I first started looking into Niche websites over a year ago and since then I set one site up on my own and bought another one from the guys at Human Proof Designs.
So how has this worked out?
Avoid Boring Niches
Well, the first niche was a really dull niche and very hard to write articles about so I have kind of left that to fester after scraping about 10 articles together that didn’t rank at all well. I found it really frustrating as there were loads of low competition keywords, but my site got no traction at all so I lost encouragement. However, I’ve looked at the site again and have a couple of new angles I will take to build the site out in the future and link to Amazon affiliate products, but for now, I’ve put this site on hold.
Follow Your Passions
The second site, which I bought, is actually in a sports niche, which I really am interested in. I bought a premium site from Human Proof Designs, which came with about 15 articles pre-written, a list of keywords and a fully set up Word Press site, so it saves you a lot of the hassle of getting up and running.
Of course I spent a lot of time faffing around with the theme and have finally got the site looking how I want it to. Honestly, this isn’t the most important thing that you should be doing when you start a site, but I find that if your site looks good, you’ll be a lot more encouraged to work on it.
The downside with ordering a pre-made side was that you’re not setting the overall tone and direction of the site so have no real control over the initial content. This was a bit of a gamble, which backfired as the content, which was delivered originally was poorly written. Thankfully when I pointed this out, they rewrote all of the content for me, which improved it vastly, however, it still wasn’t anything like I wanted it to be, so I set about re-writing a lot of the articles and creating my own.
Because my ebay dropshipping side business is ticking along quite nicely and I only need to spend a few hours a week on this at the moment, I’ve decided to dedicate more time to building out the niche site over the next few months, so that I have a good body of content (and hopefully some backlinks) in place, before I quit my job and head out to Thailand for 3 months.
This change of emphasis coincided nicely with the following…
Niche Site Training
Dom from Human Proof Designs has just started an over the shoulder case study, where you can follow his videos week by week as he builds out 2 different sites. His goal is to build these sites up to make $10,000 – check out the course here.
One site is a ready made site, and the other site is a ready made site, which has aged for at least 6 months so it’s out of the Google sandbox.
This was really great timing and I’ve been following exactly what he has been doing with his site for the past 4 weeks. For me this is a great way to learn as you can see exactly what he does, the reasons he is doing this and I figured that if I follow exactly what he does and I don’t succeed then at least I tried!
So what have we looked at so far?
- The importance of getting a good base of links from comments
- Creating a press release
- The magical Keyword Golden Ratio
- How to find forum keywords
- How to structure your content hierarchy
If you want to know more about these techniques then check out my latest post on How to Get Free Instant Traffic to Your Site
New Team Member
The next thing that I’ve done is brought my 11 year old nephew on board the writing team and he’s written about 10 articles for me in my chosen niche!!! This is a great exercise, as I can teach him how to write properly, use a website, and his articles give the site a new angle.
On top of this, it’s great encouragement and motivation for me to work on the site.
The downside to this is that he has already quit 3 times in protest against things like getting a cooler username, but I’m sure we’ll work through the details!
Outsourcing
I’ve done some good keyword research and have a bunch of articles that I need to get written soon. I’m really tied with this one because I want to write them myself but, this is just going to take too much time so I’m going to have to find a writer to do this for me.
I think what I’ll probably do is get a writer to write the articles that I’m not particularly interested in such as product reviews so I can focus on the informational articles instead.
The only trouble is… how can I find a good quality writer?
I’ve got a few ideas on how I want to go about this, but I’ll save this for another update.
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