Niche Site Case Study
August 14, 2007
Well I promised you that I would be creating a case study on building a niche content site from the ground up so that you could see exactly what it takes to create a profitable content site. I wanted to have the initial details in front of you last week, but I was having some work done on the house (which, as is usually the case with contractors, resulted in one disaster after the next). So I finally had the time to sit down and put it all together so you can see exactly what I'm doing.
For this case study I am using the following tools (all of which I highly recommend):
- Niche Inspector - This desktop software tool helps you find profitable niches to create sites around.
- HypreVRE Gold - This desktop software tool is what I'm using to create the niche site for the case study. I'm using the Gold (paid) version, not the free version.
- Instant Article Wizard - This desktop software tool is what I use to create all of the content for the site super fast. You need unique content if you really want to rank well, and IAW is the tool I use to create it (even if I know nothing about the subject).
- 3WayLinks.net - This is the service that I'm putting the site into to get it ranked in the search engine by building up link popularity while I sleep.
Here are the steps that I've taken so far.
- Step 1 - This video shows how I used Niche Inspector to select the niche I have created the content site around, and also shows how I used HyperVRE to build the site itself. The niche that I decided on is "rowing machines".
- Step 2 - This video shows me creating the headliner article for the site in just a few minutes, using Instant Article Wizard.
- Step 3 - Now, in the video for step 2 I said I would create a video on getting links to the site using 3WayLinks.net. Afterwards I realized that a video isn't necessary, since there's really nothing to show. So let me tell you what I did.
I added the new site to the 3WayLinks.net network so that it would start building links to its home page to get the site ranking for my target keywords. You won't get anywhere in the search engines without links, and my sites in the 3WL network are doing phenomenally well (as are the sites of hundreds of other people).
I didn't stop there, though. I wanted to get links to the home page, sure, but I also wanted to get links to the inner pages of the site. This helps not only rank the inner pages, but also reinforces Google's "trust" of the home page, which in turn will cause it to rank better as well.
To accomplish this, I had 10 articles written that I have distributed to EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com. Once those articles start to get picked up and spread across a variety of other sites, those links will begin to help the site to rank in the search engines.
For posterity's sake, here's a screenshot of the traffic the site is currently getting. This also helps you know that I'm starting from zero here:
All of the "traffic viewed" is from me working on the site. The "traffic not viewed" stats are from the AdSense bot crawling the site.
All in all, I spent about 5 hours building the site, including writing the on-site articles and submitting the second set of articles to EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com. I will post an update to the site's progress once a week so that you know how well this system is working.
In case you were wondering, I'm not revealing the domain name to prevent skewing the stats by having everyone go to the site to "check it out."
Please post your comments below, letting me know what you think, and if there's any information about how I'm doing these things that you'd like to know. Ask your questions and I'll post my responses in the comments as well.
Transcript from my interview with Joel Comm.
January 31, 2007
Well the interview with Joel Comm was a smash hit! Everyone who showed up got a great free gift–the many comments made to me already show it was a gift everyone was glad to get.
I've made the transcript of the interview available. Click here to read it.
Be sure and leave comments with your thoughts about the transcript or the chat!
Three free AdSense tricks to boost your click through rates.
January 28, 2007
With AdSense being the second most requested subject for 2007 (according to the poll I took about a week ago), I was pretty sure you would find this cool little video by Ben Shaffer very useful.
The video is called "Three Little Known Tricks", and that's exactly what it is. The video contains three short tricks that you can apply today to your AdSense sites to improve your click through rate.
These aren't magic moves, just time tested techniques that we both use on every single AdSense site of ours. They work, they are effective and if you are not doing them, you should be.
Ben has been an associate of mine for some time now, and everything I've seen from him has always been worth looking at. This new video is no exception.
The Three Little Known Tricks video is free to watch and to learn from.
You can watch it by clicking here.
It's pretty short, so if you don't like it, you really have nothing to lose. There isn't a signup page or email address request or anything, either.
After watching it, I'd love it if you added your comments about it to this post.
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
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