Should You Build A Niche Website?

Do you know of any better alternative? If not, then to build a niche website is one of the few viable ways to make money online. In this article, I am going to tell you the amount of preparation, education, and time it approximately takes to build a successful niche site, and how much you can expect to earn from this project.

Not only that, if you are not sure if you can dedicate a few months into a website, I have good news for you. You can actually build tiny web projects that are far smaller than a niche website and see if you can make some small money first, before you commit many months into building a niche website. The thing is you can reuse and recycle these tiny projects and complement your future niche website with them if you do decide to build one.

A Niche Website Might Sounds Like A Small Project...

But it's not, a lot of people give up before they have spent enough time and effort to actually see the first dollar coming.

That's why I would advise you to try build some tiny web projects to test your ability and commitment level first.

A lot of people overestimate how much they can achieve in a month, even if they happen to find the right tools, right education, and right methodologies to tackle this task (To build a niche site).

Plus there are a lot of internet marketers out there trying to get your business and have you spend hundreds of dollars on their gadgets and courses.

I won't say a lot of them is "get rich quick", but they tend to play with jargon and terms to make it sounds like their teachings and tools are unique. They would give their products fancy names such as "hyperactive marketing", "permission-based marketing", "Google Adsense arbitrage", or other fancy labels that are basically the same things based on the same kind of methodology, but even real experts won't recognize what they are unless they spend half an hour to look into it.

There are also tons of teleseminars, free report, sales pages, testimonies, email newsletters, and other viral campaigns they relentlessly throw at your way. One marketer would introduce yet another marketer, who in turn try to get your business by throwing yet more of his free information at you.

The Internet marketing world is so saturated that every guru just try to give you more and more info, but these things get redundant, so like I said earlier they try to make their stuff sounds unique by inventing new names and new labels, hoping you will get curious and spend hours to hear their pitches.

It's very easy for a potential customer like you to spend hundreds of hours to hop around gurus. And even after they buy enough tools to build a profitable niche site, they may still waste hundreds of hours READING information, lurking in forums, and studying how other people made big money online and wandering when it's their turns.

If you are absolutely certain that you are not going to be one of those information addicts, but are actually good at implementing ideas and following simple plans, then you will succeed in about a year, if you persist. After the first success (such as making $2000 a month), you will have little problem building more profitable niche sites. And only then you can start thinking about automated, passive income. The first one is usually the bottle neck.

It's going to be boring a while after the beginning. You will have to spend hours working on the same niche day in and night out, while having to deal with life. So make sure that the niche you choose is your true passion — that you are not going to hate your life working with your niche 3 months down the road.

As an entrepreneur, you need to find out what are the most important things to do each day. For a niche site, there are actually only a few things that truly matter, but like I said, there are just too much information out there. It can seem overwhelming. But really there are only three things that are important for almost every type of internet marketing, even though each of the three things is a whole world unto to itself.

1) SEO Keywords Analysis: SEO stands for search engine optimization. Do you know how the search engine works? How do you find a website? You probably find the last one by typing a search phrase into the search box of a search engine right?

The search phrase that the website was found with is like the Zip or Postal code of a house, except that many other websites also use the same search phrase as their Zip code, but only the ones that the search engine thinks are the most relevant will be listed on the first page.

(If you want to find out more about how to optimize your web page with a good SEO keyword, see the link I listed below for the relevant info. SEO isn't hard, it's worth your worth to spend 5 minute to read about what exactly it is and how easy you can SEO your pages)

When you try to build a niche, you will have to spend quality time to find out the best, low competition SEO keywords (phrase) in your niches. If there are too many competitors fighting to get the search engine to rank their web pages with those keywords, then chance is your niche is too competitive.

Fortunately, for most niche markets there are always some long tail keywords (i.e. specific keywords that have 3-6 words) that are under competed by the major players. You may try to conquer those first, and these long tail keyword web pages will bring traffic to your site. In time, your more competitive keyword pages will also gain traffic and ranks because the search engine see your site as a whole.

If you use internal links to connect your long tail pages to your competitive pages, the visitors of your site will be able to visit those pages as well, and the search engine detect visitors behavior for those pages to see if they should be ranked higher in the search result.

Estimated Time For Beginners: 10 hours to understand the concept, 5-6 hours to learn how to use a piece of SEO keyword software, and half an hour on average to actually mine a keyword and optimize it for a page.

But to really find a niche that is worthwhile to spend months working on, you need to determine the level of search volume and competition level for that that segment of the niche you want to target, and also the monetization potential for that segment.

2) Build Relevant Contents: After constructing the outline of a web page for SEO purpose, you need to build relevant, quality content that people like.

If you really know your niche, then it shouldn't be a problem. If you are an experienced or talented supervisor, you may hire a person to write for you, but you still need to ensure the quality and uniqueness of your contents.

Think like your web visitors, will you be happy to spend time to read the content if you are them? Think about their burning desire to solve a problem or to find an answer. If they find that your information is a waste of their time, what would they do? They click the back button. The search engine detects such behavior.

Usually an average web page contains 500 to 800 words. A page must be focused! You don't want to stuff many keywords or many concepts into one page.

You may build a hub page (not hubpages.com 's hub page) for your long tail pages, the keyword you use for the hub page should have higher search volume than the long tail keyword, and only slightly more competitive. In other words, your hub keyword should be some of the best keywords you can find for your niche.

For a niche site, there should be 7 to 20 hub pages and 200 to 400 long tail pages. Your homepage should connect to all the hub pages through the navigation bars, and/or a list of text links, with a brief intro or summary for each of those links.

The keyword for your hub page should cover a major concept that is inclusive to all the long tail keywords under it. You hub page is like a directory, or site map, to the long tail pages. You then links them back and forth within a hub, by in content text link, or another list of text links, with brief intro or summary for those links. In other words, the hub page is a mini version of your homepage.

My first and second niche sites failed because I fail to find good and unique hub keywords. I also fail to build keyword optimized and focused page for my long tail keyword. I also tend to spend too much time to build one page.

If you have nothing else to do, you should build two page per day. That's how you build a niche website. If you take longer than that then you are no different to an unemployed person, unless you have a job so you can only build several pages per week.

Estimated Time: Try not to spend more than 3 hours on one page. If you do, you are in for a long haul. You periodically update your homepage and hub page, and that's it. A lot of people spend 6 to 8 hours on one long tail page. You must discipline yourself if you want to build a profitable niche website in reasonable time frame.

3) Build External And Internal Links: I can't stress enough how important it is to have inbound links to your pages. Each page should have at least 3 external links and several internal links that connects to it.

At least 60% of your search engine ranking is based on this factor alone. The more websites link to you and the more credible they are, the more you pages will get ranked by search engine, especially Google.

You build internal links by referencing to your pages by using contextual text links in other pages of your site. Your visitor might read a page and become curious about something else that you mention within that page. If you happens to have another page that cover that something, you can use contextual link to give the visitor the choice to click into your other page to check out that piece of information. It increases value to your visitor's experience and ease of navigation.

The crawling spiders that the search engines send to to your website (the bots) will also find it easy to navigate your site if you have those contextual links, navigation bars links, and directory links that I have so far mentioned in your site.

So How Do You Get External Links?

There is a natural way to do it and a manual way to do it. If you do it the natural way, you simply build a quality site, and wait for visitors to spread the words. They will mention you in forums, blogs, and in their own websites.

If you want to get your pages ranked up fast, so there might be more visitors coming sooner than later, you have to promote your pages actively.

Basically you will need to visit forums, blogs, and other websites in your niches, and drop forum posts and blogs comments with backlinks to your website, and email webmasters to tell them that you want them to link to you.

You may also submit articles to directories, user contribution sites (such as ezinearticle.com, goarticles.com, and of course hubpages.com), and other credible websites and links back to your web pages in your submitted articles.

Estimated Time: For every page you build, you need to spend at least 5 times the efforts to promote it. The articles you submit to external sites must be good, if not better, than your web pages. It might sound like so much work for sites that you don't own, but fortunately, credible site such as hubpages.com will share the revenue with you for the pages you contribute, so you may focus your effort on sites like hubpages.com or squidoo.com, creating high quality backlinks while making some money too. I will explain more on this.