Niche Site Challenge – Week 29
It’s the 29th week of the Niche Site Challenge. We’re over halfway now through our yearly challenge for creating niche sites.
In this update, I’ll talk about what the niche site challenge is (for those who’ve accidentally fallen down the rabbit hole,) what I’ve done this week and I’ll link to some other thoughts that might be useful to people looking to build their own niche sites.
What Is The Niche Site Challenge?
The Niche Site Challenge is a little competition I set myself – and anyone else who wants to join in – to spend a year creating niche websites in my free time. The rules for the challenge were and are basically:
- You can’t spend more than two hours a day on the challenge
- You can’t use PPC to build traffic to your website, nor blackhat SEO trickery
- Instead, you must rely on your ability to write great material and get search engine love naturally
- No products or other high-ticket items to skew the income upward
- I’ll be creating 28 niche sites this year. You can set your own figure
It’s all in the archives for anyone who wants to learn further.
What Have I Done This Week In The Niche Site Challenge?
This week was great. I wrote a few posts a day for my latest site and I had time to spare. I even thought about trying for a second niche website at one point, but then decided against it. Still, the words were coming easily, and as long as I stuck to the plan, it was going splendidly.
Until today.
Today, I bought a domain name for the site I’ve been working on this week. It was even a great domain: KEYWORDtips.com. I was feeling confident.
It all went downhill from there.
Usually, it takes me about fifteen minutes to set up the domain name/hosting thing.
- I know the nameservers off by heart
- I’ve got reseller hosting so I log into that and “Create new account.”
- I use the Softaculous one-click install for WordPress set up.
- I set up the email accounts to forward to my real email address.
Then I’m ready to get started with building the site.
Today, I was going to record it all to eradicate mistakes and see where I could improve the process. (I know… nerd.)
For some reason, the hosting company wouldn’t let me log in. “Incorrect Password.” I haven’t changed that password in six years.
Anyway, I spent 45 minutes on live chat with an Indian guy who didn’t understand English all that well and didn’t understand my problem.
“Log in to your account so we can find out problem.”
“I can’t login to my account… that is the problem.”
“If you can’t login sir I can’t verify you are account owner.”
So on and so forth.
Anyway, eventually the issue was fixed.
So I set up everything, and go to log in to the WordPress Dashboard. I get this:
Apparently, malware is on my site. That’s despite it being a new domain on a new hosting account.
Urgh.
Of course, I’m worried that my other sites might be affected. Luckily, they aren’t. Apparently it’s a Google issue and the domain has been flagged before from when someone else owned it.
So I sent a support ticket to Google, who’ll get back to me in 72 hours.
Painful. Anyway, I managed to upload some of the articles to the site in the meantime, but every time I tried to click onto a new page or upload a logo or whatever, I got sent back to the evil red “You’ve got malware” warning.
Not a great day.
Other Useful Articles
This week, I wrote some articles which are indirectly good for those of you looking to build niche sites.
Firstly, let’s start with something easy yet crucial. Here’s how to create a quick backup of your blog articles.
Secondly, let’s talk about a great piece of software that you can use with your niche sites (or any website.) Thrive Headline Optimizer is a fantastic plugin for WordPress, and it’ll give you lots of data about which headlines perform best on your site – and which don’t! Check out my full review (and how to use it) here.
Finally, the Niche Site Challenge isn’t all about making money passively from simple internet websites. It’s about practising your copywriting and web building skills. In this article, I talk about the importance of practising writing – and guess what a great way to do that is? Building niche websites.
Final Thoughts
That’s it for another week of the Niche Site Challenge, because I’m tired and I’ve had a stressful tech-problem-filled day.
Hopefully, everyone else is avoiding these issues and building some websites.
Let me know how you’re all getting on, and drop any questions/comments below, and I’ll be happy to answer them.
Until next week!