Setting up a niche site ~ update
In my last post I showed you my internet marketing strategy. I am pleased to tell you I have followed through and I have set up my first keyword sniping site. 
Yesterday was a busy day. I had been looking for keywords throughout the week and reading more of Courtney Tuttle’s blog Internet Marketing School. I continued to learn more about the process of keyword sniping and was feeling pretty confident about my ability to do this.
I was having a hard time finding a good keyword. A friend of mine mentioned I might want to just expand on something that was already working for me. This was a great idea. I took my most profitable squidoo lens and found some excellent keywords on the niche. I was able to find keywords with over 5000 hits a month and only 197,000 competing pages. These also happened to be keywords I was not currently focusing on in my squidoo lens.
There comes a time when you have to stop reading, and just start doing. I still had a few questions I thought I needed answered, but I figured I’m already doing ok in this market, I bet I can’t screw it up much.
Away I went. I purchased my domain name. I had some questions, like can I use a .info domain? Should I use dashes in my domain? I could have just waited until I could find out the answer, but that’s how things get stalled out.
I went for a .com ~ just spent the money and did put dashes in, because that’s the only way I could get my keyword in the domain name. Now whether these are the right choices or not, I’m still not sure. However, I could still be here today trying to find out the answers with no site built, or I could just take a chance and get moving.
There are always going to be questions and I can almost guarantee that none of them are going to kill your chances in internet marketing if you just guess at the answer. If you make a seriously HUGE mistake ~ which I can’t even think of what one would be right now ~ I bet you can either fix it later or try another website. So stop letting your questions stop you and just go for it!!
After I purchased my domains I changed the nameservers to my hosting and uploaded wordpress. Easy Cheesy.
I found a great template. In fact, I used Court’s Dateless Sniper template from his SEO Wordpress theme selection.
From this point I basically followed Court’s instructions from his Introduction to Keyword Sniping post. I actually had the post open in one tab and my new site open in another. I followed his directions. Until I ran into more questions.
Since this was not just a adsense site, and I was taking some of my information from the Wordpress Goldmine book for doing this for affiliate products I ran into some questions about links and product placement.
Again, I did not let these questions stop me. I just made a decision. I used the main keyword to link back to the homepage, just as Court suggests. I also used a keyword related to my product to link to the actual affiliate product.
Wordpress Goldmine suggests you put an image and a link to the affiliate product in the top left corner of your blog, but this template was not set up that way, and I think the content will sell well enough.
Next I wrote 10 articles related to my keyword. (this was the most time consuming part of the process). I also ran into some questions here as well. Court says 10 articles with a link back to the homepage in each one. Wordpress Goldmine only uses one article and a product review.
HMMM. I decided more content is probably always better, and managed to fit an affiliate link and a link back to the homepage in each of the articles, and I did a review of the product as one of my articles.
Finally the site was up. I was pretty impressed with my efforts for a first timer.
I had a squidoo site already on this topic so I used the RSS feed from this site as one of the modules in my Squidoo lens. I ran all 10 of the articles in the feed so there is a lot more content on my squidoo lens now. I also sent the site to a couple friends and they stumbled it for me.
This all took me about 6 or 7 hours yesterday, in the middle of Hanna puking due to 4 teeth coming in and trying to get ready for her birthday party (which is today). It really is one of the things I love about working from home. I can drop what I’m doing to take care of Hanna. I can set my own schedule. I can run to walmart to get a cake whenever the mood strikes me. It really is the ultimate freedom.
This morning I jumped over to my new site to check it out and see what’s going on.
This is exciting.
I had 2 comments, I already had 138 page views, 7 of my 10 articles have been clicked on and I already have 3 clickouts to my affiliate product.
This traffic is coming from Stumble Upon and Squidoo, which is great. Each day I will stumble a new page of the site, so I will get some traffic each day, as well as some internal backlinks. This should also help get my site indexed, and maybe allow me to make a little cash in between.
My next task for this site is to start building backlinks. I think I have finally decided on an article marketing site I am going to use. I am going to keep it to myself for now, and use the site and see how it goes. Once I have had a chance to formulate an opinion of the service I will let you all know.
There you have it. A run down of building my first niche website. If I can do it, with my kid puking on me. I’m sure you can too. Get out there and find some keywords, if you have something you are already marketing successfully, why not do a whole site for it. I’m sure you will have better access to great keywords and more traffic ~ which means more profit!!
I’ll let you know when I get my first sale from this site. One sale and this site will be in profit.
[tags]keyword sniping, build a niche site, courtney tuttle, internet marketing strategy[/tags]
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