We are 9 days into our Niche Website Challenge. James Seligman posted his update earlier today so I figured I should post mine.
So far I have created 5 sites. I kinda hoped to have a couple more up by now but some of these took a bit longer than I wanted. Overall I am fairly happy with what I have put up. Some of the sites are just quick, ugly short term sites but there are a couple long term projects that hopefully will continue to grow over the next few years.
The sites are getting spidered quickly and I am slowly building links to them. Eventually I want to try outsourcing some of the link building but for now it is just me cranking away. Link building is the part of the job I hate the most. I get bored with it very quickly.
One of the sites is starting to get some OK traffic but I have yet to see a sale from that one. I have some decent hopes the first sale on that one could come soon.
Two of the sites are just focused on single products with a couple other products on the site just to fill out the site a bit. If those ones can pull in $20-40 a month I will be pretty happy. I don’t have super high expectations for them.
My longest term site is starting to get some traction also. It might be a few months before I can really build up enough content to make it a good money maker and I know it will be a slow process but I am committed to it. The plan is to add new content to it 2-3 times a week.
And for the big news: I have made some money! It is only about $2.50 in commissions so far but it is a start. From what I have heard from the other guys that puts me in the lead!
Two of my main goals for this challenge were to 1. Build more sites and 2. Learn and develop more skills. I have built more sites in the past week than pretty much any other week in a long time so that is going well. As far as learning? Here are a few little tidbits I have picked up:
1. CSS – Rather than just throwing up some standard WP theme sites I have been hacking around the CSS a bit. It still takes me quite a few tries to actually figure out what I am doing but slowly I am learning.
2. Link building – I have found a couple decent sources for links. Major sites that are not nofollow. So that is kinda cool.
3. WP Plugins – I have tried quite a few different plugins for some of my sites and there are a couple winners in there that I am really liking.
That is about all for now. I will try to do a bit more indepth post next week breaking down one of my sites and how I went about choosing the niche, building it, etc.
You da man, Joe!
Nice follow up man. I’ve been following your progress and I’m sure I’ve gained and will continue to gain more from this challenge. Over there on my blog, I sought of do the same thing you do, post my challenges and follow up with them and it’s kinda fun. I love it. Have a great day.
Tim.
It will be interesting to see what WP plugins you've been trying out and which ones you like the best to quickly get a niche site up and running.
I was planning to build up to 200 micro niche autoblogs this year, but as Google just beat down lots of low quality site, so plan nipped in the bud… Can you recommend some of your marketing resources or strategies?