By John Taylor (c) 2005
Building a portfolio of profitable niche sites is a great way of developing a recurring income stream. A typical niche mini site may only earn you $60 per week but at that rate, four such sites will generate a yearly income of over $12,000. I’ll let you figure out the earnings potential of 100 mini sites!
The niche mini site strategy is very straightforward. First, find a niche market with profit potential that isn’t already oversaturated with competitors. Identify a list of related keywords that people are searching on and then create keyword rich content pages that are optimized for each one of your keywords.
Traditionally, once you have your content pages, you would normally upload them to your site and monetize them with affiliate links and pay-per-click programs such as Google’s Adsense. However, why not make it easy on yourself and gain an added search engine advantage…
We now have access to an easy to use and versatile content management system that means building a niche mini site can be done on the fly. Yes, that’s right – The Blog!
At its very simplest, a blog is just a structure for managing web content. It’s the backbone, or skeleton, of a web site on which to hang the flesh. A blog is simply an easy way to enter and publish your content online.
Blogs don’t just have to be journals, rants, personal commentaries or diaries; blogs can take on a wide variety of forms and functions.
In fact you can just about build any kind of web site with a blog. Just think about it – a blog can be used very effectively to build a niche site. In fact, because they are so easy to use, blogs are one of the most effective niche mini site building tools.
More importantly, one of the most important reasons for choosing to use a blog is their attractiveness to the search engines and the effect they can have on attracting targeted traffic. According to a study released earlier this month by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a full 27 percent of all online users now read blogs, a 58 percent increase from the early part of 2004.
So, how can you take advantage of blogging technology to build a successful niche mini site?
First, choose your niche, identify your primary keyword phrase and pick out about ten secondary keywords – the remaining keywords that you discover will be used later in the process.
The next step is to compile some relevant content based on your primary keyword phrase, just as you would when building a regular site. Then set up an account at http://www.Blog4Cash.com and publish your primary keyword content to your main category. Your niche mini site is already up and running.
Now create a new blog category for each of your 10 secondary keywords using each keyword as the name of a category. The next step is to compile content for each of the ten keywords and post that content in the appropriate category. You can then compile content for each of the remaining keywords and post that content in one of your ten categories.
The more keywords you find the more content you can add to your blog. I try to aim for at least ten keywords /pages per category. Eventually you could have hundreds of pages. Each of those pages will have a link to your 10 Categories. And each of those links will use the anchor text of your most important keywords. As a result of all those internal keyword-rich links, your site will end up ranking very well in the search engines for your Category names.
Your next step is to set up your traffic system. This is where using a blog to build sites gives you a real advantage. There are many special RSS/blog directories that are hungry for feeds. By submitting your new niche blog to these directories, you will begin getting traffic almost immediately. Quite often these feeds will result in a lot more traffic than all the major search engines combined. This is why it makes so much sense to build your niche site as a blog. You will enjoy much more traffic, and get it much faster than with a traditional HTML based site.
Here is a list of some of the top specialist directories you should submit your niche site to: http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55
As soon as you’ve submitted your site to the directories, it’s time to get it indexed by Yahoo! by adding your RSS feed to your MyYahoo! page. If you don’t have a MyYahoo! page, just go to http://www.yahoo.com. Now click on the MyYahoo! link at the top and set up your free account. Once you have your account set up, click on Add Content, then add the URL of your blog RSS feed into the Find Content box.
When you return to your MyYahoo! page, your first niche blog post should be shown. If you go look at your web stats for your site, you’ll find that the Yahoo! spider has probably already made a visit. Your new site should be indexed in Yahoo! in just a couple of days.
Every time you add another content page to your blog, you can alert the RSS/blog directories by “pinging” them. There is a wonderful site at http://www.pingomatic.com that makes this very easy. You just have to enter the URL of your blog and Pingomatic will send your ping to Yahoo and about 15 other large directories. That will bring the spiders back to your site almost immediately!
I would recommend that you write and add a new keyword rich content page every day until you have between 40 to 60 pages. Blogs that are frequently updated tend to get the most traffic. After a couple of months, you’ll have a 60 page niche site that will already be getting a lot of traffic. You will also discover that your regular updates will stimulate the major search engines to spider your site every day. And, if you’ve monetized your site with Google Adsense and relevant affiliate programs, you will also be making a healthy profit!
Once you learned how easy and profitable it is to build your niche sites with a blog, you’ll soon be building more and more money making niche sites!
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John is a prolific writer and is the author of several books including “Testing & Tracking” (http://www.Test-and-track.com). John enjoys significant earnings as a top affiliate across a broad section of niche markets. He also runs the very popular http://www.ClickForContent.com web site
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If you have other ways to make money with your blog, don’t use Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network or any other PPC programs. The most obvious reason is that you are giving away your traffic for that few cents. If your readers are aware of this Ads by Google program, you can hardly get clicks from them. Also, many tech-savvy visitors are just blind to such ads.
You know all the hypes about making money with Adsense. You have PLR Adsense Websites, Adsense website templates and tons of Internet marketers peddling Adsense related products on the net and in your mailbox. And one of the most popular name in this area is Joel Comm. He is the author of the e-book Adsense Secrets. Nowadays, if you’re on his mailing list, he will be blasting emails to sell you all sorts of stuff that are profitable to him and I believe he makes more money doing email marketing than selling his own Adsense Secrets e-book.
1. Build a website on a topic that is close to your heart, it should be something that you have lots of knowledge or experience. It may be your hobby, things that you do during your free time or even your profession.