#1 - Pick a Topic

The first step in starting a website is choosing what its going to be all about. There are a lot of questions to be asked and answered. What kind of content can you produce: text, audio, video? What topics are you going to cover (how much topic-specific content can you produce?) What products are popular with online advertisements within this topic niche you're interested in (will it make any money?)

One of the most important factors in starting a website and choosing a topic niche that you are interested in. You could theoretically write about anything that makes money, but you're not going to be competitive in any topic unless you're extremely motivated. For most people, this means thinking up something you're interested that also makes money. It could be cars, it could be clothes, it could be computers themselves or video games.

Once you've got a few niche topics you might be interested in, do a little preliminary research into competitiveness. Check out Google's adwords tool to see how often various keywords in the niche are searched and how much advertisers are paying for spots on sites that are related to the keyword.

You'll also have to kind of guess at your appetite for competition! On the one hand, you want high competition keywords because they pay more per click, on the other hand, you want the ones that will bring in traffic.

Since hosting is your main cost tied to more traffic, it may be more profitable to run a low-traffic website that targets a few searches in high value keywords!