Niche Site Challenge Week 24
It’s week 24 of the niche site challenge.
The niche site challenge is a year-long challenge where I (and some mostly silent other participants) attempt to create niche sites with the aim of making money on a part-time, sort-of passive basis.
Here are some guidelines:
- Your niche sites must make money through affiliate links – no product creation!
- Your niche sites must get organic traffic; no spending hundreds on PPC or whatever
- You can only spend two hours a day building niche sites maximum
- You should be using the niche sites as a means to practice your content/copywriting for the internet, though your goal should be to make money from them
There are tons of articles with helpful tips and rules on this site. Check out the archive page or just browse if you’d like to learn more.
Every week, I write an update talking about what I’ve done in the challenge, along with random thoughts and ideas. When other niche site challengers write about the challenge, I also link to them.
Let’s get started with this week’s update.
The Niche Site Challenge – What Have I Been Doing?
In last week’s update, I noted that the sites I have with less content massively under-perform compared to the ones with more content. I put that down to less long-tail traffic meaning less visitors. The fix is obviously to write a lot more content.
However, writing content is time consuming. So I decided to use a “template” review from my files for other work.
Doing this has made writing a sales letter quite fast.
But there’s an issue with my personality which means that creating content never goes as smoothly as it should: I get side-tracked when I’m on the PC.
So this week, I’ve been figuring out how to increase my productivity. I’ve been writing on my tablet using the Evernote application and a Bluetooth keyboard. No screen to look at means that I can’t procrastinate.
It’s also better for my posture, (I’m not craning my neck to look at the screen,) my eyesight (I’m not spending as much time staring at an artificial light source) and time management (no procrastination means seemingly more time to do things.)
This is something I’m rolling out for all of my projects. It starts with thinking, “What can I do away from the computer screen?”
Niche Site Challenge Work Flow
There are three major steps in my niche site challenge blueprint:
- Create the site, upload articles, do the admin stuff
- Keyword research and finding products to review
- Writing the articles.
Now, the astute among you will notice that there’s not much wriggle room for working off the PC in that list.
You can’t register a domain name, set up hosting, and all that stuff on a mobile device. Well, you probably could, but it’d be a pain in the arse. Same with uploading and writing directly into WordPress on a mobile. It’s not worth the trouble.
Keyword research – so far as I’m aware, nobody has created a mobile-friendly keyword research tool. (Feel free to correct me – or build one!) Finding products to review is also a pain.
We’re left with writing the articles. Luckily, we could do that, except all the information we need is on the computer.
Put It All In An Evernote Table
I created a table to get around this. When you’re doing your niche site research, create a table in evernote – or if you don’t mind working on the PC, an excel table – and put in all your information. I used the following headings because they work well with my review template:
In that template, I write the major benefits, the customers I’m targeting, and other bits and pieces. Once I’ve written the articles offline, I’ll open the table up on my PC, add in the affiliate links and use that as a reference from then on.
Building a table like this and putting it in Evernote means that you can come offline and write, and then access only the data you need without going back on the computer, loading up your internet browser and distracting yourself all over again.
Doing this, you can write a few reviews per hour without distraction. That’s what I’ve been doing this week in an aim to get my lagging niche sites up to par in terms of traffic and success.
Market Samurai Is Working: But You Need to Adjust The Figures
A recent spanner in the works for the niche site challenge (and everything else) has been that Market Samurai has been broken.
Google changed their keyword planner results, and so Market Samurai couldn’t collect the right figures.
Luckily, Market Samurai is fixed – but with a caveat. It now collects data from the Bing search engine as opposed to Google.
This is great, because keyword research is only ever a guideline – and if people are searching for a keyword on one engine, it’s likely going to be reflective of other engines.
However Bing gets less searches than Google, so in the new Market Samurai results, you have to rethink what a “good” search volume is. Whereas Google might have returned 1000 searches a month, Bing will probably only return a few hundred or less.
Revise your thinking if you use Market Samurai.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, the above has been helpful for some of you.
As always, you’re free to let me know how your niche site building is going on. We’re almost at the half way point, for those who joined initially!
Questions are welcome; thoughts, etc. … let me know.
Until next week!