Niche Site Saturday Week 42
It’s Niche Site Saturday, and that means it’s time for my weekly update on my niche site building adventures.
You’re all aware of the niche site challenge, the rules and regulations surrounding it. I won’t go into detail. For the newbies that somehow stumble upon this post as the first in the series, check the archives and you’ll find all the details you need.
Every week, I recount random thoughts about niche sites and tell readers about what I’ve been doing.
Random Ideas Versus Related Subjects For Your Niche Sites
I’ll start with a detour.
I’ve been irritated at myself recently. I gave a piece of advice way back which basically said, “Don’t write about lots of unrelated subjects when you can write about related ones.”
The reason for that advice is that your knowledge on a subject is a key part of how you create material quickly. You can use templates, learn writing tricks and other things, but ultimately if you know nothing about a subject, you’re either going to have to research around your subject area or you’re going to have a terrible article if you write it without research.
When you have a lot of unrelated sites, each subject requires its own research. If you have a site about windsurfing and a site about online business, you’re going to find very little overlap. This means double the work.
Why am I annoyed with myself? I’ve been doing the wrong thing in this regard. My niche sites are basically an excuse for me to indulge loads of weird hobbies I want to try, and as such, they’re only ever tangentially related.
This means – as I’m approaching twenty niche sites in circulation – that I have a lot of material to write and virtually none of it is useful outside of its own site.
This means the time scales with the output at a 1:1 ratio.
I was researching an idea recently, and I stumbled across a website that looked familiar. Turns out it was a friend of mines’ site. He has two websites in almost exactly the same niche. A lot of his articles are similar across both sites. This means less research and double the output (well, not quite because the articles were different.)
Essentially, he gets more output for less time than I do.
Another friend has a major authority site and several niche sites – all on related subjects, so he can link from the main project to the side projects without it seeming weird. I don’t even do that. None of my niche sites thus far are involved in any of the subjects I talk about on this site.
Again, this means that my friend gets more value for each bit of his time than I do.
Now, because I enjoy writing and building niche sites, until this point I’ve always made up for the lack of productivity with good ideas, good writing and the most important ingredient; time sat at the desk pumping out articles.
One of my New Year’s Resolutions though was specifically to increase output and be more efficient.
My current niche site strategy isn’t fit for that.
So the past couple of weeks I’ve been a bit bummed out about this problem. I think I wrote about this last week. Anyway, this week I’ve worked on the problem and found a better solution. Let’s talk about that – and for the niche site empire builders waiting in the wings, learn from my mistake and try and keep things semi-related unless you like ploughing time into things.
What Have I Been Doing This Week?
This week I started work on a new and unplanned niche site.
One of my goals with this project has been to get a niche site built in one day, content written and all.
I’ve failed at this again. I’ll get there though.
Anyway, this week I started a new niche site. I’ve written three articles for it as well as something else (Which I’ll talk about tomorrow – it will address one of the big problems with niche sites.)
The difference with this website is that it’s on a subject I’m pretty well researched on. (It relates to my really expensive paper wall decoration.)
I had an authority site a few years ago where I talked about this subject. It’s funny looking back on it, because it had all the little elements that would have made it successful if I’d known what I was doing. Alas, I didn’t. And the writing wasn’t even remotely good. Still, you live and learn.
Anyway, this authority site is the genesis for a whole new set of niche sites. I take the same subject; make it relevant to a certain audience, then when the new site is complete, rinse and repeat.
It’s actually crazily similar to one of the ideas I gave away for free to my mailing list a couple of weeks ago, now I think about it.
Anyway, I’m pretty excited about the new niche site because the research time is effectively zero. I have a competitive advantage and now I’m getting more output for less time spent.
Final Thoughts & What’s Next
I’m going to write twelve product reviews for this site and then about ten to fifteen other articles based on keyword research. Twenty-seven articles total will take me about fifteen hours. Add in another couple to create the site and sign up for the affiliate programs and do all the admin, and that’s it.
Then I’ll rinse and repeat for the next one. I haven’t felt this good about the Challenge for months.
Let’s hope it works – even if it doesn’t, I’ll let you know.
Here’s the takeaway; when you’re talking about SEO and niche sites, the results won’t come over night. That fact is a lot more stressful to live than it sounds to read.
If you can make that process easier, then you should. If you can repeat a successful formula, then you should. Learning and experimenting with online money making stuff is tricky and you’ll find a lot of setbacks.
If you can stack the odds in your favour, you should do it.
See you all next week.
P.S. Actually, see you all tomorrow. There’s a key problem with niche sites, and I’m going to give you an easy way to solve it in tomorrow’s article. Don’t miss it.