Where to focus at the beginning stage.

[SarahWalsh]

I’m fleshing out my site and have my main pages complete. There will need to be some changes once I can nail down my audience. But I feel good for the most part and have made serious progress over this weekend. I’m still struggling to come up with content ideas.

I have TONS of generic digital marketing ideas I could post but I’m not looking to do that. I’m trying to imagine that I’m my dream customer and what is my intent. What am I searching for right now? I know I need to niche down and that alone would make everything easier; and allow me to talk directly to that industry and their problems—only I’m soo new to the online business world that I don’t know which direction I want to go.

To date I’ve only done ads for local service based businesses. As I stated previously most of them aren’t trying to spend $1k-2k on advertising. They all say they are very interested but right now is not a good time.

So do I continue on this path or change my target. I want to put at least 2 pieces of pillar content on my site before I launch it live, and I’m hitting a wall. Now I’m question myself and not sure what I should even be working on. Where should my main focus be right now in these beginning stages?

 

[bernard]

It would probably help to do some more research.

You can begin by googling some other topic and look for authority websites and then see how they structure their site.

The basics are usually the same.

Generally a pillar page is a "dummies guide to" or "the complete guide to" and then you have "best" type pages, which are usually round review type articles with several products reviewed against each other. Then you might have in depth reviews for each individual product. You can also have "best product for x", which could be "best product for vegans" or whatever.

Those are you money pages in terms of affiliate offers like Amazon. You'll promote products here.

Then you can have how-to and faq content like "how to use product x for" or "why are product x such and such" types. These are usually meant for display ad revenue, because they're not buyer intent directly. They can also work as supporting content, certainly for SEO, to your affiliate articles.

News articles might also be worth doing, like commenting on an event or product launch or whatever. You can monetize these with display ads or get emails or affiliate offers.

As you can tell, there is a never ending supply of topics to write on, but you would want to be structured and the above content makes up 95% of all authority websites, so it makes sense to consider each article as belonging to either category.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Focus on what you know first. "PPC advertising for local small businesses with budgets below $1k per month" and go from there. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that topic and it probably fills a gap in the market.

 

[TheCurator]

Hey @SarahWalsh. I read your first few posts and I'm just curious to know how things have been going in the past week or two. Have you managed to break through the metaphorical wall, or are you still feeling stuck on anything? Did you get those 2 pieces of pillar content up?

Everything starts to get more and more clear as you do it. Your first site won't be perfect. Your 10th site won't be perfect. It's okay!