The Niche Site Challenge Week 50
Howdi.
It’s week 50 of the Niche Site Challenge.
For those of you who aren’t aware, the Niche Site Challenge is a mostly-one-man journey into building niche websites for fun and profit.
The rules are pretty simple. You can review them here. You’re welcome to join in the challenge as and when you want.
Every week, I update the world on how I’ve been getting on with building niche sites (or not, as the case sometimes is) and give random thoughts that’ll help aspiring niche site treasure hunters on their way too.
Let’s get started.
What I’ve Done This Week In The Niche Site Challenge
I wrote a few sales letters, and I got recommended a plugin by a friend which might help my sites. It’s an alternative to Buffer in that it sends old posts to Twitter and stuff, but it apparently does it on a schedule so you don’t have to think about it. I’m trying it on one site (I’ll set it up after I’ve written this) and let you know how it goes. If it’s good I’ll name the plugin and recommend it – I’m always wary of automatic plugins and stuff though because I don’t want to recommend something and have people’s sites get Google ban-hammered from the index or their Twitter accounts suspended for spam.
Other than that, I bought a few more domain names and I’ll start posting to some of the new sites within the next week. I won’t have 28 fully functional niche sites in the next two weeks, but I’m going to get as close as I can, damn it.
That’s about all I got on with this week.
Oh, I also looked at one of my old sites to post the first article this year (I know, terrible) and it turns out that the 10-post site gets about 600 visitors a month despite the inactivity. Will have to look into that and see what’s causing it and whether I can do anything with that site.
Random Thoughts: Demonstrating Skills
I figured a way to get myself enthused about niche sites again.
It’s not about the money, nor about the love of writing simple product reviews.
It’s about results. Particularly, niche sites are a great way to prove you can do what you say you’re going to do.
Case in point:
This is the Amazon conversion rate for one of my niche sites.
This site had less than 600 visitors for the month. (March 15th through to today, April 15th) The screenshot doesn’t show a clickthrough rate of just over 10%, so you’ll have to believe me on that.
But it does show 6 ordered items from 60 clicks, which is a conversion rate of 10%.
10% conversion rates are pretty solid in any case, but remember that these niche sites aren’t hyper-intensive and they’re based on simple reviews.
In other words, we’re not working too hard to prove we know what we’re talking about in terms of internet marketing.
This is a key point and I’ll talk more about it in tomorrow’s article, but the general point is that not only are niche sites a learning experience, but they’re also a demonstration of your skill.
Why tell potential clients that you can average a 10% conversion rate on a simple sales letter when you can show them?
Final Thoughts
Another short update today because I want to play around with the new plugin I bought and I’ve also got to write tomorrow’s article. (I’m taking tomorrow off.)
As always, comments, thoughts and questions welcome. I’ll get back to you sometime soon, and if I can spin an article out of your thoughts or questions, I’ll do that.
P.S. Some people have emailed me/commented on the site. I’m not being a dick and ignoring you. I’ll get back to you soon. (Possibly Monday, probably Tuesday.)