Creating a Theme

First, we have to decide on the very specific "theme" of your web site.

Why?

Never be afraid to specialize on the internet. The 'net population has become so big - and is growing so quickly every day - that you can find a significant customer base for almost anything, no matter how narrow it seems.

Indeed, while the big dot.coms are chasing the massive general audiences, and the high street stores are setting up in virtual malls - all of them spending millions on their shotgun approach, you will be successful by "picking off" carefully chosen targets.

Additionally, evidence is stacking up that suggests single interest sites will become more successful in the search engine stakes (we'll see later why that's important) as the engines get more and more clever at working out what is the one key thing each site is about.

... and there is nothing to stop you specialising in 2, 3, 4 - or more areas once you get going!

Make it Interesting

The first important thing about your subject is: you must be interested in it!

Later on you might get to a stage where you can pick any subject and put together a selling web site for it. But for now, I think it's important that you have some connection with the subject - whether it is a hobby or interest, something to do with your job, your family situation, the place you live.

Start by brainstorming a list of anything you might be interested in doing. This would be my list:

• Sales, selling
• Internet, e-commerce, business start-ups, small business
• Outdoors, mountain biking, camping, canoeing
• Scotland, outdoors in Scotland
• Computers, DTP, e-books
• Circus, juggling, circus collectibles
• Mechanical toys, old toys
• Cars - classic cars, beach buggies, VW campers

Now, you have no way of knowing this - but I really did that as a live exercise - just once, for real. It isn't a refined, edited list that I've worked on over time (shows - doesn't it?). The key thing is that you may be able to see how one idea sparked off another, and how ideas got more specific as I went along.

So I'm lucky - I have a whole bunch of interests and activities (it also makes it easy to buy me gifts!). I know some of you will be saying "but I don't really have any hobbies" or " I haven't really done anything".

Sorry - but you're not getting out of it that easily. As Ken Evoy puts it when introducing Make Your Knowledge Sell!:

Each of us lives a life of unique circumstances and experiences that results in building a body of knowledge... knowledge that has value and that can be packaged and sold to others.