Editing Niche Sites

Editing Niche Sites

Let’s talk about a niche site topic I don’t think I’ve mentioned before, but you’ll have to do.

Editing is one of those bone-achingly boring things that nobody ever enjoys.

Here’s why you will need to edit niche sites:

• Better offers present themselves
• Some affiliate program closes stealing your money and you want to get them back
• You get better at writing
• You find new and better ways of doing things
• Some term gets SEO traction

Here are some of the “how” answers for editing niche sites:

Better Offers

Offers don’t stay the same. The best web hosting deal now probably won’t be the best deal in a year’s time.

This goes for you as an affiliate, but also for your customers.

Companies that are looking to expand have great terms and great affiliate programs. Once they’ve expanded to their optimum, they take away the programs and incentives for the most part.

If you want to stay honest as well as improve your income, then keep abreast of these developments.

I recommend not messing up your SEO by completely changing articles. Instead, add a box at the top of old articles saying, “Hey… just for the record I’ve since updated my views on this subject. The best current deals can be found here.”

Then link to your updated best offer.

Better Skills

I’ve separated this from better writing, which I’ll talk about quickly below. But I separate the two because if you’re building websites and doing any sort of online marketing, then not only will your writing increase, but so too will your other skills.

Like web design. Or structuring your sites. You might learn how to add an email autoresponder once you’ve learned a bit of email marketing. Or you might find that having a particular sidebar alignment means people are less likely to click your buy now buttons.

Or maybe you learn that buttons are more or less effective than some other piece of design.

With any project, I recommend getting on with it first and then once you’ve learned a better way of doing things, you can go back and improve.

SEO Traction

Some posts will gain traction with the search engines. Some won’t. You can edit both.

If you have a review which should be a winner, then go and add more to it. It might mean adding some photos or embedding a video. Maybe it involves including the keyword a few more times.

Some posts are more successful than you think they’ll be. If these posts are designed to convert, then play with them to raise conversions. If they are instead how-to posts, then go and edit them so you have more links to income-generating pages.

Better Writing

Your writing improves over time. Hopefully your niche sites gain traction.

For instance, I never used to be all that great at calls-to-action. So when I look back at some of my earlier sites now, I think, “I could swap out the CTA for this article.” So I do.

This then improves the performance of any given article and doesn’t take much time if you’re using templates which you know work.

As you learn and improve, you’ll find tons of opportunities to quickly edit your articles.

When To Edit Your Niche Sites

Firstly, let’s get one thing straight. Do not edit as you go, and don’t worry about editing when you’re still building your site.

Every niche site will go into a hibernation mode at some point. It’ll usually be for one of a few reasons:

1. You have run out of things to say or products to promote
2. It’s not making you any money
3. You have a new project that takes your time
4. You’re bored of the subject
5. The return you’re getting isn’t worth it anymore and your income has stabilised or stalled

At this point, you’ll probably move your writing somewhere else. If you have a niche site that makes $500 a month and you’ve covered all the major products and topics, then it probably won’t matter if you add another article a week just for the sake of it.

At this point, it’s best to stop spending so much time on it.

So this is “hibernation mode.”

This is when you should edit, and only for a few hours.

Final Thoughts

Across all writing projects, I don’t really put all that much stock into editing. That’s not because I don’t do it, but because I think it’s something you should do after the fact.

Once you see things are going to work, edit them to be better. Once you see things are not working, then you can fix them or leave the sunk cost if there’s no hope.

Niche sites are good for this because they’re not designed to be regularly read and so changing things will draw no confusion.