It’s Week 43 of the Niche Site Challenge.
I’m not going to go over the rules and regulations. Read this article right here about what the Niche Site Challenge is and how we go about it.
Every week, I update the world on my progress with the Niche Site Challenge. This week is no exception, though I’ve got stuff to do so it’ll probably be a short update.
Let’s get to it.
What I’ve Done This Week In The Niche Site Challenge
This week I had a massive planning session. I also wrote twelve product reviews for the latest site I’m building.
Last week, I wrote that I was going to try a different strategy and start building related sites. That’s turned out to be a good idea. This one is taking a bit longer, but the related sites that follow it (hopefully) won’t.
The reason is that I’ll be using the same affiliate programs and talking about the same subjects… just for a different audience.
Think of it like this: Say you’re creating niche sites in the fitness niche. Your niche site might be “fitness for over fifties.”
You find a few affiliate programs for weight loss, muscle building, having a healthy heart and the like.
Your niche site does great and those affiliate programs work really well. So you decide to build another site: “fitness for new mothers.”
The goals are the same – weight loss is weight loss whoever you are. The methods are mostly the same; eat less for weight loss, eat more for weight gain and the motivations behind everything are the same.
So most of the products are going to work with the new audience too.
That’s the idea I’m trying out right now, and I think it’s going to work. After all, it works for the copywriting clients that I have who do this. They’ll recycle and reuse material for different audiences and target their sales pages to those audiences and not much else.
This is why massive publishing companies can push out new content and new programs so fast: the material doesn’t change, the methods don’t change and the margins are pretty uniform too.
Let’s see how it works.
Some Ideas: It Doesn’t Have To Be Good At First
Here’s something that throws a lot of people off the scent with niche sites: they want their articles to be brilliant and they want their niche sites to look great when they start.
This is a mistake. I’ve made this mistake, and I’m sure you have too. In reality, you don’t have to worry about this. If your website is terrible, nobody is going to see it anyway. Don’t worry about having perfect articles that perfectly sell the product – especially if you’re working in the dark and you don’t yet know whether your niche site is going to be a success.
It’s better to spend a few hours throwing up some quick articles and gauging the traffic you get versus spending 100 hours making sure everything is perfect. Either way, you might find that there’s a ton of interest in your niche or none at all. Take the easy road.
Future Challenge: Can You Do One Niche Site In One Day?
As regular readers of this site will know, I have a real problem with dipping my toes into too many streams. I love learning new stuff and running new experiments – especially when those experiments involve pots of gold to be made.
I’ve learned over the years not to fight this attribute of mine, because concentrating on one project for months makes me miserable. Instead, I try to work with it; I’ll stay up late at night and implement some weird form of volume learning for a new subject, plough through it until I’m sick of it and hope I’ve done enough to get something meaningful out of it.
This isn’t a Dear Diary entry: the point of the above is to frame the next challenge I’m going to try.
The shorter time I can get something done in, the more things I get to learn and thus the happier I am. This means that I place massive emphasis on systems that allow me to move on.
When it comes to niche sites, a big goal of mine has been to get a working niche site done in a single day. (Even I can concentrate on a project for that long.) With the related-site system I’ve mentioned above, I think this is in my reach.
(Still, it might end up like that time I tried to write a novel in a day. Still haven’t figured that out either.)
I’m hoping to try and finish up current niche site and then get the next one done in a day. That’s my goal… tune in next week to find out if it failed or succeeded.
Final Thoughts
This week; planning and writing. Next week there’ll be less planning and more writing.
Hopefully everyone else is having a great time with their sites. As always, questions, answers and thoughts are welcome in the comment section below.
See you next week!