Niche Site Saturday – Week Thirty-Six
It’s the “Back from the break” edition of the Niche Site Challenge.
I’m guessing you all know what the Challenge is by now. If not, you’ll find plenty on it in the archives. Let me summarise though:
- It’s a part time challenge where you – unsurprisingly – build niche sites
- It’s just you and your product review/copywriting technique. No PPC, no products
- I’m not your Mum – do whatever it takes to make residual income from the sites you build
- Let us all know how you’re progressing
These weekly updates are where I share my progress and random other thoughts I’ve collected throughout the week.
Random Thoughts: Mistakes
Let’s talk about some mistakes. Firstly, I’m writing these updates every week. Looking back, this was my first mistake. The reason it’s a mistake is that most weeks aren’t very interesting. Niche sites take a while to gain steam. They take a while to accumulate posts – especially if you’ve got multiple sites. (See below.) Also, the technicalities become mundane. For instance, I could say, “I installed a new domain… blah, blah.” The fact is, installing a new site is exciting but explaining how you installed WordPress for the twentieth time and it all went as expected is pretty boring for a reader.
Also… the problem with niche sites is that the wins aren’t that exciting either. This week, one of my newer sites made its first sales. If that were an authority site, it’d be a great thing. However, it’s an Amazon affiliate site and so the two sales netted me $2.54.
(Side note: Amazon affiliate program is a good place to start, but not a good place to stay if you want to make a rap video about how much money you throw at strippers.)
Also, I realise that I’m massively behind in this challenge. I also realise that twenty-eight niche sites is a lot of niche sites. If you were to post to each niche site twice a week, then that’d be 50+ posts on its own.
I’m not going to do that.
Anyway, what have I been doing?
What I’ve Done In The Niche Site Challenge This Week?
Well, I planned and wrote material for a whole new site this week. It’s going to have less posts – maybe twenty – but they are going to be (I say going to be, they’re mostly written) long form of several thousand words to see if less posts with more content can outperform some of my sites which have closer to fifty posts that are filled with 800 word-or-so articles.
Thinking about life after the challenge, these long form letters are going to be easier to wrap up into a book. More on that later.
The most interesting thing about this week’s planning and writing is that I’ve done it all off the PC.
I’ve been trying to limit my time spent in front of the screen, scrunched up and giving myself back pain.
So, most of the articles I’ve written this week have been written in bullet-point format on paper first, and then fleshed out minimally as I type them up and publish them.
It’s actually been an interesting experience. It’s too soon to tell whether it’s going to become an engrained habit, but I like it so far. I concentrate more and am less distracted by various internet goodies.
Random Thoughts
Does SSL affect niche sites – or any sites – in terms of ranking?
A few murmurings have occurred over the past couple of months. A couple of friends of the blog have said that they think that SSL’s are helping their rankings.
On reading this, I decided to find out for myself. It caused a few little wheels in my head to turn, and I came up with a pretty ingenious thing as far as SSL certificates go. Also, I looked into other little things that could help or hinder ranking to do with hosting, domain names and the like. It’s amazing how deep the rabbit hole goes where that’s all concerned.
Needless to say, I’ll publish my findings at some point. (I don’t think I need to tell you that dedicated subscribers will get the findings first.)
As far as the Niche Site Challenge goes, the next site – which I’ll be transferring from paper to website starting on Monday – will be equipped with an SSL certificate and other goodness.
Final Thoughts
That wraps up the latest edition of the Niche Site Challenge. Hopefully, everyone enjoyed their festive period and is now back to building some sites.
As always; questions, thoughts and feedback are welcome.
See you next week!