The Niche Site Challenge: Delayed Edition
It’s technically week 52 of the Niche Site Challenge.
May 1st will mark the year mark for starting and building niche sites.
Now, I planned to have a massive post here about what I’ve learned, how I’ve done and whatnot.
Sometimes though, life throws a spanner in the works; and what I actually did was spend a whole week rebuilding this site from the ground up because it was broken. Read more about that in this link.
The Niche Site Challenge Quick Thoughts
Niche sites are perfect as far as learning projects go.
At the beginning of the year, I thought I knew how to build a niche site and had a great handle on most things that were niche site related.
I’d built a handful of them before I started.
Now, I wasn’t completely wrong. I had a head start in that I could write a product review, set up a website reasonably quickly and work out how to target niches.
As far as knowing what I was doing though; I was pretty wrong.
If you spend a year trying to get better at something – even for a couple of hours a day – you will get better. It doesn’t matter whether you’re starting from scratch or whether you have experience before you start.
You’ll find that what you think you know is a lot more than what you actually know.
Here’s an example; I thought I had seeking out products figured out. About ten days ago, I stumbled upon a great way to find out which products get searched on Google versus which ones don’t. This is after a year of concentrating on building the things.
If I’d have known that little technique a year ago, all of my websites would have been far more successful because I’d only have written articles that I knew had people seeking them out.
Don’t think the above is some miracle technique though; the point is that if you spend a year trying to find better ways to do things, they’re going to pop up all over the place and make what you thought you knew seem basic and irrelevant.
Rewind A Little… Why Are Niche Sites Good For This?
Niche sites are good for this purpose for a few reasons.
Firstly, they’re forgiving. If you stick your name out there for a big career-changing move, accompanied by the social media web and pictures of you cradling the family cat, then you’re going to be burned if things don’t go to plan.
It’s probably not as bad as you imagine, nobody will point and laugh at you in the street, but there’s that stigma of having tried to win big and failed.
With niche sites, nobody cares. You’re putting in an hour a day or whatever and it’s basically a hobby with the potential to make money. Low risk.
Low risk and high reward. Not only financially (The risk is about £30 a year for domains and hosting) but in terms of skills. Here’s a list of skills you’ll learn from building a niche site or two:
- Basic copywriting
- Basic Web Design
- Customer profiling
- SEO
- Product research
- Market research (not the same thing)
- Patience
- Affiliate Marketing
Outside of the niche site challenge parameters, you can also throw a bit of social media, backlinking and start a free mailing list with Mailchimp or something and learn those skills too.
In short, for an hour a day you get a lot of positive and valuable skills and experiences. With the risk of absolutely nothing except the cost of a really unhealthy junk food buffet.
Final Thoughts
I’ll come back to this subject and more next week.
In the interim, if anyone wants to update me on their niche site progress by leaving a comment below, that’ll be great. As always, questions welcome as well.
(It might take me a while to get back on track. I’ve got a backlog of just about everything to get a hold of now the site is up again. Don’t take it personally if I take a while to respond.)