The Niche Site Challenge Week 33
It is week thirty-three of the Niche Site Challenge. We’re well over halfway, and for those of you who are here with no idea what’s going on, you might want to read the next section – because the New Year is approaching us and the Niche Site Challenge is a great little project you could do as a New Year’s Resolution, if you were so inclined.
Let’s read on to find out what it is I’m talking about, for those of you who don’t know.
What Is The Niche Site Challenge?
The Niche Site Challenge is an unofficial beast of a thing that involves building multiple little niche websites that are designed to make money online residually.
Essentially, there are few rules:
- You build niche websites.
- Only spend a maximum of two hours a day on them in total.
- You can’t build a product to sell on your website – articles and affiliate links only!
- You can’t spend a lot of money on Pay-per-click advertising; instead learn SEO and get organic visitors in a natural fashion
- But you can write product reviews, sales letters and other copywriting magic to sell products.
- You should use the challenge as an opportunity to get better at copywriting, website building and other online marketing skills.
Those are the guidelines as set out by well, me. You can read more about the challenge in the original Niche Site Challenge thread, which you’ll find at this link.
What Have I Been Doing This Week?
I’m still navigating other stuff, and so I maybe did a little bit of planning – I can’t quite remember. But I did maybe an hour at most all week.
Even I can’t draw that out into a massive article.
However, before I let you leave, you should probably go and check out the Niche Site Challenge category in the archives. You can find that here.
In there, there are many months’ worth of updates, random thoughts and ideas for you to use for building your niche sites.
Useful Articles and an Exercise
Whilst I only had a limited amount of time this week, I did make an amazing discovery; website auctions. You can read about it here.
To make up for my lack of progress, here’s an exercise that you can do to help your niche site building process:
- Go to a website auction site like Flippa.com
- See what sort of little sites people are selling
- Firstly, think about whether you could try a niche site in the field
- Secondly, go to the websites that are for sale or ones that have been recently sold
- With the above, see what you could do better and the mistakes they’ve made, as well as look for how they are making money from those sites (and how would you?)
- Optional: use this research to make an action plan
Why Is This Exercise Useful?
You don’t have to use auction sites to buy and sell websites. They are also great for idea generation, checking out competitors and analysing your own sites in terms of what other sites are on the market. You’ll also get a sense of which niches are valuable and which aren’t, and also which niches are particularly popular (or not.) The popularity can work both ways – too popular (like bodybuilding) might mean that the market is saturated. The other hand though; popular might mean that you can make money doing it (otherwise nobody else would be wasting their time and money on the niche.) On the other hand; no popularity might on the one hand mean you’ve got an untapped market, or it might mean that you can’t profitably build a site. Who knows?
You can also use auction sites to get a valuation for your niche site. A simple niche site that’s making a few dollars a month might not seem worth the effort, but someone could value it at a couple of thousand dollars. That’s not a bad return on investment for a couple of hours a week as an investment.
Also, if you build multiple sites, you’ll see the figures above adding up very fast. (So fast, you might want to quit your day job and build niche sites to sell – but that’s outside the remit of the Niche Site Challenge.)
Final Thoughts
That’s it for this week of the Niche Site Challenge.
I’m sorry for having another week where not much has occurred. Still, for those of you who are reading along, it means less reading of my thoughts and hopefully more work on your own sites.
As always, drop thoughts, comments and questions in the comment section below, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Until next week (though it’ll be Christmas Eve, so who knows what’ll be going on then?) good luck and keep working on your sites!