Tips For Building A Niche Site

I Built My Niche Site In A Few Hours And Made 4k In A Weekend With An Easy 4 Step System Anyone Can Follow (Clickbait)

What it really takes for a complete novice to build a niche site

We’ve all seen the ridiculous headlines claiming yet another Medium writer has stumbled upon a killer niche idea, done the keyword research and discovered an unbelievably low competition keyword all in the blink of an eye. They’ve then put on their superhero costume and churned out a killer website that instantly ranks number 1 on google and hey presto they’ve made 4k over the weekend.

You might be tempted to give up reading this post now because you are worried I’m trying to do the same. Don’t! If you stick with me, I’ll share what I’ve learnt so far about building your own niche site. So if you do decide to give it a try, you will at least have two sides of the story and be better prepared.

First off, it’s not as easy as they make out.

I’m a novice, I have no coding experience, I’m no techno expert, I don’t know SEO and the only things I have going for me is that I am prepared to give it a go, follow instructions and I like writing so the content part is not so difficult for me.

I recently celebrated because after 3 months of blood, sweat and tears, my first site is almost 98% complete.

Has it been easy? Hell, NO!

I’ve had to do a lot of research and learning new skills. It’s been a steep learning curve and there are times when I would cheerfully have thrown the bloody computer out of the window.

“I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. Nothing in life is easy. But that’s no reason to give up. You’ll be surprised what you can accomplish if you set your mind to it. After all, you only have one life, so you should try to make the most of it.”, ― Louis Sachar,

What Did I Do & How Long Has It Taken?

So far, I’ve spent 3 months on this project as a side hustle. I now have a very simple blog site with a few long content posts (pillar posts).

It took me a long time to write the posts because it was more difficult than expected. This is because you need to find low competition keywords to sprinkle in your content but more about that later.

Step 1 Find A Niche

The first step is to identify a niche.

This is not as easy as everyone makes out. It takes a lot of research and time.

I used Mangools to search for keywords. You have to come up with a few ideas for a niche, as finding a low-ranking keyword that is easy to monetise is a challenge.

Some Keywords come up as easy to rank, but when you look at who dominates the market, you might find they are big players like Amazon or eBay or the New York Times, you get the picture. Sites like these all have high-ranking page authority and domain authority. This means it’s going to be hard to rank your site without throwing a ton of money at it or working on it for years to build authority.

I used Mangools.com to research my niche and keywords because they have a free version and because it is easy to use.

You can easily check keyword difficulty, how many monthly searches there are and also take a look at the competition. You can check them out here. (This is an affiliate link. If enough people follow my link, I may get a commission).

Once you have found a low ranking keyword, you then have to check if you can monetise it.

For example, thimble may be a low ranking keyword but if you don’t have any of your own products or good affiliate products that can link to it or the search volume is too low, then it’s not a good Keyword for a site. I found this part really hard. Every time I thought I had a reasonable word, I would find out there were no good products/services to link it to.

Step 2 Domains

What I discovered is that Google doesn’t like brand new domains and so doesn’t send traffic to them.

This is why people opt for aged domains instead. There are a number of websites that sell domains but not all of them are good because not all of them check to see if the domain has a bad history or not. By bad history, I mean a site that was used for spamming or sending out viruses.

After doing a bit of research to find out what the pros use and to be on the safe side, I went with Spamzilla. I didn’t find it easy to use as this is clearly a website for people who know what they are doing, but I did manage to get myself an aged domain for not a lot of money.

Step 3 Hosting

I have an existing website and it is hosted with ipage. They offer cheap hosting, and in the past, they helped me a lot when I got stuck. However, they seem to have changed their focus, and things have changed. Plus, I discovered I’m on a shared hosting plan, which is why it was cheap, but the downside of that is it makes your website vulnerable to attack.

This time around, I’ve opted for Dreamhost. So far it’s easy to use, the support is good and you get a free SSL certificate with your hosted domains which tells Google your site is safe. So that’s a good bonus as you have to pay for an SSL with iPage.

Step 3 Writing Content

For me, this was the easiest of steps. Although, it took longer than expected.

You need several blog posts to get you started. They need to be a decent length, good quality and obviously focused around your keyword.

I did some posts myself and others I left to Jasper. If you haven’t tried jasper, I highly recommend it. Jasper is artificial intelligence and it can write great copy. Within a minute of giving it your instructions you will have a very user friendly blog post. The only caution is, you may have to check the facts because not everything it says is true!

To try it for free, follow this link and get 10k credits. This is enough to give you a good sample of what Jasper can do.

Step 4 Signing up for affiliate offers.

This can be bloody exhausting!

You can complete all of your details (sometimes multiple times) only to have your site rejected because it’s too new or you’re in the wrong part of the world. So far, I’ve been accepted by 1 really relevant product provider. Others are either pending or I can no longer be bothered to wrestle with their websites.

“The moment when you feel like giving up is right before your breakthrough.”

-Victoria Arlen

So that’s it. 3 months of work to produce a very simple niche blog site. Next stage is getting some traffic and getting some sales!

If you found this useful, give it a clap and stay tuned. You may have to wait for the next instalment because I operate at a snail’s pace. But I’m going to get my snail on, so you don’t have to wait too long.

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