The Niche Site Challenge Week 19
It is Week 19 of the Niche Site Challenge.
For those of you who are unaware, the Niche Site Challenge is a little project I devised back in April.
Essentially, if you want to take part in the challenge, you commit to creating niche sites with the following rules:
- It’s a part-time challenge.
- You create websites that make money via affiliate links through sales letters and product reviews
- No advertising, no product creation or any other super-complex ways to make a lot of money. Just affiliate links.
There were a few other things about the challenge that I can’t remember off the top of my head. Check out the rules in this article, but bear in mind there’s no judging or presiding deity that’ll check to see if you’re obeying the rules. Do whatever you want.
In these weekly topics, I tut like a grumpy old man about everyone getting on with their challenge and reporting back, throw in some random thoughts about niche sites and update everyone on my niche site challenge.
… Except not for the next week or two.
What I’ve Been Doing This Week
If you think back to last week, I had written the majority of the material for a new niche site. I was going to upload that this week.
I didn’t. I’ve been snowed under with other projects and I’m going away for a few days this week and I prefer to wait until I’ve got a few domains to buy before I buy them. (Seriously, it feels like I spend money on domain names every day.)
In short, I had a grand plan for September which is not going to happen.
The Niche Site Challenge is one of the casualties of this, as I’ve neglected it this week entirely in favour of getting everything else out of the way so I can go away this week without working the whole time.
Enough Of The Dear Diary Stuff, Talk About Niche Sites
Let’s talk about keyword research.
I’ve written about it a few times:
Keyword Research in Four Simple Steps
Reader Question On Niche Site Research, Keywords and Competitiveness
Friend of the blog Kyle asked me about keyword research on Twitter this morning.  Specifically, he asked about Market Samurai, and the fact that it can’t return some data and that was making keyword research difficult.
I haven’t used Market Samurai for a couple of weeks. The annoying thing with keyword research tools is that they pull their data from elsewhere. Market Samurai was playing up for me a few weeks ago, and so I did what I usually do: Leave it until the development team sort out the problem.
It turns out this time though that Google has massively changed how they deliver information, which means that Market Samurai can’t tell you how many searches it gets.
Needless to say, this is a major pain in the backside.
I’m going to search for some other solutions, but until then, here’s what I’ll do for keyword research:
- Use Market Samurai to collect competition information such as total pages with a search term and the amount of pages with the term in the title
- Use Google Keyword Planner for their vague and unhelpful estimates
- Use various subjective and intuitive means of gauging whether there’s a market for a niche site
Obviously the key part is the last bit, which I’ll probably write about at a later point.
Until then, I’ve got to wrap this article up because I’m still getting other work done.
Final Thoughts
For those of you undertaking the challenge, comments, questions and other musings are always welcome.
However, this week’s update is proof that building niche sites isn’t something you need to do full time in order to be successful. I haven’t done any work on my niche sites this week, but they stil exist and are still getting visitors.
With that said, hopefully you’re all still working on your sites!