Thanks for your comment and trackback. Another commenter had the same opinion as you. Here was my reply to him.

I understand where you are coming from. I think the order is not as important as doing a good job in each of the steps. Each of the three steps is vitally important to having a long-term profitable website.

I think my model works better for new to intermediate webmasters. In my experience, if you start with monetization, you’ll be tempted to go into a niche you’re not passionate about. To me, that’s not a good idea. In my opinion, unless you’re a really good marketer, it will be harder to make money in a niche you’re not passionate about.

The problem is most of us are not really good marketers.

Also, when you actually build your website, you have to use my model, because you can’t market without content and you can’t monetize without traffic which comes from marketing.

I think if you have good content and marketing, you can monetize any niche. It might not be a full-time income, but it should be a decent part-time income. If you have good content and marketing, you’ll get traffic. And if you have traffic, there are just too many ways to monetize traffic today.

Thanks for your dissenting opinion. It’s made me think more deeply about my opinion. I’m thinking of emailing some internet marketers for their opinion on this matter.

Thank you for replying Dee. It can be hard to come to an agreement and I not sure that we have to. Both methods will work and in the end that is all that matters.