The Niche Site Challenge: Week 51
Another week has gone by and we’re back to Niche Site Saturday.
Every week, I devote a little time out of my schedule and put it towards building niche sites that’ll hopefully earn a passive income for many years to come.
This little challenge is called (quite creatively) the Niche Site Challenge.
The rules are simple:
- Build niche sites
- Write product reviews on them
- Use affiliate links
- PROFIT
There are 50+ entries in the challenge right now, and that’s not including the other folks who have joined in as well.
Every week, I write up my progress, thoughts and other good stuff. Let’s get on with it.
What Have I Done This Week in The Niche Site Challenge
I can’t remember how I left it last week, but I know sometime over last weekend I bought five new domains.
This week, I’ve been writing material for those. This morning, I uploaded one site’s worth of materials and I’m currently working on another one. (I should post the articles to schedule by the end of the working day.)
Now, I could have been faster but for making a rookie mistake: I didn’t have my ducks in a row as far as affiliate links go.
Here’s the smart thing to do:
Open up a spreadsheet. When you get a long affiliate link like the various online merchants tend to give you, paste it into the spreadsheet.
Then use Pretty Links.
Now, you don’t have to have your website up and running, but in your spreadsheet you can put your intended shortlink or “code name” next to the ugly link.
Then, when you write your articles you can add the link “yoursite.com/product-name” and that will be the end of it.
All that’s left to do is input the link names into Pretty Links when you put the plugin on your site.
Anyway… that’s something I didn’t do and so I’ve added an hour or so of boring work to my day.
This is why it pays to think in terms of systems and how you can do stuff quickly and efficiently.
Speaking of which, here’s a random tip of the day.
Random Tip: Upload All Your Themes and Plugins Via CPanel
This is something I only learned to do recently, and it’s a massive timesaver.
When you build your niche site, chances are you install WordPress, then install your themes, and then install your plugins via the WordPress Dashboard.
Don’t do this.
You have to do them all one by one and it takes ages.
Instead, have all your regular plugins in a folder on your computer.
For what it’s worth, here are some that I use on pretty much every site I create:
- Yoast SEO Plugin
- Pretty Links Pro
- Jetpack
- All in One Security
- Thrive Leads
- Thrive Headline Optimizer
I use more and some sites have particularly useful plugins for the niche, but those are a good start and I use them on nearly all of my sites.
So, I have the zip files in a folder ready to go. Here’s the process:
- Go to your CPanel file manager.
- Navigate to Public HTML>WP Content>Plugins
- Upload your Zip files
- Extract each one
- Delete the zip file
- Leave CPanel
- Go to your WordPress Dashboard and “Installed Plugins”
- Activate all the plugins
That way, you have saved a ton of time on uploading them individually.
You can do this with your theme as well, but that only saves a little time as you only use one theme for the most part.
Final Thoughts
This has been a Niche Site Challenge episode that’s about the finer details of niche sites, for sure.
However, when you make writing an unconscious process, you find that it’s the little technical details that bug you and side track you a lot more than the writing.
If I find a good product, I’m reasonably sure that I can have a great article written about it about an hour later.
Sometimes that means I’m tempted to think that I can write 12 articles a day every day. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that, because there are technical details to address.
Sort out the writing first, and then you can get irritated, optimise your system and realise there’s a whole lot more to learn.