Niche Site Saturday: Week Seventeen
It’s Week Seventeen of the Niche Site Challenge.
The Niche Site Challenge is a part time challenge dedicated to creating niche websites and making money through affiliate sales. For those who are new, that means:
- Creating little affiliate sites consisting of how-to articles and product reviews/sales letters
- This should take no more than a couple of hours a day
- You’re not allowed to make money by creating a product or spend money promoting your site
- The goal is to create a side-income of revenue by promoting affiliate offers
The rules are pretty ambiguous and there’s a lot of scope for ignoring/updating them. I don’t really mind, there’s no official judge or anything.
Anyhow, every week I post an update with random thoughts, other links and my progress. I welcome others to do the same via the comments or articles on their own websites. The goal of this is mostly to keep myself accountable and hopefully provide inspiration for fellow challengers.
With that explained, let’s get on with it.
What I’ve Done For The Niche Site Challenge This Week
I’ve had another busy week. That said I did manage to work on my niche sites this week. I posted a grand total of eight articles across the six sites I have operational currently.
I also managed to waste a morning because a couple of my sites use a theme that was incompatible with the latest WordPress update. That incompatibility meant I was unable to access the site or the dashboard to remove the theme. It wasn’t fun.
Anyway I fixed that.
I also spent this morning looking into a new niche. After I’ve posted this article, I’m going to go offline and sit and plan out the new site on pen and paper.
I’ve got a few site ideas in various stages of planning, so hopefully this week I’ll at least get those to the point where I’ll either start building them or give up on the ideas.
Random Thoughts
Here are some random thoughts I’ve had about niche sites that might be useful to you and the other fellow challengers.
Bad Niche Sites
Hopefully everyone who takes part in the niche site challenge creates awesome niche sites.
The difference between a good niche site and a bad one is just a few hours of making sure everything looks right, reads well and answers the questions of the niche in a legitimate way.
Sadly, there are a lot of bad niche sites out there.
Some of them are remnants from before Google clamped down on backlink spam. Some are the results of Fiverr sellers being paid to create niche sites they don’t care about. Some are just the result of people looking to make a quick buck with spam and adsense.
However, they represent an opportunity.
If you find a terrible niche site and you think you can do better, why not try?
Obviously you don’t want to copy a site. Especially if that site is bad.
But if you see a spammy site with a domain like “cheapphonesukbestphonesprice.com” then there’s nothing unethical about serving the market they’re serving in a better way.
In fact, they’ll have done the hard work for you. Go and see what affiliate offers they are promoting, check out the keywords they’re targeting and do a better job.
You’ll find these sorts of sites all the time when you’re doing keyword research, and it’ll cut out the time it takes for you to do all non-writing things.
Niche Sites As Testing (More On This Soon)
Ideas are complicated.
On the one hand, it’s the easiest thing to come up with ideas. “I’m gonna invent a vacuum that doesn’t need electricity to run!”
On the other hand, it can be a nightmare to find viable ideas that are within your budget and skillset.
When you find a workable idea, it’s best to develop that into many different streams of income as opposed to not developing it in favour of finding new ideas.
Niche sites are a great way to test a market or idea. They’re a way to get data on traffic and visitor intentions. If you get that far, then they’re also a great way to build your skills and your budget for when you take the next step.
I’ll be writing more on this in the near future.
My Next Niche Site Experiment: Recurring Revenue
As I wrote above, this morning I had time to browse the net for some new ideas. I found a market with a lot of untapped potential. One of the big draws to me is that there are affiliate programs with recurring revenue.
Recurring revenue is where you refer customers to a monthly program, and instead of getting a single affiliate pay out, you’ll get a percentage of that recurring monthly revenue.
This is obviously great, but it’s something I’ve never tried before. So one of the niche sites I launch next will definitely experiment with this.
Look at your niches and see if there are any recurring revenue opportunities. As, an example, a few guys who have emailed about the challenge are running fitness-related niche sites, and I imagine there are plenty of opportunities in there for recurring revenue.
Final Thoughts
At the moment the sky is black and it’s pouring with rain where I am.
Summer has a negative effect on my productivity. As such, within the next few weeks I expect to be putting more time into work and my various projects; the niche site challenge included.
As always, I welcome questions and updates from everyone.
Otherwise, keep going with building niche sites, and let’s make some awesome websites and fun spending money.