Week 1 – Choosing a niche site topic

This is the 1st week of this experiment with Niche Sites. We are very excited and have high hopes for the possibility of making a full time living off of Niche Sites.

We are not 100% sure on the best way to format these blogs for easy reading of information so you might notice a change in layouts over time. We do know that we want to include: Income & expenses, the number of hours put in with what we did, plans for the future and the lessons we learned.

If you have any suggestions or questions, we would love to hear them in the comment section below. But first…

It is time to get started with the Niche Site Journal!

So, let’s get started with a strategy.

Site 1’s strategy (Pat Flynn’s)

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/)

Week #1 Results

Choosing a niche site

My wife is currently 7 months pregnant with our first child; because of this Leah has been doing hours of research on the topic for her own worries and some peace of mind. For this reason we have decided to do our first niche site involving pregnancy.

The problem facing this niche is that it is over saturated with tons of information, sites, and blogs.

niche site options

Current Numbers:

Income: $0

no money in yet.

Expenses: $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’ve concluded it will save me a lot 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 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!
    Because we choose such a highly saturated market that involves public health anything with high view numbers in pregnancy are 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.

 Plan

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

Options:

  1. Create a niche site that focuses on smaller searched keywords that are pregnancy related. Then 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 is more enjoyable and easier for us to put in more than 2 hours at a time.  Now we plan to put in at least a 4 – 5 hour stretch, 4 days a week.

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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