Niche Site Saturday Week Twenty-Three
It is week twenty-three of the niche site challenge.
We’re approaching the halfway mark in this challenge – and as I said last week – it’s time for me to get serious.
Before I talk about what “getting serious” has entailed, I’m going to explain for the newcomers what the niche site challenge is.
Back at the end of April, I decided I was going to build a set of niche sites over the course of a year. I was going to challenge myself based on a set of tweets someone else wrote – find out about that here.
I invited other people to join in and share their niche site building stories.
Every Saturday, I post an update on what I’ve been doing, random topics and what I’ve read about niche sites from other niche site challengers.
This week, I’ve been working on a specific problem, so that’ll be the basis for this article.
How To Fill Empty Niche Sites
Of the sites I’ve created thus far, the ones with more content do a huge amount better than the ones with less content.
I guess that makes sense. After all, each article increases your chance of exposure and search engines sending someone to your site.
It’s a problem for me though, because I want to create as little content as possible for the niche sites; I don’t have hours to devote to content creation every day. (In fact, the challenge rules are that 2 hours a day is the maximum – I rarely spend that much time.)
A decent sales letter will take an hour to write. Across a planned twenty-eight niche sites for the year, that’s one article every two weeks; and twenty six articles per niche site is probably not going to cut it as far as profitability is concerned.
Normally, I’ll write how-to articles to fill up a niche site, but I figured there was another way to do it this week.
Boiler-plate reviews.
How I’ve Created A “Template Review” For A Niche Site Article
Over the course of learning copywriting, I’ve gone through a lot of experimenting.
In any A/B test, you’ll test the effectiveness of any variation (say, sales page 1 versus sales page 2) by having a control article and then articles with the thing you want to test. Then you’ll see whether the new article outperforms the first one.
This isn’t so relevant to niche sites, except, as I wrote yesterday, I have a folder full of page structures that I’ve tested. This includes things like:
- Where and when to introduce the target market
- How many benefits to list
- How many calls to action and where to put them
I haven’t been referring to these templates recently, because it’s better to write everything from scratch when you’re building a sales page. The difference between 1% conversion and a 2% conversion can mean a lot of money.
That said, yesterday I realised that in terms of content creation, using the templates above made the whole process of writing a review a lot quicker.
So, that’s what I’ll be doing this week. Over the last week, I wrote article ideas and products to review using the above structure. This week I’ll hope to write a lot of product reviews.
If you’ve written reviews and sales letters before, chances are you’ve already got a blueprint you can follow. After you’ve followed the blueprint for a few product reviews, use different elements and start testing to improve them.
Increasing Your Niche Site’s Effectiveness
Today’s article is a short one. However, what’s in it is the difference between writing a single product review for your niche site in an hour and writing a couple of articles.
When you’re running multiple niche sites, it’s important to save time in as many ways as you can.
Whilst writing from a template is going to lower your conversion rates, if you can write more articles and send more traffic to your website, then the lower conversion will be evened out.
When I started the niche site project, I anticipated using it to build data. Using template-style reviews is something that helps tremendously with building data.
It’s very hard to get traffic to a website with five articles. When you have fifty articles on a website, it will generate traffic – even if those articles are terrible.
Using template reviews means you get to the point where you have traffic quickly. You can then always go back – what articles are getting the most traffic? You can then rewrite those for higher effectiveness.
Also, if you do this you can use the templates as control articles themselves; you’ll be able to see how much better an article that takes you two hours to write versus fifteen minutes performs. This will help you going into the future.
Final Thoughts
That wraps up my niche site thoughts for the week.
As always, I’m happy to hear from anyone else with niche site questions, stories or links. Drop them in the comments below and I’ll reply/include them next week.
Until then!