Yesterday I got an idea to see how quickly I could build a website on WordPress from start to finish using a datafeed and some plugins. I figured from start to finish I could do it in less than an hour.
So I contacted on of the affiliate managers I work with to see what kind of programs he had with a decent datafeed. It didn’t need to be a huge datafeed and I was gonna just pull out a niche of 50-100 products out of that feed anyway. I got ahold of Roger Snow from http://snow-consulting.com/ to see what he had for me and he suggested the watch site he worked with DiscoutWatchStore.com. I looked at the site and some of the brands of watches looked like they could be a good niche so I did some keyword research on some of them and found one to work with.
The particular brand I was looking at has some specific watches I thought would do well. I decided to mainly focus on Luminox Navy Seal Watches. That particular keyword gets about 4,400 searches a month based on the Google Keyword Tool and there are only about 120,000 competing results for that one. Both those numbers are right in the wheel house of what I have seen work well lately. Here is a quick timeline detailing what I did to build the site. Of course this isn’t a great looking site and I will probably go back and do some modifying and cleaning up later but for now it works and looks OK which is all I was going for here.
Step 1: Register the domain name and set it up on the server – I went to my registrar and registered http://www.luminoxnavysealwatches.com, pointed it to my server, and set up the domain on the server. Nothing fancy. Elapsed time: 2:39. BTW, you need to be careful when using trademarked terms in your domain names. Make sure you check your merchant’s terms of service and be ready for possible letters from the trademark holder and their lawyers. There is a chance you could lose your site. But in this case I am gonna take the risk.
Step 2: Install WordPress and the Thesis theme – I went into Cpanel on the server and installed WordPress. Then I logged in and installed the Thesis theme which is the theme I use for many of my sites. It is a very good theme to use, is easy to use, has a bunch of options, and is a great theme for people like me who don’t want to get into editing templates and CSS. I adjusted some of the options, changed some colors, set up some sidebar widgets, and stuff like that. This took 13:12 so we are up to 15:51 elapsed time. I could have done this quicker if I just uploaded the settings from another site but I wanted to do it all from scratch.
Step 3: Installed and set up CSVPig – CSVPig is a WordPress plugin that takes datafeeds and build out pages for each product. It also seperates everything out into categories, tags pages, and all in all is probably the best CSV to WP plugin I have used. Sometime soon I will do a comparison of the 4 or 5 I have tried but for now CSVPig is the one I use the most. It isn’t perfect but it is better than the others I have tried.
I had to set up my template and put some tags in the template telling CSVPig where I wanted everything to go. It lists out all the tags (the headers from the CSV file) so it is very easy to get the template set up. So I uploaded the CSV file and got the template ready to go. I did spend some time yesterday cleaning up the datafeed a bit. You don’t have to do this but for what I wanted it needed a bit of work.
In a perfect world I would have added some custom content to the feed to make it unique but I skipped that step this time.
All that took me less than 10 minutes so we are sitting at 24:42 elapsed time. CSVPig is a very easy plugin to use once you have used it a couple times. If you are looking to build WP sites using datafeeds it will probably do what you need. It does have some limitations but for sites like this one it works great. Try it today.
Step 4: Build the site – Once the template is all set up you just tell it to go and it only takes a few seconds to build the pages. For this site there were only 64 pages. You can set up CSVPig to drip the content in over time and make some of the posts with past dates but I just had them all build right now. After building the site I checked it out and saw some stuff I needed to modify. This took 88 seconds so we are at 26:10 now.
Step 5: Revisions and modifications – I don’t think I have ever built a datafeed site that didn’t need some tweaking. There is usually something I forgot in the template like making sure the links are there or text is the wrong size or the images don’t fit. Mostly cosmetic stuff but I had to go in and tweak the template about 3 or 4 times and rebuild the site. Since it only takes a few seconds to build the site it isn’t really that bad. This took me just over 10 minutes. Elapsed time: 36:36. I could have left it here…
Step 6: Tweaking the overall WP layout – This was just playing with some nav menus and seeing how stuff looked. I just did some minor stuff here and pretty much ended up how I started so there wasn’t much change at this point. That was a bit less than 5 minutes so we are looking at an overall elapsed time of only 41:22.
In less than 45 minutes I was able to go from nothing to a site with 64 product pages on it. Like I said, this site isn’t totally complete yet and I will still do some tweaking, maybe add in a header graphic, write a bit more content and stuff like that but it is a fully functioning website.
I could have done it quicker and cut some corners in some areas but less than 45 minutes to build a site isn’t bad. If I could stay disciplined and churn out 2 or 3 of these a day and they each made a few bucks a month it wouldn’t take long to build up some good money.
Let me know if you have any questions about this process. I would be happy to answer anything and help you out however I can.
BTW, if you want to see another example of how to build a niche site very quickly check out Build a Niche Site, Quick by Eric Nagel.
Can you post the url of this website?
The URL is http://www.luminoxnavysealwatches.com
Not a bad little plugin actually when you consider the price. Will it allow you to create subcategories of a parent category on the import of the feed?
Hey Clarke. No, it doesn't do subcategories. That is one of the biggest drawbacks of this plugin. Most of the sites I build like this don't need subcategories so it isn't that big a deal but there are other datafeed sites that sometimes need 3 or 4 levels of subcategories.
I am still looking for a good plugin for that. I will be testing another one tomorrow and I will let you know how that one works.
I tried it out briefly, but ended up canceling my subscription because of the subcategory issue. I think there are some review plugins out there that do a pretty good job with subcategories on their import options.
Hi Clarke,
just to let you know that CSVPiG now includes subcategories! We updated the product just before Christmas.
Any further feedback always appreciated – we try to deliver what our members ask for.
Fiona
Hi Joe,
it's Fiona from BlogPiG here – the makers of CSVPiG.
I just discovered your blog this morning! It's great and this post in particular is useful – mind if I share it with our members, we've had some people asking for more info on building sites with datafeeds?
On another note, about ten days ago we re-released CSVPiG with a few updates – one of them being that it now INCLUDES SUBCATEGORIES. Members like you were asking for it and so we delivered it.
Let me know how you get on with the new version!
Thanks,
Fiona
I've never really looked into datafeeds but it looks promising. I came here from Eric's site but I need to make some money first before I start buying more domain names 🙂 Bah…. that's what my JOB is for right! 🙂
Hey Rick. Thanks for the comment.
Datafeeds can be a good way to start out but be sure you have the website fundamentals down before you try tackling a datafeed. There is more to it than just throwing the site up there. I would suggest building a couple super-specific product related site focusing on just one or two products before you attempt a datafeed site.
Thanks for the tip Joe. I was going to ask where I can find datafeeds, but if you have any links or tips on product sites, I'd be happy to see them. My most focused site at the moment would probably be excelatspreadsheettutorials.com (did not hyperlink it because I'm not dropping links, but maybe you'll have time to check it out).
I checked out your site Rick and it looks good. If you just take what you have done there and repeat with some specific products you will be on your way. Basically take a product, write 5-10 articles about it (how to use it, why it is better than the competition, what you like about this one, etc) and you will be on your way.
As far as where to get datafeeds most of the affiliate networks allow you to download them. http://www.shareasale.com is my favorite network to work with but you can also get them fairly easily from CJ, PepperJam, Avantlink, and others. If you talk to your affiliate manager they can help you also.
I wonder, is your site actually making money still?
Hey Trisha. I am still waiting for the first sale on this site. I wasn't really expecting a flood of sales or anything. But here are some stats since Dec 1st:
126 visitors from search engines
111 different keywords and phrases used to find the site
59 clicks through to the merchant
The average price for the watches I am promoting is probably around $300 so even one or two sales a month would be fine with me. I have no false illusions that this site will makes sales every day or even every week. Since the traffic is very targeted long tail traffic and people are searching for specific models I expect to see at least one sale or so fairly soon. The traffic is still trickling in so it is only a matter of time.
Hey… is it normal that apparently the number of competing sites has just doubled? All the best Joe.
Yeah, that number will constantly be in flux
Hi Joe, just got a quick question. I am trying to build a niche site for sports apparel. My site is http://shoppittsburghgear.com, but I am looking into building a site for the NBA and NHL Champion teams, but I am unsure how to go about finding good keywords.
Should I just type in the name of the teams and then just see what people are searching for? Or should I type in say "Lebron James Jerseys" and see what kind of results come back?
Thanks. Look forward to your comments.
Victor
Hey Victor. If I were to look for keywords for championships like that I would find some past champions and do some searches for stuff like "Giants World Series" and "San Francisco World Series" and stuff like that. It will give you a good idea of some decent keywords to target. Then you could get some domains like http://giantsworldserieshats.com/ and http://giantsworldseriesjerseys.com/. Some leagues and teams won't necessarily like you using their names though so you would have to do some research on it.