Niche Site Journal Week 1 – Choosing a niche site topic

I have decided to take up the challenge of the Niche Site Duel and in doing so I’ve also decided to drag my wife into it as well. Instead of doing the duel with Leah (my wife) and I trying to build sites at the same time, we are planning to work together on each site including choosing a niche site, writing posts, creating videos, etc, etc.

Each website will be different in that for one we will be mostly be using Pat’s technique and the other one using Tyrone’s.

RULES:

  • No paid advertisement to get traffic.
  • We will do this as cheap as possible (we are broke, so no problem there).
  • Spend no more than 14 hours per week (average 2 hour per day) between the two of us.
  • Work on the first one for 8 weeks, then switch to working on the second niche site.

We will continue putting in 1 hours a week on the first site to maintain & optimize.

For the first site we will follow pat’s strategy of:
1-Choosing a niche site and create it.

2-Get traffic.

3-Traffic clicks on affiliate links or ads strategically placed on the site.

4-Make money.

(from http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/niche-site-challenge-duel/)

SITE 1 (written post niche site)

The plan for this first niche site is to use written blog posts and SEO to bring in people to the site. Once there, I want them to click on an ad or an affiliate link. Meaning that I don’t need them to say on the site for a long period of time I just need them to get on and then back off through a link.

Site 2 (Video post niche site)

This site will be primarily made up of videos with just a few written posts.  The hope will be to build up very passionate followers and than find things to sell them.

Hopeful outcome

I have been putting off working on a Niche site for a long time.  By being public with our websites we feel that the idea of other’s watching us and the expectation will force us to complete the tasks we have set out to do. We hope to share our experience and give other beginners in internet business an oportunity to see our process, learn from us, and to just see if Niche Sites are worth doing. We currently have no followers, no email lists, and no experience creating income from niche sites.

Week #1 Results

Choosing a niche site

Leah and I decided for the first site we wanted it to be about pregnancy.  This is because my wife is currently 7 months pregnant and she has been doing hours of research on the topic already for her own peace of mind.  The problem facing this niche is that it is over saturated with tons of information, sites, and blogs.

niche site options

Income: $0

no money in yet.

Costs: $98.94

We ended up giving in and purchasing Market Samurai (this is an affiliate link).  We purchased this product because the amount of hours I was spending going between Google Keyword Tools and then using Mozbar and SEOquake extensions drove me crazy.  It was tripling the time it took me to see the numbers.  Market Samurai gathers the numbers for me and I have concluded if will easily save me 100 hours of hours in the future for under $100.  It was an investment I couldn’t pass up.

Time breakdown: 14 Hours

  • 4 hours learning about choosing niche sites.  Basically I was trying to figure out what I should be looking for and what numbers make a good niche site.
  • 2 hours on learning Market Samurai.  After about 4 hours of looking going through keyword numbers on my own I gave in and bought the software.  I was not familiar with using it so I had to go through the tutorial videos that Market Samurai has on their site and youtube channel.
  • 8 hours trying to find keywords (including 4 hours before using Market Samurai).  This part was a lot harder than I expected!  The reason is because we choose such a saturated market.  Anything with high view numbers in pregnancy is over saturated and covered by all the  medical, educational, and non-profit sites.  Not to mention the blogs of people talking about their pregnancy and the commercial websites trying to promote to pregnant woman. If Leah and I where more flexible it would have taken 5 hours at the most.

 Plan

We have decided to adjust our plan a little.  We know we are going to have to work around the problem of the saturated market but we have a few ideas to get around this.

  1. Create a niche site that focuses on using the smaller searched keywords pregnancy related hoping that getting number one on google search for several of them will bring in the numbers we need and allow google to provide the best ads for each of those pages.
  2. Instead of creating one larger niche site, we create several micro niche sites that link together.  This will cost more in purchasing domain names ($15 per domain) but will make google more likely to rank us as number 1.
  3. A hybrid of the first two.  Create a website that is our main hub with great content on all aspect of pregnancy and have several micro niche sites that cover very specific areas.  All of the micro sites will link back to the main website and the main website will send readers to the micro sites to read about those specific topic.

Lessons

The first lesson we have learned is sticking with 2 hours a day is hard.  We have found, however, it more enjoyable and easier for us to put in more than 2 hours at a time.  With just 2 hours we find is hard to get started but that we want to keep working when the time is up, so we have switched our niche site schedule to each of us putting in 4 hours on Friday (8 hours between us) and I put in 6 hours on Saturday.  I am not sure if we will stick with this schedule, but time management is something I always stress about, so I figured if you are like me you would want to hear how we are finding the time.

I have also found that choosing a niche site is a lot harder than I though it would be but I have enjoyed my time.  It is like playing a game where the winner gets passive income for years to come but to win it is important to take chances, make the right choices, and not quit the game.

 

My Niche Site Journal:

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