site network may not be for you.

What would I choose?

While I do leave the definitive choice for you — only you can know what works best in your case — , I certainly have one or two personal thoughts to share.

What I used to choose was a sort of mix between these two online business models. I had a few sites, but none of them was too large and I never tried to turn them into an actual network. This worked for me because I also had a day job to deal with. Nonetheless, now I believe I should have tried to expand my business. The other day I missed the chance to make some good money because an advertiser contacted me and I had only a few sites to sell ad spots on. Had I invested in more web projects, he’d have bought more ads. Well, it’s never too late to learn with our mistakes, right?

This doesn’t mean that the very same thing will happen to you if you don’t start a large site collection. Nor does it mean that one single site couldn’t be lucrative. I’m just sharing a real-life experience with you, so you can see how these things may work in practice. Different webmasters have different experiences, though.

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Why am I writing about this topic once again? Because I feel this is an activity many webmasters neglect. But I know that just saying something is good doesn’t mean much; people want details. And this is what I’m going to give you today.

What should you analyse on a competitor’s site?

First of all, you must be able to determine how successful your competitor is, because this will influence all the rest. If your competitors are successful you’ll want to use their sites as models. If they aren’t, you’ll want to identify their mistakes and/or see if they are just about to achieve success.

I’ve already written a whole article on how to choose the competitors you’ll monitor and measure their level of success. Go read it if you still haven’t.

Now let’s see which aspects of a competing site you might study:

• Design: This should be the easiest one. How does the site or blog look like? Cluttered? Clean? Sophisticated? Amateurish? If you’re studying a site that is popular despite having a cluttered, amateurish design, how can you explain its success? Maybe the niche is a less demanding one, or maybe the content is just too good to be ignored.
• Technical stuff: How is the competing site built? Does it use html, php, asp, cgi or what? If it’s a blog, which platform is used? Is there any kind of plugin, extension or widget installed? How fast the pages load?
• Content: How is it displayed? Is it superficial or thorough? Is it informative, helpful, entertaining? Is it divided among several pages or is it concentrated on a few ones?
• Promotional efforts: These ones will also require visits to other sites in order to be detected. Do your competitors encourage visitors to recommend their sites to friends? If so, how do they do it? How often are your competitors linked by other people in their niche? Is their content usually voted for on social media sites? In case it is, do the votes look spontaneous or self-promotional? Have you ever found paid ads promoting a competing site? Where?
• SEO methods: Can you spot any signs of conscious search engine optimisation? How do the pages’ titles look like? Do the images have descriptive alt tags? What meta tags are used on the pages’ code? Do the authors seem to worry about keyword density? Can any attempts of PageRank sculpting be detected?
• Visitor activity: Can you find any evidences of visitor activity? Look for comments forms, guestbooks, forums, mailing lists… How do visitors behave? Do they look engaged? Are interaction opportunities taken by a small group of usual visitors? Or do they attract a larger audience?
• Monetization techniques: How do the competing blog or site make money? What are the ad spots like? Text links? Banners? Contextual ads? Where are they placed? How many ads per page? If the site owner offers any type of service, how is it promoted?
• Progress: This is easier when you study blogs, because they usually have archives. But some sites also contain lists of past updates. In any case, check the older material out and compare it to the current one. Has the webmaster or blogger made any visible progress? What has been changed for better (or for worse)?

You can always expand the list above by including other aspects that might be particularly important in your niche. Conversely, you can exclude aspects that you don’t deem to be so relevant, although I believe that none of the things mentioned in this article should be ignored.

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Should you apply this principle to your activities as a webmaster or blogger? I’m not totally sure that I can give a positive answer to this question. But I’m going to save my objections for last. Now I’m going to show you a few situations when you might consider doing some make-believing, if you really must.

When could you fake it till you make it?

• Suppose you still don’t have much practical experience in a given subject, but you’re a good researcher and find it easy to compile data about that. So you feel you’re ready to build a great site or blog about the topic and possibly make money from it. The problem: many people hate it when someone without first-hand experience on a field writes about it. What can you do then? Exactly: you’ll fake it till you make it, i. e., you’ll use your research skills as substitutes for experience, at least for the time being.
• Forum owners often inflate member and post counts as a way to encourage more people to join their forums. The reasoning behind this is that no one will join an empty place, so you play a little trick to get the bandwagon effect to work. Several bloggers inflate subscriber and/or comment numbers for similar reasons.
• Bloggers and webmasters may avoid the loss of direct ad sales by temporarily filling their own unsold inventory.
• Some service providers offer their services for free — or for discounted fees — when they are starting out. They ask for testimonials in return. Said testimonials will hopefully generate more business in the future, thus resulting in profit and compensating the initial financial losses.

The biggest disadvantage of faking it till making it

Ethical issues are the number one reason why you should be extremely careful when you pretend to be more successful than you really are.

Do you like to be misled? Of course not. Why should your visitors like it then?

Even if you don’t care much for ethics, keep in mind that you can always be unmasked. I myself have written an article containing basic tips to help people measure a site or blog’s success. Anyone can read that article because it’s available for free. There are certainly other articles like that on the Internet. People are getting smarter and smarter anyway.

Are you willing to risk your reputation just to make some quick money?

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Choosing the type of competitor you want to spy on

First of all, let me make one thing very clear: I’m not proposing that you engage in illegal activities. “Spy on” is just a fancy term in our case. I’m sure you get the idea.

That being said, let’s see the three types of competitor that you could/should be interested in:

1. Successful: For more than obvious reasons.

2. Intermediate level: Because you’ll find it easier to relate to them, since they probably don’t have as many financial resources as the most successful ones. Yet, they may be well on their way to achieve huge popularity. Keeping one eye on sites that could be in a transitional period will teach will a lot.

3. Beginners and/or little-known: Just because a site isn’t popular, doesn’t mean you can’t learn anything from it. At the very least you may be able to spot several mistakes that you should avoid. And who said that those obscure webmasters will never become famous someday? You can witness the beginning of a fantastic story.

Numbers and data that can guide your competition monitoring efforts

How do you determine how successful — or not so successful — a site is? Well, I guess you must be able to tell which the main sites of your niche are. You don’t have to think too much about them; you just know that they are famous. But what about those sites that are just moderately popular? And how do you spot those webmasters and bloggers who pretend to be much more important than they really are?

There are several things you can verify in order to measure a site or blog’s success. Note that many — if not all — of these pieces of data can be manipulated. So, don’t rely too much on them.

Now that I’ve written my little alert, I’m going to show you what you should be checking out, in no particular order:

• Publicly available stats: Does your competitor link to an external stat provider? Great! As flawed as such services may be, they are still a good source of information on a site’s traffic.
• Advertisers pages: “Advertise here” pages often contain traffic numbers and other relevant data, so they are the first or second thing you should verify. Just remember that the info on them may not be totally accurate, since they are designed to impress potential advertisers.
• Subscribe numbers: Very important for blogs, although it depends on the niche. The less tech-savvy readers, the less RSS subscribers a blog should have.
• Comments: Does the blog or site gets comments on a regular basis? Or only once in a blue moon? Some successful blogs rarely get any comments, due to their content and audience’s nature. Still, a large amount of quality comments use to be a good sign.
• Forum members: If the competitor you’re evaluating offers a forum on their site and/or if it’s a forum itself, take a look at the amount of members it has. Also pay attention to the forum’s activity level. See if the posts are always written by the same members or if there’s variety.
• Traffic analysis tools: See what Alexa, Compete and similar tools can tell you about your competitor.
• Google rankings: Does your competitor rank well for search terms that you’re interested in? Then it’s mandatory that you concentrate your spying efforts on it.
• Social media votes: How often does your competitor get spontaneous votes, reviews or links on sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Mixx? By “spontaneous” I mean activity that isn’t self-promotional.

In case you have more ideas on how to evaluate competitors that could be added to your “to-spy list,” share them in the comment form.

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The one great thing about Expression Engine is the amount of customization it offers. You can create a template for each of the pages on your website, or create custom fields to fit your content. For example, if you plan to make a site that features vegetarian recipes, you can make a text field for the recipe name, estimated time to prepare, ingredients, and procedure. In short, the platform adapts to your needs, instead of you bending over backwards to make a platform work in your favor - all without having to code in PHP!

Aside from the flexibility, EE also has a good reputation in terms of security, and long-time users have are generally satisfied with the fast and responsive support they provide. Other features include direct database query capability, a photo gallery, built-in mailing lists, a wiki module, email-a-friend, search tools and user-notifications of comments.

One downside to Expression Engine, though is the lack of an integrated WYSIWYG editor. That’s pretty basic to miss out on and while I personally can live with that, it may be unacceptable to people not used to seeing code. It’s also easy to get lost inside the Control Panel, but there are helpful manuals to get you going and some short video tutorials for the not-so-patient among us (I’m raising my hand).

You can try Expression Engine for free with their downloadable Core version, but it will not come with some of the advanced features. For the full feature set, there’s a Personal and Commercial license available for $99.95 and $249.95, respectively, and they also come with technical support. Is it worth it? That all depends on what you’ll use it for.

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Most search engines nowadays tend to browse through the actual content of the page being searched for, instead of sticking to the tags. Offer quality content on your website, for that is what attracts traffic. More traffic translates to a more popular website. The mantra is that you can never have too much of relevant content. Keep updating the content. Old content did no one any good. The search engines actually look into how old your content is. Fresh rank ensures a higher priority and therefore, higher ranking.

Constantly updating the content is a good thing. Sometimes even just moving content and changing the date is known to have boosted rankings. Talking of content, link exchanges with sites related to your niche are known to have brought higher ranks. True, search engines rank you by how often you have been linked. But of late, the search engines have gotten wiser and have been dropping those web pages that link in excess.

Using underhand techniques to boost your ranking never helped. Backdoor tactics always lead to the user’s nemesis when the search engines eventually tracked them down and remove them from their search index. They either do that or bury you in the deep depths of search results where no customer would even set their sights upon. Play fair, play for longer.

A well structured website is always the owner’s strength. Everyone prefers a website that can be easily navigated. The more organized your page is, the more easy it is to find information and therefore, more the visitors. No one reads lengthy paragraphs of text. Make appropriate headlines which easily pin point what the paragraph is about. This way, all the text is organized and neat. Also, ensure that your website is special needs-friendly. For example, you could have something as simple as a website conducive to those who are colour-blind.

A good choice in selecting the URL for your website is also vital when it comes to the attractiveness and functionality factor. Many SEO believe that the presence of keywords in a domain is a must.

First impressions are lasting impressions. Make sure your site looks good, neat and yes, has pertinent images up as well. Invest in custom photographs instead of lifting random images off the net. Even an expensive product would not look inviting if not photographed properly.

Keep these in mind and you have a website that is your strength. Invest some time and the returns shall come by themselves in steady flow.

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The Features

The first thing you notice when you create a SquareSpace account is the clean, easy-to-navigate interface. It’s full of sleek Flash-based elements and semi-transparent menus. The only thing that bothers me a bit here is the black-on-dark gray color scheme that sometimes works against it. I wish they added an option to change the colors to something lighter that would make text easier to read. Otherwise, its really a well-designed UI. And did I mention the stats page? Sweet.

SquareSpace V5 is ideal for those who want to create a professional blog but don’t have the skills to tinker with code. You can, for example, change the layout from 2-columns to 3-columns with just one click, then vary each of their widths with a slider. Changing font attributes, adding drop-down menus, and tweaking navigation options are just as easy.

If you’re comfortable with code, all the better as SquareSpace blogs are completely customizable. They have video examples showing how to mimic the designs of some popular blogs, just to demonstrate its flexibility, but note that these are super-fast-forwarded versions and not meant to be tutorials.

As for content creation, there’s a full-featured WYSIWYG editor that features full iTunes tag support for podcasting. Links are search engine-optimized and the code is valid XHTML. You can also post via email if you need to. There’s an intergrated spam blocker, but I haven’t had the chance to see how effective it is yet. You can read the full list of features here.

As you may have guessed, SquareSpace is not free. It’s a premium service for people with very specific blogging needs. They don’t offer a download of the platform itself - its a “platform + grid hosting” package. Monthly fees start at $8 for the Basic setup: 1GB of storage and 75GB of bandwidth per month. While the price is pretty reasonable, one downside to SquareSpace is that it’s limited to one blog per installation/account. If you’re looking to create a blog network, it’s not the most cost-effective option.

Can’t decide? Take it for a spin with the 14-day free trial and leave a comment for your impressions.

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Most of the things you’ll find on MT Pro can also be done on Wordpress. The difference is that MT Pro is an all-inclusive package, whereas with WordPress, a lot of the useful functionalities can only be had after installing varied plugins which, unfortunately, don’t always work well with each other (raise your hand if you’ve hand conflict issues).

These are some of the some of the best features of MT Pro:

• Create forums and an unlimited number of blogs
• Manage everything under one dashboard
• Allows an unlimited number of site members/user community
• Supports user-generated content, subject to permissions and administrator review
• Supports user ratings and polls

• Great speed due to smart caching and a revamped core engine
• Simple templates that are easy to customize
• Includes comment anti-spam that’s compatible with the Akismet API
• OpenID suppport, OAuth libraries, and the ability to add plugins
• Integrated widget management
• Threaded comments
• Live template previews

However, if you need only one good reason to switch to Movable Type, security would be it. As you can see, Movable Type has an impressive record compared to WordPress, which has been widely criticized for being prone to attacks in the past. Makes you think hard, doesn’t it?

Now, if their developer community can come close to the level that WordPress has in terms of plugins and themes output, I think they may just convince a lot of people to convert. Interested in trying it out for yourself? Head on over to the Movable Type website and tell me what you think.

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