“Imitation is the sincerest flattery” – Mohandas Gandhi

 

Nothing original here, I assume. In fact, I’m not even a pale version of Pat from Smart Passive Income. But he is one of my idols as I am definitely looking forward to making a living from blogging one day. At the beginning of the year, I started to talk a little bit about the creation of niche websites… like Pat did last year (ugh!).

 

To admit something, way before Pat started to produce niche sites, my partner had this idea. The idea of creating sites requiring low maintenance and providing steady income. Sites that you spend some serious time to build but would grow over time without much additional effort. So this is what we tried (and have failed at miserably several times!) back in early 2009. Yup, 2009!

 

The main difference between Pat and us was in the execution. It is much harder to successfully apply the techniques when building such sites than it is to learn them. And this is why I failed with my eBook too.

 

Our very first success with niche websites came after hiring a VA and setting some serious process around it. After a few “okay” sites, we launched What is Dividend. Since June, I haven’t put a single minute into the site and it earns between $50 and $100 per month. So we decided to continue with this model to build more websites.

 

And here comes the Niche Site Duel Launched by LaTisha @ Financial Success For Young Adults. The goal is simple; one must create a niche website and rank #1 for its keyword in Google.

 

As it is a great initiative, I wanted to share how I’ve built my latest niche website as I think it will be my biggest success so far (and that I’ll also win the challenge ). Here are a few rules I have followed to create my site.

 

Note: this is an extensive 2,000 word article, so don’t skim through it in a hurry. Also, it applies to any kind of topics, not just personal finance (you’ll see the other niche sites from other participants, it is highly diversified!). So you might want to take a look and start your own site, regardless of what your passion is. This may be your best investment of the year! Make sure to bookmark this post and come back from time to time!

 

#1 Find Your Niche And Dominate it

There are a lot of people that talk about my business online model as an empire. I really like the sound of that. But what do empires do? They aspire to world domination! After trying different things here and there, we finally found what we want to dominate. We are taking over the dividend investing niche!

 

Why dividend investing?

 

Forget about Market Samurai keyword research and other online tactics such as solving a problem or a need. You already know about these techniques and they are pretty good. But, there is nothing like good old marketing style: find a sizable niche with wealthy clients ready to spend. There are 2 very important parts of this last sentence:

 

“sizable niche”: You need enough people in the niche so you can reach them. I doubt that albino clowns is a great niche to start with.

 

“ready to spend”: When you think about a niche website, you don’t want traffic, you don’t want loyal readers. You want customers who consume. You want someone that will click, subscribe, buy. You want people that are in “action mode” rather than people that “love your site” but never do anything about it. The dividend niche follows exactly this principle:

-          People interested in dividends have money (if not, they can’t invest)

-          They see the cost required to learn as an investment and not an expense

-          They are willing to pay to improve their situation (trading abilities, portfolio management, overall investment return, etc)

-          It is a sizable niche (there is a general frustration aimed at financial institutions and high management fees linked to investments)

A very, very, VERY important point: I tested this niche with a blog.

 

After looking at The Dividend Guy Blog traffic (over 40,000 visits per month), newsletter subscribers (over 1,200 since June 2011) and downloads of my Dividend Investing eBook (13, 774 since June 2011) I knew that I couldn’t go wrong with this niche.

 

Testing your niche with a blog is probably the most effective way to see if there is a market for your niche or not. It’s easier to get traffic as the blog is updated on a regular basis and people will comment on your site. You can also exchange links with other bloggers in your own niche. On top of that, it gives you the ultimate weapon of mass destruction when you want to dominate this niche and drive traffic to your niche site. Your blog will already have a good number of readers and linking power in the eye of the Big G. That’s perfect to put your niche site on the map fairly quickly.

 

 

#2 The Site Creation Process

 

I usually don’t spend much money on my niche websites at first as I want to see if it will fly or not. I have gone completely against this method with my latest site. I did spend a lot of money as I didn’t have the time to do it myself:

 

Costs so far:

-$70 for the logo

-$0 nothing for the design (we took an old TFB original template)

-$1,100 in article writing

-$700 worth of my time (at $35/hour)

-$199 for article marketing services (Mark Riddix service who does an awesome job at copying Pat’s technique)

 

Total: $2,069

 

Upcoming costs:

-Another $1,100 in article writing

-Another $700 worth of my time

-Another $199 in article marketing service

-$500 in VA work for promotion and link building

Expected total cost of this site: $4,568

 

As you can see, I am about halfway in my cost and site creation. The site is already operational and we will just continue to add more content on it. Why invest so much? Simply because I want to make sure that I dominate my niche and that it would be Goddamn tough for any of my competitors to replicate the same thing. As you noticed, I have just used the word “investing” and not “spending”. Why? Because I know that this site will probably generate between $100 and $200 in a few months only. So even at $100 per month, this is a 26% annual return on my investment. Can you beat that with the stock market?

 

I am currently paying for almost all content creation in order to save time and use my talent. Since I’m pretty good at optimizing websites, it makes send that I have someone else create the site for me and then, – I optimize it so as to generate more traffic and income.

 

I’ve taken about 2 hours to design the look and outline of the site. I have known since the first article I bought how many articles I will need and how the site will be designed. I also know which keywords will be targeted and in which sections they will appear. It’s very important to know which categories will appear in your site and how many articles are required for each section. If not, you will keep adding content and it will turn into a blog. You want to build a passive source of income, not another site requiring weekly updates (this is why I don’t allow comments either!).

 

So the way I work is that I find a good writer for my niche and submit my outline. Since all the categories, titles and keywords are specified; all I need is someone who knows about this topic. The main advantage of this technique is that you can create sites very fast. The sooner your site is online, the sooner you will get traffic… and the sooner you receive income from it ;-D.

 

Since October, I spend about 2 hours a week on the site. I review the articles submitted by my writers (to add links, images and graphs) and publish them in the right categories. I quickly edit some posts by adding more information or mention another category/article on the same site. Since I do them in bulk, I’m way more efficient in doing it. I have streamlined my publishing process (I have all my pictures saved in a specific order, all my word documents opened and tabs for quick links before I start). I also create some pages (like the homepage) in order to put my personal touch on the topic.

 

The only place I’m cutting on cost for my niche sites is the design. Since we run several original and copyrighted templates within our empire, we use them to make our sites more professional without paying for additional designs. The only thing required is to buy another logo. And Pete from logosfromwebsites does an awesome job at creating professional logos in a short period of time.

 

#3  Promotion and Link Building

 

As of November 1^st, I didn’t have a single back link towards this site (this was the requirement for the duel). I had already a good share of articles published but not optimized and nothing was done for SEO as well.

 

 

Once all the articles are live and the site will be ready for promotion, I’ll send my instructions over to my VA so he can promote it via carnivals, commenting on other related sites or forums and to mention it on twitter. This is how I will make one wave of back linking. This is fairly basic stuff but it always works.

 

Another wave will be the launch throughout my network. I’ll use my empire to throw links towards the site. The very first thing I did so far was to make a quick link in one of my newsletters. Here’s the result:

 

 

A single mention in one newsletter got me almost 173 visits in 2 days on top of steering 19 newsletter subscribers to my new niche and 14 emails giving me comments about how I can improve the website. Now that I have the first feedback, I can modify my niche and get it ready for a bigger push.

 

The bigger push started yesterday with a mention on The Dividend Guy Blog. Since I’m giving away an iPad this month, it dragged a lot of attention towards this post… where I mention my new site. I’m making another push today with this post (I’ll eventually mention my site… lol!). And finally, I’ll do mention it again whenever it’s relevant using all my sites and newsletters (I have over 4,556 subscribers across my network). I’ll also add the site to the sidebars on my blogs’ homepage to create more link building.

 

My last strategy is to go with massive link building. I’m trying Mark Riddix article marketing services for this challenge. Mark’s process is very similar to the one explained at Smart Passive Income without requiring me to do the boring work (if you have ever spun an article or submitted it to article marketing sites, you know what I mean ). I use it because it will create numerous back links in a very short period of time. Since my site is already keyword rich and I use several internal links to boost my SEO, all I need are external links to have an optimized site that will eventually rank well in Google.

 

#4 Set realistic expectations

 

A big problem with niche website creation is that there are a lot of people doing it now and there are a lot of dreams and not enough achievers. This is because they read a few articles about niche websites and passive income and they start thinking about the thousands of dollars they will make next month. This ain’t gonna happen. It’s a long, hard learning process. I’m pretty good at making money online and still, I’m not kicking over $200 per month with any of my sites yet.

 

With my new process in place, I expect to get about 100 visits per day in Q1 (January 2012). Since January is always a big month for investing sites, I need to make sure that everything is ready for this date!

 

This should be enough to bring roughly $30-50 per month via Adsense at first. It is important to not expect to make $500 per month within a few months. Why? Because I’m not Pat and you are probably not him either. This is why thinking that you will be making more than $1,000 with your site upfront is called daydreaming. However, if you set realistic goals, you won’t be discouraged and you will keep working on having a great site where people will want to take action.

 

You can apply my techniques to any topic and any site. So if you have any specific knowledge about something that you really like, you might want to put that to profit and make a great investment out of your knowledge. I think it is a nice way to make money on the side without much effort (once this is launched properly!)

 

That’s it for today… oh! I almost forgot! Here’s my niche site: Canadian Dividend Stock

 

Also, here’s the list of the other participants:

Picking Up Girls 101 (way to go MD!)

Shirataki Noodle Facts (great site already!)

Market Share Battle

DIY Ebook Publishing

Entrepreneurship Life

Help For Hoarding

Protective Styles

Infrared Heater Scam

Life in College

Cook Quinoa Best

And myself: Canadian Dividend Stock

 

 

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I’ve been discussing the topic of niche websites since the beginning of the year. Actually, if you read any “make money online” site, it seems that niche websites have been the buzz words for a while now. To be honest, I clearly feel that I am a bit late in getting into this game. And the problem when you are late is that it’s hard to establish yourself. On the other hand, you have the chance to learn from many others.

So if you want get into the creation of niche websites in order to create an additional income; you are not too late. However, you better be good! I’m learning this as I create my first niche websites since the beginning of the year.

My Niche Websites Overview

We currently have 4 niche websites that are live (I have put their nicknames in brackets to simplify the rest of this article):

Smart Financial Analyst (SFA)

This was our first project that was launched last year (mostly by my partner). It is a website that provides information for those who want to pass the CFA exams. My partner is a CFA so he is a good resource to give tips on how to pass these important exams.

Secondhand Saddles HQ (SHS)

This is our second attempt at a niche website. It was created after a brainstorming session with one of our VAs who is passionate about horse riding. We are talking about how to choose secondhand saddles and horse riding in general.

Home Security System Canada (HSS)

It is our third iteration of what we call a niche website. This one was created based on some interesting home security affiliate programs. We found that we could rank for a few keywords and that the payout was interesting.

What is Dividend (WID)

“What is Dividend” is our latest and our best creation so far. Born from the knowledge we have in dividend investing, we wanted to teach and encourage young investors to use this strategy. The purpose of the site is clearly to provide high quality information regarding dividend investing basics.

Niche Website Mistakes

While building these 4 niche websites, we have learned a lot about niche website creation. This is why I want to share my mistakes and success so far:

#1 Money Focus

When I first started HSS, I had only one thing in mind; make a quick buck out of a profitable topic. Security system topics are quite profitable in term of affiliate programs and Adsense clicks. I thought of making a simple site with decent information but including a lot of ads to make sure I was making money right away. Very bad move. Focusing on money did 2 things on the site:

a)      It discourages readers from staying on the site

b)      Visitors don’t click much on ads when there are too many

I have since modified it to make it more visitor friendly and less cluttered but it will be part of my tasks in the upcoming month.

#2 Building Without a Plan

Here again, I was so excited about the idea of building static content websites that I had completely ignored planning with SFA, HSS and SHS. We did a little bit of brainstorming but nothing solid. This generated 2 results:

a)      Sites without a clear direction (where you start your topic and where you end it)

b)      We spent a lot of time working on them since we are continuously tweaking and improving the work we did

From now on, I start my niche websites with a clear plan. I determine each category I want to cover and the number of articles per categories to be written. It has helped us to delimit the scope of each site. If we realize that we need more articles to cover sub-topics, we take good notes and we will start other niche websites in the future instead.

#3 Ignoring the Difference between a Blog and a Niche Website

If you look at our first 3 niche websites (SFA, SHS and HSS) they are all built the same way; like a blog! There are no intro pages (beside an about section) and there are “continuously” updated content. Therefore, there is not much of a difference between these sites and a blog. The problem with that is that static websites are not operating with the same link structure and should capitalize from internal links between articles instead of adding fresh content on a regular basis (such as blogs). So this mistake creates:

a)      An important lack in the backlinking structure

b)      Confusion for visitors (is it a blog or is it a content website?)

#4 Not Performing Proof Reading

This has been a major challenge since we first started our company; we are not Anglophones! We are slowly getting people to edit and proof read our articles on our blogs (I’m sure long time readers will notice how poor my English was at the beginning of this blog ). For some reason, we didn’t use editors for our niche websites… big mistake! It’s even worst to not proof read your stuff for a static content website because:

a)      You lack of credibility with first time visitors

b)      First time visitors may leave pretty quickly in order to find well written articles elsewhere

From now on, we will use more editors from Odesk in order to have “better” websites .

#5 Over Estimating Keyword Research Performance

Since we are at our very first attempts to use Market Samurai, we had made some beginner mistakes. The most obvious was to think that we could easily rank for “low competition” keywords. It’s not that simple! When I read articles from Smart Passive Income on niche websites, I thought it would be relatively easy to rank #1 in Google.

While I know that my articles and each site are pretty well optimized for Search Engine Optimization, my backlinking strategy is not as aggressive as Pat’s. The results have 2 main consequences:

a)      I don’t appear in the first spot for any of my keywords (however I have reached the first page for some of them)

b)      I don’t have a clear structure of all the “good” keywords I’m looking to rank for

I have realized that a more aggressive backlinking strategy (e.g. combining The Best Spinner with an article submission software) would definitely help me to “master” keywords optimization and ranking with the Big G.

I also plan to do more intensive keyword research with Market Samurai in order to have a short list of keywords I want to rank for each site. Therefore, I’ll be able to create specific pages with some other keywords that can help me to boost my traffic efficiently.

Niche Website Successful Techniques:

Even though we have made several mistakes, we still have a few things we are doing right :

#1 Start with a Complete Keyword Research

A lot of what we do well comes from our learning experiences of our niche website mistakes. The first thing we started to do well is to start our new niche websites with a complete list of keywords. This enables us to have very specific topics to write about and concentrate the internal backlinking strategy towards these pages.

It’s hard and it requires a lot of time to go back into your articles in order to include links and ensure Search Engine Optimization. However, when you do your keywords research before you even write your first post, you will be in a better position to optimize all articles as you go.

We tried this technique with WID and it worked very well. We noticed that there were a few keywords we had a chance to rank for. This is why we decided to write articles on these topics and we tried to link back to these pages from our other articles. While the content is very useful for readers, it is also strongly optimized to show Google which pages are the most important.

#2 Doing a Mindmap

I think that the most challenging part of doing a website is to determine where it starts and where it stops. The main purpose with a niche website is to create a source of passive income. The very last thing you want is to get into a 500 article project that is constantly updated. We call this a blog . We had a hard time establishing the limits with HSS and SHS as we basically started writing as we felt it. This was not completely bad but it clearly creates a lack of direction for each website along with incomplete sections.

In my article on how I run my multiple blogs, I explain how I use the mindmap technique to generate content for each of my sites. I didn’t use this technique initially with niche websites. I thought that creating niche websites were relatively easy and didn’t require a lot of planning; I was obviously wrong! I, now, go a little further with my mindmap.

Once the mindmap for my niche website is completed I separate each sub-category for my main topic into a section of the niche website. Then, I make a clear list of each article I want for each category. I make sure that:

a)     Each category is complete and easy to understand/read

b)    Each article includes a keyword I would like to rank for (obviously, some keywords have a smaller impact but each article must be SEO optimized)

c)     I can link from one article to another and from one category to another

#3 Optimizing Back Links

I’ve realized that getting external links requires a lot of time and effort. You obviously have to create content (either through “guest posts” or article marketing) and have your links published on other sites. This is very effective but also very time consuming.

However, there is another aspect of backlinking strategy that you can explore: internal backlinking strategy. After playing with a few parameters with our main blogs and our niche websites, we realized that internal backlinking can create some very interesting results.

This is why we have increased the number of internal links from both our homepage and existing articles for our latest niche website: What is Dividend. You will notice that there are tons of internal links that lead you from one page to another. We tried to include about 2 to 3 internal links per articles. This actually gives 2 very interesting results:

a)     It helps ranking in search engines (as crawlers appreciate the thick spider web you are building with your niche website)

b)    It makes people stay on your site a lot longer (our average pages views with WID is 3 to 4 and our average time spent on the website is over 3 minutes)

#4 Using Your Network for Promotion

Over the past years, we have built 2 very powerful networks:

a)     Internal network (we currently have more than 200,000 visits on all our sites combined per month)

b)    External network (the Yakezie, the Div-Net, and making many blogging friends through forums and other blogs)

Therefore, instead of simply using article marketing submissions to create external back links, we can use our networks in order to promote our websites. We advocate several strategies such as:

a)     Offering guest posts on high quality websites

b)    Doing link exchanges (with specific keywords)

c)     Using our related websites to send more traffic

d)    Promote our niche website through our newsletters

The Results of Our Latest Niche Website Creation

WhatIsDidend.com was started in March of 2011. We purchased the domain and started on content creation right away. After 2 months, we have about 50 articles and a complete website. While we are still missing the dividend calculators and the broker reviews, the site is deemed to be fully operational.

We didn’t use much of our resources to do promotion. To be honest, we simply linked a few times from our main blogs (The Financial Blogger, The Dividend Guy Blog and Intelligent Speculator). We also used our newsletter but nothing was done with our external network. Here are the google analytics results for April.

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On top of that, after only a month of operation (while we were still publishing content in April), we made a total of $82.67 with this site only. We expect WID to reach our $100/month target at a stable clip by this summer. We can say it’s quite a success compared to our previous niche websites!

Final Thoughts On Making Niche Websites

The internet is all about sharing great resources. This is why we have decided to increase the level of quality of our niche websites. We are lucky enough to have a high level of competency in finance so we should use it and share our experiences with you.

I heard this quote somewhere: the internet is about making the world a better place. I think that this is definitely what you need to do if you want to be successful with niche websites.

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