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.
What marketing subjects concern you most for 2007?
January 16, 2007
I need your advice. I need to know what you think I should be researching and writing about in 2007. What are your goals? What traffic-building or sales-building subjects interest you the most?
Is it video? Articles? Traffic building methods? Product creation methods? AdSense? Search Engine optimization?
Post a comment with your response so that I can be sure and research, test and post information that you, my reader, are interested in.
Once all of the "votes" are tallied, I'll be putting together a chat-session for the most popular subjects. Everyone who wants to join in and ask questions or make comments about them will be welcome to do so. I've got the chat software installed and tested, so it will happen soon. Your thoughts count! Post them now.
Should you hire people to write your articles for you?
November 20, 2006
My ongoing article case study has established that writing articles is a great way to get traffic to your web site. If you're not writing articles, you need to be. Or do you?
That's the question I asked myself. Is it really necessary for me to write my own articles, or is it worth paying a ghost writer to write the articles for me?
Up until I asked this question, I had never hired anyone to write any of my content for me. I'd always used tools I've created to help me do that (such as my Instant Article Wizard). But I got to thinking: if I can pay somebody a few bucks to write some great articles for me, then I can focus on creating the sites that those articles will point to. That would save me a lot of time.
So I decided to give it a try and see how it went. I registered at ELance.com and posted a project. I wanted 5 articles written on 5 separate acne topics (teen acne, adult acne, severe acne, cystic acne and acne scars). I wanted each article to be between 650 and 850 words, and I wanted 100% rights to claim those articles as my own.
The Good News
Within 24 hours I had 3 bids on the project. One bid for $140, one for $85 and a third for $50. The first two didn't have any feedback or ratings at all, so I chose to go with the third one, who had a lot of good reviews and a very high satisfaction rating (4.9 out of 5). Besides, for $50, the price was dirt cheap! That's only $10 an article.
So I accepted their bid and paid the 20% up front via PayPal. Within 48 hours all 5 articles were written.
If it sounds like it was a wonderful experience so far, it was! Within 3 days I had a complete set of 5 articles I could use, put my name on (or a pseudonym for tracking purposes) and start distributing to build traffic to my web site.
The Bad News
The downside was clear when I actually read the articles. The articles were well researched and offered professional information on each of the keyword sets I created the project for, yes, but…
The English used to write the article had a lot of little problems.
Now, don't get me wrong, the articles weren't terrible. They were of decent quality, and as I said, the research was great so the information was good. But the articles were clearly written by somebody who did not speak and write English as a first language, and so there were little grammatical issues that I would have to go in and fix.
Having to go in and fix these grammatical errors takes time, and the whole purpose of hiring a ghost writer is to save time, so this extra step took away some of the value of hiring out for the job.
However, as the saying goes, you get what you pay for, and I hired the cheapest group to write the articles. At only $50, perhaps it was worth the $35 - $90 I saved from not hiring the other bidders. After all, in about an hour all five articles could be polished to make them perfect.
It Costs Money
Of course, the other problem is that hiring out costs money. If I wanted to create a full content site of 100 articles, with the bidders I hired I'm looking at $1,000 up front plus twenty hours of solid editing work to get the articles polished enough to post them to a web site.
So on the one hand I can see the benefit of hiring out: it still saves a lot of time since you don't have to do the research, and if you get a good bidder the articles are pretty good.
On the other hand I see the drawbacks: if you go cheap you will have to edit the articles into "real" English, and if you don't go cheap it can be pretty expensive to get them written.
So Is It Worth It?
The real question is the bottom line, isn't it? If I can make those five acne articles result in $1,000 in product sales over the course of a year, it was certainly worth the $50 and hour of my time to go in and edit the articles.
I'm not sure yet if it's worth it, but believe me that I will be distributing these articles and watching the results. When the results are in I will post them to the blog so you can see for yourself whether or not it paid off to hire other people to write my articles for me.
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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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