Niche Site Saturday: The Challenge Week 21
It’s the twenty-first week of the niche site challenge.
Last week, I posted a round-up of all the niche site challenge entries to date.
This week, I’m going to tell you what I’m doing to take the project forward. I haven’t spent any serious time on the niche site challenge for a while. So I have two choices:
- Forget it ever happened and just create niche sites as and when I feel like it
- Kick myself up the backside and sort it out.
The minute you put any goal in those terms, your choice is already made for you.
Let’s Take A Step Backwards
For those of you who are new to the niche site challenge, let me quickly explain:
- The niche site challenge is about creating niche sites
- It’s a challenge you can only do part-time (no quitting your job and dropping your kids off with Grandma)
- You can only make money from sales letters and SEO (no product launches or advertising)
- Other than that… I’m not your mum. Do whatever you want!
As you can probably tell, we’re not entirely serious with this challenge. There’s no secret niche site challenge policeman to come and make sure you’re obeying the rules.
Anyway, that’s that. You can read more about it here.
In addition to building niche sites (some of the time) I write a weekly post rounding up various articles that I’ve written (and other challengers have written too.) That’s what you’re reading now.
I also add random thoughts on niche site building to my articles, which is what I’ll do in the next section.
How To Plan Niche Sites
This week, I decided to streamline my website building process. I’ve learned a lot of stuff about building websites over the years, and a lot of that learning has been haphazard and random. So I spent a few days collating everything I know and putting it into templates and documents so that I could build websites quickly and more efficiently.
When it comes to building niche sites, there’s a lot of information that makes building niche sites seem like a complicated thing. It doesn’t help when people talk about niche sites as though they’re a separate thing to “regular websites.” (Although I’m guilty of doing this.)
In reality, if you’re building a niche website, you should probably breathe a sigh of relief.
Building a niche website is exactly the same as building any other site, except there are less variables that you have to take into account. Things like:
- Email lists
- Social Media followings
- Building authority
- Releasing products
- Analytics (Well, except the odd glance at your traffic figures and stuff)
- Networking
All of these are things you’ll have to set up at some point if you’re building a business website, an authority site or other major online project.
You don’t have to worry about these things for a niche site.
Essentially, you need to get a nice WordPress theme, do some keyword research and start writing product reviews.
The point of this section is that you should think of building a niche site as a stripping down process where you build a basic website and work from there rather than a process all of its own where you have to incorporate a lot of new skills and tricks.
If In Doubt, Plan On Paper
I’ve been procrastinating massively with the niche site thing for a while. I’ve had other work to do, I’m working on bigger projects and building niche sites has taken a back seat to those things.
Also, it’s easy to waste a lot of time “researching” niche sites. By researching, I mean “wasting time browsing the internet.”
This isn’t just true of niche sites, but internet “research” is a big time waster for any would-be online businessman.
The best solution I’ve found is to get offline. It’s the only solution that works with any kind of certainty for me. (I can’t trust myself on the PC, it seems.)
With the above section, I’ve tried to say that building a niche website is a simple case of creating a stripped down website. You can do this offline.
If in doubt, leave the computer. Get a pen and paper. Write down some subjects. Then, write out the basic questions for the niche, some topic titles based on questions people would search for and the top ten products that are helpful for that niche.
Then, write out bullet points for all of the articles that generates for you.
By the time you’ve done that, you’ll have a lot of material. You could even take it a step further and write the actual articles themselves in pen and paper, but I don’t do that.
By the time you’ve gone online using this method, you’ve got the majority of the work done. It’s always easier to finish a project that’s almost complete than it is to start at the beginning, so you’ll have done yourself a favour.
Anyway, that’s what I’m going to be doing over the next week to get my niche site challenge back on track.
Final Thoughts
Thoughts are always welcome. Leave them in the comments section.
If you have any articles you’ve written about building niche sites, then throw me a link below or on Twitter (or wherever else you can find me!) and I’ll include them in the next update.
Other than that, let’s round up this week’s edition of Niche Site Saturday and get on with building some niche sites!