HOW TO BUILD A PROFITABLE NICHE SITE
If you were like me, when I first started, struggling month after month trying to "make it" online, then this may be the most important article you read in your life...
I remember that feeling of frustration and anger when I read about all those other people who had succeeded online. What really made me hopping mad is that they had started after me. I was still making zilch and they were financially independent!
I said to myself: "What do they know that I don't know?" If you're in the same position that I was, then you're probably feeling the same way! Well, grab a cup of coffee and read this letter. It's all about to make sense.
Now you must be thinking how does this make good money?
Well, if you are lucky and do your research well, $10-$20 a day or more
is enough to consider it a success. Once you have done this you can
move on to your next niche content website. Over a period of a year if
you set yourself a goal to create one of these content websites per week
at the end of 12 months you would have 52 niche content sites. If they
all make an average of $15per day that's $780 per day total, around
$285480 USD per year. Best of all the websites require no maintenance,
it's all about picking an untapped niche and filling it with content.
How To Make This Work For You
Before you run off trying to pull this
off remember that in order for it to be successful you need to be
confident you can successfully generate good search engine traffic to
the niches you select. The recursive income only comes when you have
search visitors clicking your ads. By the way, random search visitors
are usually better ad clickers than loyal readers and that's one of the
reasons why this technique can work. Randoms come to your site once,
read your content, click an ad and probably leave never to return again.
Loyal readers come back for new content and often screen out the ads.
It's not in your interest to establish a repeat audience using niche
sites. You don't want the responsibility of adding new content since
chances are finding content about a niche you don't necessarily have
much interest in can be tough. In this case it's just search traffic you
care about, forgot about being sticky.
Step One: look for A Niche
First you need to find niches where there is some traffic. You should use the usual tools, such as the overture inventory keyword data miner,
to conduct research on how many searches are done for certain key
phrases (look for sites with at least 1000 searches per month). Don't
aim for keywords and topics that are highly competitive, look for low
competition with *some* traffic. Take for example Jonathan Wold's Sump Pumps Information
niche. How random is that! Do you even know what a Sump Pump is? I
don't, but he suspects enough people are searching for sump pump
information online and he only needs a handful of them to click his ads
per day.
The key is to find topics that people search for and advertisers use Pay-Per-Click marketing
and other online advertising methods to sell to these people. Your
niche content site helps to bring these two groups together and you take
your middle man fee, with the help of the search engines for traffic
and advertising programs for a monetization system.
Always be certain there are monetization
possibilities before starting a niche content site otherwise you will be
wasting your time. Look for AdWord campaigns by doing Google searches
for the niche you are considering - if you see several ads down the
right column that target the niche then you know advertisers are paying
to reach these markets. To be really thorough, log into AdWords and set
some test campaigns up and see what the bid prices are for your keyword
research subjects. If the prices are reasonable then there probably is
some competition for those keyphrases from advertisers running AdWord
campaigns.
Step Two: Scan For Competition
Once you find a few niches you think have
potential search those key phrases and see what results show up. If the
natural search result sites that turn up are badly optimized (look for
low Page Rank, poor title key phrases and heading tag key phrases) and
you are confident that a site with well optimized content would quickly
jump to the top of the rankings and by quickly I mean about 3-6 months
(remember the Google Sandbox is going to impact how quickly you get high rankings) then you might have your first candidate for a niche content site.
Step Three: Build A Site
I suggest you go with WordPress
to manage your niche content site. WordPress is blog content management
software that runs off a PHP/MySQL backend (this blog uses it). It's
very easy to set up, handles most of the search engine optimization for
you and all you need to do is pump in the content and off you go. There
are some occasions where a plain static HTML site may be more
appropriate, for example when you only need a micro site of a handful of
pages and it would be quicker to just set up the few pages using a HTML
template design, but I'll leave that up to you (read Bo's
Marketing-Syndrome post on WordPress vs Static HTML? for more discussion on this topic).
How To Find Content
At first thought this would probably be the hardest part of using the niche content site technique - how do you come up with content for a niche site that very likely you have next to no interest in or experience with?
Now if you are not the writing type and can't waffle on and bang out a
few key pages of content yourself by utilizing what's already available
online, then you may want to try these options:
- Use articles from public article repository sites such as Ezine Articles and GoArticles. Writers contribute articles to these sites that you can republish on your site as long as you keep the author's byline intact. The downside of this is that other people also can do the same and your article won't be original. However if your niche is small enough there won't be that many other people out there discussing the topic (in fact you are banking on it) so if you are lucky enough to find some on-topic articles in repository sites, make use of them.
- Another popular method is to republish Wikipedia content. Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia contributed to by anyone and if you have ever used the site you know that it has entries on virtually any topic you can think of. Chances are your obscure niche content site topic will have some entries in the Wiki and under the GNU Free Documentation License you can republish the content on your site.
- Freelance writers all over the web are eager to take your money in exchange for their writing skills. Elance is the largest freelancer hub online and listing your article writing project there will flood you with responses. Most writers are pretty adept at producing content on almost any topic, even if they just regurgitate someone else's writings in a new way. A few thousand words shouldn't cost you too much money. If possible try and establish a long term relationship with a good writer if you plan on needing their services again.
- There are special article subscription services that give members the rights to make use of articles, some even promise a certain amount of new articles on a range of different niches will be provided on a regular basis so as to keep members subscribed. The idea here is that you get access to an article pool that only other members are granted access to. This is deliberately done so the articles are only utilized by a handful of people and often membership sites will cap their numbers at a few hundred. Members can do what they want with their articles knowing that at worst only a few hundred other sites are using the same materials.Personally I have never subscribed to an article site and I've read various reports, some good, some bad, about article membership services. I'm skeptical about the concept and I don't like the idea that you have to either choose a niche that directly matches the articles available or try and modify articles to match your niche. I also have no idea where article membership sites source their articles but I have a feeling it would be a room full of trained monkeys writing the new articles each month (or ahh, freelance writers of course, and let's not talk about cheap Indian labor). Given that most members subscribing to the articles will be chasing the same niches this seems like a formula to guarantee you will have at least a few hundred people competing in your niche - not much of an opportunity then is it!
The Importance Of Keyword Click Through Prices
For most niche content sites Ad Sense will be the main monetization strategy. These programs
pay on a per click basis and click through prices are calculated based
on advertiser demand. The golden mix is to find a niche with few well
established content sites but a lot of advertisers competing to find
customers. This means click through prices will be high but the market
is not likely to stay untapped for long and likely a bunch of competing
content sites will pop up. In fact you may never find this combination.
A more likely scenario is a niche where
there are high click prices because of lots of advertisers and a few
well established content sites or moderate to low keyword prices but
almost no competition. How you can succeed in these situations is to be
better at search engine optimization than any of the other sites. If
your site pulls more traffic you get more clicks.
Hope this will help you.
