Niche Site Challenge Week 0: What I’m Doing
James over at Red Pill Reviews posted about the niche site challenge since I last wrote about it. In that post he said, “I’m not sure what Jamie is doing.”
I wrote about the “rules” such as they are in the last post. To summarise:
Starting May 1st – or whenever you like – the aim is to create niche sites that’ll give you long-term passive revenue. The challenge has a series of simple tweets that design the framework:
The Goals
Build 28 niche sites over the course of a year.
$500 target for passive income for each site.
The Rules
No paid advertising.
No product creation.
Only simple SEO skills (Which I’ve taken to mean on-site optimisation, keyword research and natural linking only.)
Caveats and Other Stuff
You probably can’t guarantee your income – it’s a guideline: Yours might be completely different. (James is aiming for a few sites that make $100 within 6 months.)
You don’t have to spend two hours a day on this project; I guess the idea though is that this is a part-time endeavour. Don’t spend ten hours a day on this, but taking a day off is fine!
Do as many niche sites as you like at a time, do them in whatever order you like.
That’s a basic explanation – like James said, don’t worry too much about the rules. Just join in, build some websites, try and make a load of money, see what happens.
If you do decide to join in, leave some comments, write blog posts or write about it on Twitter. The whole point is that it’s fun to get encouragement and share progress and whatnot.
As for the rest, I’m sure you get what’s going on by now, so I won’t give you the wise-old grandpa treatment.
What I’m Going To Do
I’m going to build niche sites as I think of them as opposed to dogmatically going with 7 for three months. I’m going to try and think of sites early on in the year, so hopefully I’ll have all twenty-eight started within six months. (Massive disclaimer here: I don’t know that that’s going to happen.)
I’ve done some brainstorming and I have about ten niches I think I’m going to try out. I’m going to do the keyword research and niche testing for these in the first week or two. Then I’m going to write some sales letters for some of the big ticket items and a few other posts before I set the site up. My first sites will go live with a handful of posts each by the end of May, if all goes to plan.
After that, I’ll see how I’m doing as far as workload for the project and how confident I’m feeling about the sites I’ve started. If they show signs of doing well, then I’ll simultaneously fill those out whilst building the second set of niche sites and doing the keyword research etc. After this, I haven’t even thought about let alone planned, so I can’t tell you more.
As far as what you’ll see as a reader though:
Every Saturday, I’ll write a post like this one going through what I’ve been doing for my niche site challenge throughout the week. I’ll point out observations and troubles and milestones and whatnot. (Again, I’ve not really thought this through, so come back next week to see what’s happening.)
When I think I’ve got something worth writing an actual article about, then I’ll do that as my topic of the day, so if you really want to keep up with all the stuff I’m learning from the challenge, periodically check in and see what articles I’ve put up. Otherwise, the blog is going to be business as usual where I write about writing and stuff in general.
Finally, I figure that I’ll use the niche site challenge as a means to get myself more into social media. I’m not a big social media guy usually, but I figure the part-time, little project nature of the niche site challenge is probably going to work well with Twitter, so I’ll post my thoughts as I have them.
My Personal Goals
I wrote above about the “rules” of the game and how you should customise them for your own purposes. This is my customised plan (subject to change should I be failing utterly by Week 2)
- I’m going to build twenty-eight new niche sites before May 1st, 2017.
- I’m going to write about this process on this blog once a week.
- I’m going to aim to spend one-to-two hours a day on this challenge.
- I’m going to aim for $500 per site per month.*
- I’m going to keep records of all the useful data so that I can use it elsewhere/in the future.
As far as the * and the money is concerned, like I said at the start of this article, I can’t guarantee any site will make any particular figure. However, I can aim to have sites that make $500, even if they fail. This approach ensures I’ll pick a specific set of attributes for the niche subjects… I might have already written about this, but I’ll write about it again in more detail when I do an article on picking a niche subject. Essentially, if I want a site to hit $500 a month, then my niche can’t be something like “£0.99 book reviews” because I’d never get the traffic and commissions to achieve the goal.
Speaking of the subjects of the niche: I’m probably not going to share the exact niches of my sites. That’s not because I’m scared that a million people are going to flood it and steal my sites, but more that it’s not relevant: I’ll be picking niches based on stuff I know about or want to know about. Everyone should do the same. I will talk about the niches in general terms – so I might say “I’ve got a site in a fitness niche.” Hopefully that’ll cure everyone’s curiosity and I’ll aim to be as clear as possible.
Conclusion: Let’s Get Started
As a final thoughts type summary: I’ll be starting the niche site challenge as of tomorrow. It’ll run until May 2017, barring the various usual acts of gods and other changes in circumstance.
You can follow along on this site, Twitter and with everyone else who is participating. I’m not sure how and where everyone is going to update, but it’ll become clearer and I’ll link to everyone as we go along. Better yet, you can get started yourself and join us in the niche site challenge. The more the merrier.
P.S. When you do decide to join in, (and therefore immediately be more awesome,) leave a comment below so I know who you are and where to find you.