Of our five factors, some will be more important to our decision than others.

What I need to do now is go down my list of five factors and decide their importance by giving them a score of 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. The most important factors are scored 5 and the least important factors are score 1.

Incidentally - you can use whatever scaling factor you like for the weights (e.g. 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50).

I'm now going to look at my factors and rationalise their importance so I can assign a score to them:

• Potential
  The potential to make money is the most important factor, really. [ 5 ]
• Certainty
  I need to know that what I'm going to spend months doing is going to work. Maybe not quite as important as potential as I'm fairly confident that with work, any niche could be made to succeed. [ 4 ]
• Content
  The ability to create content is important but not necessarily essential. Part of the problem with writing content is finding inspiration and if necessary, the niche can be broadened to offer more scope for topics. [ 3 ]
• Appeal
  If I'm treating this like a business, I shouldn't be letting my personal feelings take the wheel in this decision. For this to be an objective decision I should be more concerned with the other factors [ 2 ]
• Motivation
  Remaining motivated after a year is quite important if I'm going to keep going long enough to keep writing content and attracting traffic. [ 3 ]
  

Now that I have my weighting factors, I can plug them into my matrix.

Before I do, I'll just explain how they work. Here's the simple matrix from the previous page (before we add the weight values):

Currently, the total for option 1 (Build a niche website) is the result of adding the values for each factor together. So, in the current example, that's:

When we add a weight value to each factor, the total is the result of multiplying the weight by the value for each factor and adding together the result of each.

So, here's the matrix with the weights added (blue background):

Now, the total for option one is calculated by multiplying the value of each factor by the weight of each factor. Here's the calculation for the niche website option:

If you copied my Google sheet example, you don't need to worry about putting in these calculations as my total column automatically recognises if the weight is there and calculates accordingly.

The Winner

In this case you can see that the winning option is still building a bootcamp site.

In many cases, you will find that adding the weights can dramatically change the outcome of the decision.

Next: Why this works, even with subjective selection (click Next Page below)