Over the past four days, I’ve created four new sites. Two of those new sites are going to be niche sites. One is in the health niche and one is in the financial niche. Both of them are quite wide topics yet also have specific audiences and will probably have a focus on a more specific set of topics for the most part (because that’s what I’m interested in.)
Disclaimer: They aren’t finished by any means. I’ve designed the sites, uploaded some material and gotten the ducks in a row.
I haven’t really put up all that many niche sites for a while having done the Niche Site Challenge and frankly put too much on my plate. I gave it all a rest. So in the meantime, my other stuff took priority and now I have a bunch of new skills to apply to these latest sites.
As such – I learned a lot over the past couple of days about how to make the process of preparing and creating niche sites better.
In this article, I’ll give you my latest findings.
MASSIVE DISCLAIMER: If you are creating your first niche sites, don’t care about any of this. Go, build, write some stuff and make some money. Worry about optimising after you know what you’re doing.
One: Site Design Is Important. Get Your “Look” Right
I might just be a form over function kind of person, but I find it a lot easier to work on a project when I feel like the structure is already there and I’m just contributing the words.
So when I go to write a new book, I load up a template Scrivener file or a Word document that’s already formatted. Then it’s a case of me writing the words and it’s all ready to go.
With niche sites, I’ve found that it’s a lot easier to concentrate on writing the articles if I don’t have to worry about what the site is going to look like.
So what I learned between creating niche sites one and two this week was to get all the images and everything ready first.
By this, I mean create a logo and create a template “featured image” file and decide on the fonts and colour scheme. This doesn’t come naturally to me, so I looked up the stuff online, created a few images and generally got some amateurish-but-passable graphics created for my niche sites.
As far as logos go, find some royalty free ClipArt and pick a nice looking font. Type over your icon and hey presto, you have your logo.
You can go on Fiverr if you want, but that’s what they’ll probably do and to be honest, your niche site logo is never a huge factor.
Two. Get The Boring Stuff Out Of The Way
Let’s talk about the plugin Pretty Links.
This is a good plugin, because it allows you to get rid of horrid, long affiliate links and replace them with yourdomain.com/productname
This is valuable, and the plugin is free. (Unless you want the pro version, which I don’t think I have ever bought. I certainly don’t use it in any case.)
But until this week, I didn’t realise its full use.
You can use it to set up links for stuff you haven’t created yet.
Let’s just say you’re creating a niche site around cooking. You know that at some point you’re going to recommend a crockpot, but you haven’t researched an affiliate program yet, or don’t know the best product.
Simple… you go to Pretty Links and set up yourdomain.com/best-crockpot as a Pretty Link. Have it redirect anywhere. Once you’re ready to use the link and have done your research, then you can change it without altering your article or having to find every time you’ve mentioned the product in your work.
Stuff like this and getting your affiliate logins in a document so you can easily find them is boring and tedious, but it’s more boring and tedious when you’ve not done it and you can’t find any of the information.
(This is especially true when you get that letter from the taxman saying, “Hey… we want to know exactly how much money you’ve got, buddy.”)
3. Structure + Audience = King
If you think about the audience you’re targeting and the main problems they face, you can create niche sites with a definite niche but still quite an extensive range of topics to talk about.
This makes coming up with content for your niche site easy. It makes finding products and affiliate programs easy. The only problem you’ll have is a curation problem because you don’t have enough time to write everything you can think of.
Let’s say you want to review DJ Equipment.
You could call it DJEQuipmentReviews.com and go on Amazon and find the list of products.
Now, this might be a good approach, and it’s one I’ve used before with varying success.
A better approach is to say, “Hey… let me target DJs and ask myself what are the three key problems they face?”
You call it MakeDJsGreatAgain.com and you establish that their problems are:
- They don’t know what equipment to buy
- They don’t know how to create music
- All of them are broke
Now you get to write about DJ equipment, but you also get to throw in financial advice, general music advice and other stuff that other DJ sites won’t be talking about. You’re also well on your way to creating a community-focused resource that’ll get more shares and more engagement.
As always, the above isn’t your primary goal, income is. But the secondary benefits make you more income and create a better resource, so it’s win-win for everyone.
Final Thoughts
If you follow the above three rules, setting up your website will be quick and it’ll also be formulaic. Some might see that as a bad thing, but it’s far from it.
The good thing about the stuff above for you is that you spend less time on the boring admin stuff and more time on content creation – as well as earning money faster and more completed projects.
The good thing about it for your audience is that you’re spending more time creating content and giving them a better end product. The formula and set up doesn’t detract from the quality at all, but because it’s more efficient for you, you’ll be able to do more, build more and provide more for your audience.