Marketing Niche Sites is hard. There is a never ending amount of information with a lot of contradictory theories and techniques. I ended up spending a crazy amount of time just looking around at what other people thought on the subject.

There is a lot of content out there in a variety of forms. I spent more time watching videos, listening to podcasts and reading articles then I really should have.

My new philosophy is to just pick one person to follow on this and stick with that.

How many hours in now?  That is right, we are 56 hours of work into our niche site and it is “more or less” done.  In week 4 it has been a busy week and we had a hard time finding time to work on the blog.  Leah had her baby shower and had some other baby related things going on, which left me to take up the slack.

Plug-ins

In case you are new to wordpress, “Plugins are tools used to extend the functionality of the WordPress platform. However, they are only applicable to self-hosted blogs and web sites using the WordPress.org software” (from http://en.support.wordpress.com/plugins/).  I am not going to explain how to install since this is not that kind of post.  Instead here is a list of the ones I am currently using for my niche site.

  • Contact Form 7:  for my contact page I am using this form so that people can contact me without having to give out my email address.
  • Disable Comments:  I didn’t want people to be able to comment on my pages because it isn’t that kind of website.  Also, I get enough spam comments on jasonloveslife.com.  I would hate to have to clean out two sites from comment spam.
  • Google Analyticator:  This is how I am connecting the website to my Analytics account for tracking visitors.
  • WordPress SEO:  A plug-in that is allowing me to optimize my pages for Search Engines and hopefully getting me ranked higher.

Week #4 Results

Fine Tuning the website

We are at a total of 42 hours into working on this niche site with 14 hours coming from this week. This week we’ve been filling up the website with content and adjusting the code to look good. The process is simple: write the article, create or find images for the post, make changes to the “look” of the website, set up Google AdSense, and placing ads on the site.

Pages for the website

Since we spent the week working on the site, I thought you might find it helpful to know what the website is going look like in regards to number of pages and what they are for.

  1. Home: We are using this as the Welcome page.  It talks about the product (which is our Keyword), we make sure to give it a personal feel, and we mention the reader as much as possible.  Since our site is on pregnancy we congradulate them on their expected child or their loved one’s expected child, make sure they feel we care about them (which we do), and sell them on the idea of the product being important for their health and well being (which it is).
  2. Articles: This page is in a condensed blog format.  This page will have a list of around 5 articles talking about the product. Each will show a headline with a very brief description of the articles topic.  These 5 articles will be their own pages so I will not include them in this list as they are blog posts on the topic of the niche.
  3. Questions: This page is dedicated to quick questions and answers people have about the niche.  We currently have 5 questions, but hope to populate it from questions we get from our readers.
  4. About: The page that talks about why we created the website, the purpose of the site, and what’s unique about our site.
  5. Contact: We have a form on this page for people to fill out if they have any questions, concerns, or just want to drop us a line through a form.  We created the form using a plug-in. I will share which one in the next update (week 4).

Week #3 Results

Filling in the website with Content

We put in 14 hours this week. This week we confirmed a choice for out niche site topic, found a domain name, chose a theme for the WordPress site, and created a logo.

The great thing about using WordPress and Hostmonster.com is that you can get the site up in just a few clicks and about 5 minutes.

For some reason it feels like we are already behind. As if the website should be finished by now. In fact, we probably could have finished but a few of our choices has forced us to take longer than normal.

  • We decided before starting our search that we wanted to do a pregnancy related site. If we just made a list of our interests/hobbies and looked for profitable niches related to them, it would have been a lot easier and faster.
  • We are very picky on web design. With the niche site, especially at the beginning, the look of the site is not as important. Using almost any of the free WordPress site themes would work as long as they are not too visually busy and easy to navigate.
  • We decided to change the main domain which added an extra hour or two (I explain this in the time breakdown section).

Week #2 Results

Finalizing a niche and WordPress site design

Categories: Journal on maternity belts Tags:
October 1, 2012 by Jason Love
SEO WordPress App by Yoast software image

On page with post editing.

Just got SEO WordPress Plugin by Yoast and I have to say it is a little confusing.  I understand most of the concepts, but some of the tools I can’t figure out.  For example, I have already written a lot of this article and have used the word “seo” several times, yet it says content and page url are labeled as “NO”.

However, because of this list I realize they need to be there so I am working hard to include the words “seo”, “wordpress”, and “Yoast” in order to have a higher chance to get ranked for these keywords together.  Meaning even though the plugin’s list is not accurately showing “yes” or “no” in all sections for those keywords it still functions as a reminder for me to follow those rules.

Beyond this, the plugin does a lot more that I don’t completely understand or really want to take the time to learn.  As long as it is doing it’s job, I am happy

Categories: Business Review Tags:
September 6, 2012 by Jason Love