Building Niche Sites: Other Tips and Tricks
I wrote yesterday about good ideas for niche sites: I didn’t give you just a list, I gave you a framework for creating your own ideas which should mean you never run out of ideas.
You’re probably going to have too many ideas once you really get the hang of building niche sites, so I wouldn’t worry. The key is to pick something get started and learn as you go along.
I don’t have much time today to write a brilliant post, so instead I’ll just write some things today that you should be aware of when building niche sites.
One: There’s a Learning Curve
I’m really lucky that it only takes about £10 to start a new site.
I’ve created a lot of websites over the years. I wish I could say they were all surefire, money-in-the-bank hits. They weren’t. Far from it.
If I did them now, they’d be more successful than they were back when I first started. I’m sure if I look back in five years’ time I’ll say exactly the same about the sites I’m creating now.
There’s a learning curve to building niche sites, and whilst my articles are obviously super-helpful-awesome, you’re still going to go through the learning curve. I learned from some great resources, but there’s nothing quite like building sites and learning as you go.
Two: Don’t make a niche site a massive project.
Websites are hand yin that you can devote as much time to them as you want. However, on the flip side, you can end up turning what should be a quick and tight project into a massive project that consumes your life. Generally, when you’re building niche sites, you want them to be big enough that you can sell some things on them, but not so big that you’re writing multiple times per day, doing loads of social media and essentially creating a new pen name/identity around them.
These things will happen if you let them. Any niche subject can be divided into hundreds of topics. You have to set out in advance what you can and can’t (or will and wont) do on your niche site.
Three: Have as much as you can set up before you go.
When you’re building niche sites, there are a lot of things that you can have set up before you go. For instance, WordPress theme choices, images, site structure, categories; those are all things that you can have in “template “ form so that whenever you have a new idea for a niche site, you’ll just load these things up without having to start from scratch.
Four: Write your content first
You should always write your content first. I aim for about twenty to thirty posts finished before I set up a website. If you ad one new article a week, you need fifty for the first year. Of course, with a niche site you don’t have to load them up on a weekly basis like you would a blog. You could technically write thirty posts, put them up and then never return.
Either way, you need a reasonable amount of content written to ensure you don’t end up with a five page website that never gets any momentum.
Five: It’s a lot easier if you write about what you’re interested in.
Using the formula from yesterday, you can write about any subject and to any audience.
You should probably choose a topic you’re interested in though. It makes the whole process quick, easy and fun. Also, if your site takes off, you might end up turning it into a real business.
Don’t underestimate the time/energy that knowing a topic gives you: I can write topics like these in a few minutes in a lot more detail than I can about topics I don’t know about. Picking a topic you like means research time will be less, articles will be longer and they’ll also be higher quality.
Six: Don’t make a terrible site.
Thousands of internet marketers exist. They infest every single market, every niche and every topic.
There’s one thing you have to do to not be like them: don’t build terrible niche sites.
Your website won’t be and can’t be perfect. It doesn’t have to be. The barrier to entry is really quite low for a lot of topics. Outside of the internet marketing/make money online/build a great lifestyle markets, most people can’t build a good website.
In the aforementioned niches, most people are looking to make a quick penny and scramble, so providing you make a decent site, they aren’t much competition either.
Seven: Don’t fall into the trap of turning a niche website into an authority website (re-teration of point two.)
You start off with great intentions: spend twenty hours or so writing fifty articles in amix of how-to information and reviews/sales letters for a niche.
Then there’s a little switch in your head that says, “I need a mailing list.” Then it says, “I ccould get some fans on Twitter.” Then it says “Let’s get an Instagram” or “lets research this topic to death in case we’re missing good ideas.”
Before you know it, you have a hundred how-to articles and then you don’t want to sully your perfect website with sales letters.
At this point, your niche site isn’t a little project or a hobby; it’s a massive time sink that you’re ego-invested in.
You shouldn’t allow yourself to get to this point because it’s the path to the Dark Side.
For writers, the dark side is where you think your writing is a specialist gift that you must use solely for one thing, instead of an amazing tool that allows you to work on any project and as many projects as you want.