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Week 3 – WordPress Site Editing & Content Creation

Niche Site Journal, on maternity belts, , , , , , , , , 16 Comments

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 to look like in regards to the 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 congratulate 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 essential 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 five articles talking about the product. Each will show a headline with a very brief description of the articles topic.  These five articles will be their own pages so I will not include them in this list as they are blog posts on the subject of the niche.
  3. Questions: This page is dedicated to quick questions and answers people have about the niche.  We currently have five 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

Leah and I have been working on different parts of the niche site at the same time.  Leah has been creating content and designing images to enhance the site.  At the same time, I’ve been adjusting the look of the website while adding the Google adSense codes.  The more we work on the site, the more excited I am about getting the site done, marketing, and then collect the passive income from all the work we are doing these eight weeks.

Income: $0

No Income yet.

Costs: $0

We didn’t spend any money this week, but you might want to. Leah’s undergraduate degree is in illustration and art, plus I have studied digital arts for fun and for creating marketing material for my other businesses.  This means we will be creating a lot of the website images ourselves (with plans to monetize the pictures later with revenue sharing stock image sites).  You might consider getting an image at http://www.istockphoto.com/ (cheapest photos are around $1.50 to use), or you can get custom images done through http://fiverr.com/.

Time Breakdown: 14 Hours

We ended up breaking up the week down the middle because of the fact there was enough work for both of us to put in.  Leah ended up working two hours a day for three days, with one of those days working an extra hour.  I (Jason) ended up sitting down for seven hours to adjust the website’s look, add Google Ad Sense ads, go over what Leah wrote, and add content to the website.

Leah’s Time (7 hours):

  • 1 hour determining what pages were needed for the site.  The way she did this was by looking at other sited on the web and determining what pages were needed for our small site.
  • 6 hours writing for those pages.  Some of the pages were difficult to fill as this is the first time Leah has written for websites.  To make it easier she would look at the sites she liked with similar pages, determine the what objective the page was to fulfill (we listed them in Pages for Website section above), break those objectives into sections, and write based off of those objectives & sections.

Jason’s Time (7 hours):

  • 4 hours adding pages and creating links between them.  Normally this is easy with WordPress as it creates the links for you in the menu section.  In the theme we choose I didn’t like it had the links at the bottom of the page. So, I manually put the links in using HTML coding.
    This didn’t take too long, but the hard part was remembering how to link within the same page.  We used this for the Question page; there is a list of questions, and when you click on the link, it takes you down the page to the answer.  I had to look up again how to do it, and then I had problems, and that meant I had to re-do it several times.
  • 2 hours setting up AdSense banners and getting them on the page.  I had to adjust the sizes several times and figure out the best color scheme.
  • 1 hour editing and uploading to the site the pages Leah completed.

Plan

Here is an update list of our plans.  The difference is that we worked out more details of what we want to do for each week.

  • Week 4: Finishing the Adjust theme for the best look, add plug-ins, add widgets, and finish populating the website with great content.
  • Week 5: Create and implement Article Marketing plan.
  • Week 6: Continue to do article marketing, while improving sites shareability via social media and social bookmarking sites.
  • Week 7: Adjust marketing campaign towards what is giving us the most traffic.
  • Week 8: Optimize the WordPress site, Google Adsense, and the marketing.

Lessons

The lesson for this week is to utilize your strengths and outsource your weaknesses.  For both my wife and I we have different strengths and weaknesses.  She is considerably better at writing articles while she has no clue on how to set up a WordPress theme and make changes.  You might not have a spouse that compliments your abilities, but there are people out there who are willing to do the things you don’t want to do, for reasonable compensation.

Sites like fiverr.com are great for that.  For $5 you can pay someone else to do your web design, image formatting, content creation, etc…  it saves you hours of possible tedium.  I love learning how to create websites, so website creation makes sense.  I hate writing content, so if Leah weren’t here to cover that, I would hire a writer for $5 on Fiverr and then adjust their article to fit my voice.

The Fiverr website can have its drawbacks, but is usually worth the risk because it is so cheap.  You might have to shop around for a someone that does the best job and hire them to do what you don’t want to.  I also want to mention I’m not an affiliate for fiverr.com and use it sparingly because I like to do a lot of the work myself and don’t have a lot of money to throw around.  So, while it is an amazing site where you can get some great work done, there are also people who claim to be better at things than they are.  You can get your money back if you’re not truly satisfied (I had to do this one time), you need to be careful when using it to make sure you understand the process before you begin.

My Niche Site Journal:

Week 2 – WordPress Site Theme and Launching the Blog

Niche Site Journal, on maternity belts, , , , 17 Comments

We put in 14 hours this week. We confirmed a choice for our 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 have 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 easier and faster.
  • We are very picky on web design. With the niche site, especially at the beginning, the look of the website 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 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

Leah and I have picked a niche that we feel has the potential to make us some money through Google Adwords Ads.  I am not going to share with you yet what the niche is or the web address for the WordPress site until the end of our eight weeks.  This is to keep our numbers from being skewed by visitors coming from this niche site journal instead of organic traffic.

This will help us, in the long run, to get accurate numbers as far as organic traffic from the search engines.

Income: $0

No Income yet.

Costs: $115.37

$93.39 went to pay for 12 months of web hosting with a domain name.  I also used the Whois domain privacy option that was $9.99 (already in the price).  I did this so that we do not have to use our address and contact information in the website directory (it is for privacy).  I also spent $21.98 was for the second domain with the Whois domain privacy.

I used Hostmonster.com because I have had websites hosted by them for several years and have always had great service with them.  I have used 2 or 3 other services since hosting my first website in 2002 and have to say Hostmonster has been the best out of all of them.

Hostmonster.com also makes it easy to launch a WordPress site with just a few clicks.  There are plenty of other hosting services out there, and if you want to get the best deal you might want to shop around, but make sure that they provide high-quality service and have a low rate of website outages.

I also want to mention that I am an affiliate seller for Hostmonster, meaning if you follow my link to their site and order web hosting I make a little bit of money that helps pay for this blog.  I want to tell you this so that you know I’m completely transparent and honest with you, but I also want to mention that I only recommend products that I use and love.

Time Breakdown: 14 Hours

  • 2 Hours going over number needed with Market Samurai for a good Niche Site.  I was still unclear on what were good numbers in Market Samurai for choosing a keyword that was few enough searches to have low competition against other sites, but enough search traffic with high enough AdSense click value to make it worth creating a site.
  • 4 Hours finding keyword.  I spent another 4 hours finding a keyword that matched the criteria I set for myself.  I could have done it in half the time, but I wanted to test several options and figured I’d rather spend the time choosing the right niche instead of creating it and not get any traffic.
  • 1 Hour finding good domain name.  After choosing the niche, I needed to find a domain.  This wasn’t too hard; as all I did was take the keyword and add the word “on” in front of it.  What took so long was once I bought the domain, I decided I also need to by the plural version of the keyword.  So, I bought two domains; one with an “s” at the end and the other without.
  • 1 Hour setting up WordPress site.  This normally takes just a few minutes, but because I had two domains, I decided to have one domain just forward the viewer to the domain that holds the WordPress site.  The problem I ran into here was I put the WordPress site on the wrong domain.
    This meant I had to delete and uninstall the first WordPress installation and create a second one.  Then I had to point the nonplural domain to forward the user to plural version.
  • 2 Hours on WordPress site theme.  I love well-designed websites, so choosing a theme took longer than it needed.  If you are in a hurry, you could use the theme that comes with the WordPress installation. I searched out a free theme to use that I felt would make the site look better.  To get closer to what I want, I had to do some slight modifications to the CSS of the theme, but if you don’t know what that means or how to do it, don’t worry because you can just use whatever theme you like with no modifications.
  • 2 Hours working on logo.  We could have done this in half the time, but Leah wanted to make sure we had a good one that we wouldn’t want to change down the line.  My suggestion for those not skilled in digital art is to either not worry about a logo or go to a website like fiverr.com or 99designs.com to get one created for cheap.
  • 2 Hours writing first post.  Leah went ahead and wrote a post.  It took her about an hour of research and an hour to write an approximately 500-word article on the topic of our niche.

Plan

Our plan seems to be going smoothly for the most part.  We went ahead and planned out the rest of the eight weeks as follows:

  • Week 3 & 4 finishing the WordPress site, adding Google AdSense ads and populating our pages with useful content relating to our keyword.
  • In week 5 & 6 we will experiment with different ways to market the site and get it ranked on Google.
  • Week 7 & 8 will then be dedicated to optimizing the WordPress site and the marketing.

Lessons

For Niche Sites, there is no perfect answers, no magic formula, and no way to get a niche site done other than pushing through the process or hiring someone else to do it for you.  This week we have learned that while we hope to receive passive income through our niche site, the actual creation of the site takes time and effort.  With experience it gets easier but at the start it feels like a slow process.

This is not necessarily a bad thing.  Those who are looking for a quick and easy buck will never finish their websites or their keyword research, leaving plenty of space for those willing to put the time in (like you and me) to reap the rewards of a well thought out and executed niche website.

Your turn

Are you following along or working on a niche site?  Tell me about your experience in the comment section below.

My Niche Site Journal: