Niche Site Journal Week 3 – WordPress Site Editing & Content Creation

Another 14 hours into the Niche Site Journal; this brings the total up to 42 hours of work into our niche site. Our focus during week 3 was on filling up the website with content and adjusting the code to look good. This entailed content creation, designing images, adjusting the look of the website, setting up the Google adsense banners, and placing the ads onto the site.

Pages for the website

Since we spent the week working on the site, I thought you might find it helpful to know what the website is going look like in regards to number of pages and what they are for.

Home: We are using this as the Welcome page. It talks about the product (which is our Keyword), we make sure to give it a personal feel, and we mention the reader as much as possible. Since our site is on pregnancy we congradulate them on their expected child or their loved one’s expected child, make sure they feel we care about them (which we do), and sell them on the idea of the product being important for their health and well being (which it is).
Articles: This page is in a condensed blog format. This page will have a list of around 5 articles talking about the product. Each will show a headline with a very brief description of the articles topic. These 5 articles will be their own pages so I will not include them in this list as they are blog posts on the topic of the niche.
Questions: This page is dedicated to quick questions and answers people have about the niche. We currently have 5 questions, but hope to populate it from questions we get from our readers.
About: The page that talks about why we created the website, the purpose of the site, and what’s unique about our site.
Contact: We have a form on this page for people to fill out if they have any questions, concerns, or just drop us a line through a form. We created the form using a plug-in. I will share which one in the next update (week 4).

Week #3 Results

Filling in the website with Content Creation

Leah and I have been working on different parts at the same time. Leah has been working on the content creation and creating images to enhance the site. At the same time I’ve been adjust the look of the website while adding the Google adSense codes. The more we have been working on the site, the more excited I am about getting the site done, marketing, and then collect the passive income from all the work we are doing these 8 weeks.

Income: $0

No Income yet.

Costs: $0

We didn’t spend any money this week, but you might want to. Leah’s undergraduate degree is in illustration and art, plus I have studied digital arts for fun and for creating marketing material for my other businesses. This means we will be creating a lot of the in website images ourselves (with plans to monetize the pictures later with revenue sharing stock image sites). You might consider getting an image at http://www.istockphoto.com/ (cheapest images are aroudn $1.50 to use) or you can get custom images done through http://fiverr.com/.

Time Breakdown: 14 Hours

We ended up breaking up the week down the middle because of the fact there was enough work for both of us to put it. Leah ended up working 2 hours a day for 3 days, with one of those days working an extra hour. I (Jason) ended up sitting down for 7 hours to do adjust the website’s look, add Google Ad Sense ads, go over what Leah wrote, and add content to website.

Leah’s Time (7 hours):

1 hour determining what pages were needed for site. The way she did this was buy looking at other sited on the web and determining what pages were needed for our small site.
6 hours writing for those pages. Some of the pages were difficult to fill as this is the first time Leah has written for websites. To make it easier she would look at the sites she liked with similar pages, determine the what objective the page was to fulfill (we listed them in Pages for Website section above), break those objectives into sections, and write based off of those objectives & sections.

Jason’s Time (7 hours):

4 hours adding pages and creating links between them. Normally this is easy with WordPress as it creates the links for you in the menu section. In the theme we choose I didn’t like it had the links at the bottom of the page. So, I manually put the links in using html coding.
This didn’t take too long, but the hard part was remember how to link within the same page. This we used for the Question page; there is a list of questions and when you click on the link, it takes you down the page to the answer. I had to look up again how to do it, then I had problems, and that meant I had to re-do it several times.
2 hours setting up AdSense banners and getting them on the page. I had to adjust the sizes several times and figure out the best color scheme.
1 hour editing and uploading to the site several of the pages Leah completed.

Plan

Here is an update list of our plans. The difference is that we worked out more details of what we want to do for each week.

Week 4: Finishing the Adjust theme for best look, add plug-ins, add widgets, and finish populating the website with great content.
Week 5: Create and implement Article Marketing plan.
Week 6: Continue to do article marketing, while improving sites share ability via social media and social bookmarking sites.
Week 7: Adjust marketing campaign towards what is giving us the most traffic.
Week 8: optimize the wordpress site, google adsense, and the marketing.

Lessons

The lesson for this weak is utilize your strengths and outsource your weaknesses. For both my wife and I we have different strengths and weaknesses. She is considerably better at writing articles while she has no clue on how to set up a wordpress theme and make changes. You might not have a spouse that compliments your abilities, but there are people out there who are willing do the things you don’t want to do, for reasonable compensation.

Sites like fiverr.com are great for that. For $5 you can pay someone else to do your web design, image formatting, content creation, etc… it saves you hours of possible tedium. I personally love learning how to create websites, so website creation makes sense. I hate writing content, so if Leah wasn’t here to cover that, I would hire a writer for $5 on fiverr and then adjust their article to fit my voice.

The fiverr website can have its draw backs but is usually worth the risk because the cost is so cheap. You might have to shop around for a someone that does the best job and hire them to do what you don’t want to. I also want to mention I am not an affiliate for fiverr.com and use it sparingly because I like to do a lot of the work myself and don’t have a lot of money to throw around. So, while it is an amazing site where you can get some great work done, there are also people who claim to be better at things than they are. While the website can give you your money back if your not truley satisfied (I had to do this one time), you need to be careful when using it to make sure you understand the process before you begin.