Building your first Niche Site? Here are the key things you need to know before building a niche site or blog.
After some research, I found a niche that I was going to build a site around. The problem, I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know how to build a site, I knew nothing about hosting, SEO, content creation, or monetizing a website other than placing Google Adsense on the site an hope to earn some revenue. So after a few trial and errors, I finally learned and understood the basics and backbone of building a site.
So in an effort to help guide you through the process, I have put together the tools and services you will need to get your website, niche site, or blog off the ground.
Deciding On Your Niche
Get Very Creative
Deciding on the niche is something that you want to make sure you pour all of your creativity in. Niche sites has been around for some years now, and not only that, there's already thousands of niche site already out there, there's also many internet marketers out there that has created niche sites around the already popular niches so you have to really sit back and do some research before deciding on any particular niche.
In a recent article, Choosing the Best Niche Topic for your Blog, I detailed a few ways to go about choosing the best niche for your blog or website. It's really not that hard to find a profitable and best suited niche for you, but it is a process that you want to take your time with so you won't end up loosing time and money.
As Pat Flynn said in his article What to Do When “All of the Good Ideas are Already Taken”—Tips to Help You Pick a Niche,
"Selecting a niche is a long-term decision, but if it’s the wrong one, it’s not a long-term loss. You may fail, but as long as you learn it is time well invested."
To start, you can use both free and paid keyword research tools like many of the top level bloggers and internet marketers use to determine the perfect keywords around certain niches. Some of the popular paid keyword research tools are Long Tail Pro and Market Samurai and many of popular internet marketers and bloggers are currently using these programs because the play a major role in helping them find top ranking keywords which essentially is needed for ranking your site in the search engines.
Some of the popular free keyword research tools out there are Google Keyword Planner and SEO Book Keyword Tool and the great thing about these keyword tool is that they are just as powerful as the paid and will get you results if used properly.
Domain Name
Option to use Sub Domains and Paid Domains
One of the first things you want to do is think of a domain name for your site, or a name for it. The name should directly relate to what your site is about. For example, if you were building a niche site based on apple computers, you can name the site, www.thebestapplepc.com (example). This immediately tells people that your site is about apple computers.
Next is to decide whether you want to use a sub domain which is free or buy the actual domain name. Sub domains are second level websites based on a larger site. Sites like Wordpress, Weebly, Blogger, and Webs.com allows you to use their subdomains to build websites and host them for free.
An example of how a subdomain address looks will be something like
www.mywebsite.weebly.com.
The best part about using a subdomain is that they're free and you can build as many sites as you want as long as the name is available. But with anything free, there's always a downside. Check out this article of that I published that shows you the The Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Blogger For Niche Sites.
If you decide that you don't want to use a subdomain, you can buy your domain name out right, example, www.mywebsite.com, from a domain registrars. One of my favorites places to buy domain names is over at GoDaddy. Im a big fan of GoDaddy because of all the sales that they have throughout the year.
Last year, I purchased my first .99 cent domain name for a blog that I am currently working on. In the article that I recommended reading above, I explained the reasons why it may be beneficial to buy the domain name instead of using a subdomain. Overall, while I am still a big fan of subdomains, GoDaddy makes it very cheap to purchase .com names.
Paid Hosting and Free Hosting
Hosting services is what keeps your website online. When it comes to hosting, you also have a choice between paid hosting or free hosting.
The paid version can usually be purchased from your domain registrar and comes with many options to help you build your site. Some of the top hosting services are
Bluehost
One of the world's largest providers of cloud-based online solutions, Bluehost offers everything from domain names, cloud sites, shared hosting and many other features.
GoDaddy
The Worlds largest Domain registrar with over 13 million users. One of the top places to purchase domain names and hosting accounts.
With free hosting, these are usually sub domain accounts that allows you to build a website for free sometimes with very little resources. Free hosting is usually good for students, test sites, beginners, and small websites with low traffic.
One of the major downfalls of free hosting sites is the limited resources you will be able to use. The fact of the matter is that free hosting and free domains give you a no cost way of starting a website or blog.
However, if you are a business owner, want to make a professional blog, or want an e-Commerce site, you should go with paid web hosting, it will be worth the money. You have many additional features for example the free email accounts for the domains which adds a very professional touch to your business.
Site Creation
Free Sites, Do It Your Self, Or Work For Hire
When it comes to getting your site created, you have 3 choices to get this done.
Free Sites- This is basically the same as using a free hosting service or a sub domain. Sites like Wordpress, Weebly, Webs.com, and Blogger will allow you to set up a website or blog for free. Free site builders like Just drag and drop the items on your site, then add the content and you are up and running.
Do It Yourself- This option requires you to do some coding work which means you will have to learn HTML, Java, CSS, or one of the many different coding languages. Coding your own website from scratch is a lot of work and time consuming but gives you the benefit of being able to customize the site to your exact need and wants. If you are interested in learning to code, they're plenty of videos on YouTube with tutorials or check out sites like Udemy.com and Codecademy.com for a more hands on training.
Outsourcing- Getting someone to help you build your website is another option. Some may think that this option is expensive and complicated, but in this new age of technology, many of the tools and services that was once only available to a few, is now available to everyone to use and very affordable. Sites like Fiverr, Elance, and Odesk can be very useful if you are looking for someone to help build your websites. These sites offer freelancers that you can hire for just about everything from Sales, Consultations, Web Designs, Web Development, App Development and more.
Now the only problem with outsourcing certain jobs for instance, if you don't know much about coding, when it comes time to update the site, this may come as a hard task and you may end up outsourcing that as well which is no problem, but for beginners, it is best that at least learn in detail about the platforms and tools you will be using. Trust me, it will make things more easier for you in the end.
Content Creation
Do It Yourself and Outsourcing
Creating content for your blog or website is the main thing that is going to bring people to your website. If you provide great information that people need or want to know, your website will attract a larger audience. One thing about content creation is that it takes time to write articles and put together content for your website. This is another area where you either do it yourself or outsource and hire someone to do it for you.
You can use the sites listed above and hire someone to write the content for the website which if you are running multiple blogs or you are very busy to update your site on a regular basis, outsourcing can be very useful to you. Simply write down key words and topics that you would like the articles to be about.
If you are using a site like Fiverr, you can find someone who will write the articles for you and all you would really have to do is let them know how you need the article to be written, certain keywords that needs to be included and any other specific detail you want the article to contain.
Remember, most communications with these services are mainly emails and messaging through the sites' message board so you will need to be very clear about what you need in the article. Once the article is received back, it is your responsibility to check for any errors and scalping from other peoples website. I personally like to go back in and do a couple things;
1. Check the internet for certain phrases in your article against what the search brings up and see if there any sites with similar content
2. Add or delete a few things so that it can feel a little more personal but for the most part, if you find someone who is great at writing, you can just publish it as you receive it back.
Now if you are choosing to write your own articles, it may take some time to write depending on what you are writing about, details and more but in the end, it can be a great option. When it comes to article writing, for beginners I would suggest that you start learning about SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Although I am not going to go into details about search engine optimizing in this article, Pat Flynn wrote an article, The Backlinking Strategy That Works in which he explains strategy's that he used to build links to his website which I feel provides a lot of information to get beginners started.
In the article, Getting Organized, I explained that in the near future, creating articles is one of the things that I would like to automate to keep the sites constantly updated. Starting out, its good to have a decent amount of articles so depending on your knowledge of the topic and how fast you can type, it can take 30 minutes to 1 hour or more for some to crank out a decent article worth publishing to the web.
One method I use to streamline content for my niches sites is to first create resource pages which usually includes the homepage, about, resources, and the blog pages. The blog pages usually starts off with 10-20 fresh articles with in depth reviews or comparisons on the topics of the niche. Once that is in place, the site becomes easier to update by writing supporting articles for the main resource articles. So to easier put it, my 10-20 new articles each has another 5-10 articles that supports the main article. With this method, you should have at least 50-100 articles on the site that will help you get your blog off to a good start. Once this is established, I usually update my sites with 2-3 articles each every week keeping information flowing throughout the site and keeping the search engines crawling my sites.
Monetization
Many Options
When it comes to monetizing your website, there are plenty of options that you can do depending on what suits you the best. Your options range from
- Paid Per Click Ads (you can use programs like Google Adsense to generate revenue just by placing a few snippets of code that displays relevant ads to your website.)
- Affiliate Programs (Amazon Associates, Commission Junction, and ShareASale are all great affiliate programs and a very popular way to make money through your website or blog. You earn a commission every time someone purchases a product or service that you referred.
- Selling Products (selling products like eBooks directly from your website can generate lots of money if done correctly. Once you have written a eBook, you can can charge people to download the book from your website using services like PayPal to handle the transactions. If the content is valuable information and you market it right, this can lead to a nice monthly residual. However, there are hundreds of eBooks on the market so you will have to be very creative and bring something different to the table.
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