Niche site in an hour - Critique my plan

by theemperor

Posted: 14 years ago 31 replies

INTERNET MARKETING

Hi Guys

Edit: Okay I realised it needs to be 1 hour 20 minutes ad I wrote this. But still that's fast...

I was thinking last night of a plan to make niche sites in 80 minutes. That includes registering the domain, install wordpress, populate with articles, make it look reasonably good and get some traffic! The only expenditure being the domain name.

The plan is based on squeezing the 'essentials' out of something I done which has made me a few affiliate sales, but the revenue has been low due to nature of the product being a hassle to order. However done correctly this method should make good money when dealing with products that are easy to order with good commissions.

The 1 hour & 20 mins doesn't include the market research and keyword research needed to choose the niche and domain name - but such research could be done over a weekend and generate quite a few of these 1 hour sites.

The market research will choose niches where:

It should be easy to rank for reasonable popular keywords (doing the Market Samurai thing etc.)
There are high-traffic and "internet-marketing-naive" forums talking about that niche. These must allow backlinks but not necessarily DOFOLLOW.
There is are affiliate products to promote that are doing well. Ideally digital products or amazon products.
Ideally there is a pain to solve where buying the product relieves a pain point. Medical / Lack of Dating Success / etc.

Here is the plan:

Basics - 8 minutes
- Register domain - 2 minutes
- Add on domain to hostgator - 2 minutes
- Install wordpress - 2 minutes
- Install a 'generic theme' - 2 minutes (the theme will be branded with a good banner)
Make the blog look good - 15 minutes
- Search on google images for a good picture to help make the banner, and design banner in Paint.NET - 5 minutes
- Find 10 decent relevant articles on EZA and add them to the blog, backdating them 1 week at a time to make the blog look updated - 10 minutes
Promote a product - 20 minutes
- Choose a product from clickbank/amazon to promote.
- Write a value giving post of 400 words on the blog that answers a question that appears a lot in the forum(s). E.g. where to buy X, or how to achieve Y etc.
- The post gives value without the reader buying, but should lead them to want to buy the product. I've seen this technique a lot in articles / emails sent to me so should be easy to replicate.
- Post it with a picture to make it look article - like.
Drink cup of tea and rest! - 2 minutes
Post to forums - 26 minutes
- Sign up for 3 forums - 6 minutes
- On each forum, find good threads to reply, and add great value. Write 100 words or so per post over 6 posts, but just write as you would say it don't think too much. Then mention you found a blog with more information and link to the last post you made with the affiliate link. 20 minutes
Rest time (before repeating) ... you are human not a robot! - 9 minutes

Now - just wait 7 days and check the web logs for this site, see how much traffic you got. See how many hops you got to your affiliate product and how many sales. I reckon this method could give you 100 targeted visitors in 7 days and your first sale.

Based on these stats determine if you need more traffic, a better converting landing page, or a better product.

Good plan? Anyone want to add anything?

#critique #hour #niche #plan #site

bgmacaw

14 years ago

Here are a few critiques/suggestions on your plan...

1. Don't count on blowing through this start to finish in the time allotted. Sometimes DNS propagation can be slow. Maybe the EZA articles aren't good or plentiful enough. Sometimes there'll be another snag in the process.

2. The new WP Twenty Ten default theme is actually a "good generic theme" and customizes quickly and easily. This will save you time looking around for themes.

3. Don't steal images from Google images. This could come back to haunt you. Instead, purchase a DVD of royalty free images that you can use for your sites. Oh, and picking and creating the 'perfect image' can be a big time sink in this process so be careful.

4. In addition to EZA you can use PLR, preferably edited and/or spun.

5. The risk of the forum idea is that somebody in the niche might be visiting the same group of forums. If they see a group of similar posts all promoting the same blog they're likely to blow the whistle on you. Plus, many will be like this forum and restrict new members from posting links. I've found forum marketing to be a much longer term approach these days, especially with profile spammers running wild.

6. You need to build links to your site from various other sites, such as social bookmarking, blog comments and the like. A few forum links won't cut it.

Thanks
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theemperor

14 years ago

bgmacaw,

Thanks - your raise some excellent points there.

With google images you can filter based on "license for reuse" although I always wonder how reliable that is ... but it seems to give you a lot of flickr - type photos when you do this.

The forum thing requires very IM-unaware forums. I.e. they wont know what you are trying to achieve. So you need to go for non-IM non-techie niches.

In one forum I know about I posed a naked affiliate link + link to my blog, and I was thanked by another poster. How about that! It's almost a parallel universe!

Now almost all forums are aware of spam. So the idea is not to spam, but to post something useful. Spam won't work anyway as people will see it for what it is.

But you have a point about being careful.

And you are also right that you just don't want to limit to forums. But this method allows you to quickly test if you can sell a product and will gets you very targeted traffic in decent quantities, without relying on the tricky world of SEO.

The limitation is that in the long-term, SEO and other methods will be able to provide vastly more traffic as most people start at Google.

So this is all about testingreally. Of course when you start selling you will want to expand traffic methods.

Thanks
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bgmacaw

14 years ago

Originally Posted by theemperor

Now almost all forums are aware of spam. So the idea is not to spam, but to post something useful. Spam won't work anyway as people will see it for what it is.

I've found forums today becoming more and more spam aware and trigger happy on the ban button, even if you post what you might consider useful content. The higher the PR of the forum or the closer to a heavily spammed topic, the more touchy they are and suspicious of newcomers.

Thanks

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tommydesmond 14 years ago

Yeah, I think the forum astroturfing would add to the timeline considerably if you're doing it right. Even if the forum isn't too savvy to the IM world, chances are good they at least have some minimums in place. I haven't found too many worthwhile forums that don't.
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cashcow

14 years ago

I think this is a good plan and could be done in the time frame in a best case scenario.

bgmacaw pointed out some of the things that could suck up your time.

I think the big thing for people to remember is not to get too emotionally involved in the blog and spend too much time making it "perfect".

These types of blogs aren't supposed to be the "best blog in the world" that you show off to your grandma. If one happens to get a lot of traffic and you really fall in love with it, you can always improve on it later.

I know for me, I often spend way too much time on the header and other design aspects.

I like the idea of using PLR instead of ezinearticles (Of course, I would say that!) because you can edit them however you want and there are no links out to other sites, plus if you buy them in pace then you already have 10 or more right in the same folder so no need to go searching. Just load 'em up!

Lee

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eaglechick

14 years ago

Originally Posted by cashcow

I think the big thing for people to remember is not to get too emotionally involved in the blog and spend too much time making it "perfect".

These types of blogs aren't supposed to be the "best blog in the world" that you show off to your grandma. If one happens to get a lot of traffic and you really fall in love with it, you can always improve on it later.

I know for me, I often spend way too much time on the header and other design aspects.

Lee

That's me - Geez I can spend about an hour to make my header perfect and then when something is not right - I redo it again and again. I like a nice layout and an appealing site but I really tend to overdo it. Same goes with when I write my articles - Nowadays I set myself a time limit.

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dgsapsford 14 years ago

dude looks like a great plan , although I agree that DNS can take a while . I usually do the research , and register domain one day then go back to creating blogs the next day . recently set up the basics to 8 blogs in about 45 mins doing this that included plugin etc . still needed posts and tweaking . but generally a good plan
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InitialEffort 14 years ago

Forums = Good, for a couple of fast back links.

Your strategy will work for developing websites, but you really want your own unique content for micro niche sites if that is your plan. You should be able to build a website from start to finish minus content in less than 30 minutes.
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Kezz 14 years ago

I'd add in one step to the WP install that will only take another two minutes.

Install "Plugin Central" and then use it to automate the installation of SEO and security plugins.

You really want to have All In One SEO and Google XML sitemaps going. Plus, a fresh Fantastico install is pretty vulnerable so a couple of security plugins will make your sites safer.

My only other tip is to pick the product you'll promote before you register your domain.

You need to have identified a market and a solid offer to present to that market as your first point of action.

Then you can plan a promotion around that offer - your domain name choice can be a key part of this plan. Getting an exact keyword match domain can go a long way.

Overall looks like a stellar lineup though. Nice one!
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helicopterplt 14 years ago

exactly how much content do you plan to use in that amount of time?
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CDarklock

14 years ago

Originally Posted by theemperor

Find 10 decent relevant articles on EZA and add them to the blog, backdating them 1 week at a time to make the blog look updated - 10 minutes

Fail. EZA TOS 1(j):

Agree to limit the number of articles reprinted to no greater than taking 25 articles from our site per calendar year per unique domain that you own. In addition, for domain owners of many domains, you may not reprint more than 250 articles per year (10 sites x 25 articles reprinted per domain).

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theemperor 14 years ago

Originally Posted by CDarklock

Fail. EZA TOS 1(j):

Lol :p. I hugely respect your posts on WF, but this time you are blatantly wrong...

My plan involves taking 10 EZA articles for this site as a one off event. You are allowed 25. So whats the problem?

As it's only 10 articles per site, you can do this for 25 sites a year. Once you've used your EZA limit, there are, believe it or not, other article directories, and as some have mentioned, PLR.
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- CDarklock 14 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by theemperor
  
  As it's only 10 articles per site, you can do this for 25 sites a year.
  
  No, you can do it for ten sites a year - read the terms. You don't get to divide the 250 however you want. You can put up to 25 articles on one domain, and you can put articles on up to ten domains.
  
  But here's the problem in your plan:
  
  "such research could be done over a weekend and generate quite a few of these 1 hour sites"
  
  Then you can't rely on EZA for all of them. Your plan doesn't work, because it specifies EZA. If you want to specify just one article directory, specify one where you can make "quite a few" sites each week.
  
  Can you get around it? Yes. But you have to put getting around it in the plan. You can't hand out a plan that can only be used ten times a year, and then tell them to use it "quite a few" times a week.
  
  Yes, it's easy to fix the plan. So go fix it.
  
  Thanks
  
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  "The Golden Town is the Golden Town no longer. They have sold their pillars for brass and their temples for money, they have made coins out of their golden doors. It is become a dark town full of trouble, there is no ease in its streets, beauty has left it and the old songs are gone." - Lord Dunsany, The Messengers
  
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satrap 14 years ago

This is a very detailed and straight forward plan that a lot of people specially newbies can use to get started. However, I dont think this is going to work that well, unless you put more time and effort into it.
I know, the only thing many of us really need is taking action, and I dont want to sound like one of those who always come up with an excuse to not take action, but, you can't just slap a few articles and a few comments and links here and there and think you are going to make money. You are gonna have to put some serious time and effort into it.
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- theemperor 14 years ago
  
  satrap - good point. I don't expect to make money immediately with this plan for every niche site. However this is a quick plan to test the market, which, when it hits the spot, should generate sales. And when it doesn't hit the spot it can be tweaked.
  
  I see the alternative as spending weeks slaving over a perfect niche site and finding 100 hours of work later that there is a fundamental flaw which limits earnings and makes that time wasted. Examples of such a flaw - lots of browsers but no buyers, limited market size, too much competition, wrong product etc.
  
  This lets you get a feel for something before spending too much time. That's the idea of getting it done in near enough one hour.
  
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madison_avenue 14 years ago

It looks an interesting plan.

Are you using info domains for this, or .com? The cost of .com could make this system too costly, if lots of sites fail. With info domains you are not risking much initial investment.
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Leslie B

14 years ago

Originally Posted by theemperor

Hi Guys[LIST][*]Basics - 8 minutes

Register domain - 2 minutes
Add on domain to hostgator - 2 minutes
Install wordpress - 2 minutes
Install a 'generic theme' - 2 minutes (the theme will be branded with a good banner)

Besides the points that others have given, I would recommend to not use a one click installation of Wordpress but do it manually, but that would, of course, take you longer. You can do it via an application, but you leave your WordPress installation vulnerable for hackers.

Leslie

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cashcow 14 years ago

I was just thinking - could using wordpress direct help you speed things up?

I actually haven't used it myself but I was just watching a video over at the 30dc on wordpress direct and it made me think of this thread. It seems like you could cut down on the blog creation and making it look good time.

Lee
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Leslie B 14 years ago

You could use WordPress Direct, but again, when your site gets hacked, it gives more pain then it would otherwise (don't ask how I know )

Leslie
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MarkSherris 14 years ago

My personal opinion is that the key here is "QUALITY".

I'm not saying your plan won't work but there are so many people who build sites and make everything as easy as possible and basically "average".

You don't need to necessarily know much about your niche to make it successful, but you do need the quality in your work to make it successful, such as original articles, a marketing strategy and motivation.

You obviously have motivation, but I think that if you spent maybe 3 hours or even a full day setting up a "QUALITY" website, rather than an "AVERAGE" one you're going to see quality results, rather than average results.

For example, you'd rather set up a site that took a full day and made $300-$500 per month, than set up a site that took only 1 hour, but only made $30-$50 per month, correct?

I think if you make all your website content unique and fresh it will be better, and then work on building up some backlinks and set yourself a proper strategy.

Here's a quick overview of what could potentially work well:

1) Set up your site with original content (SEO it with keywords etc)
2) Bookmark your site
3) Write some original articles and submit them to the quality article sites (include a link back to your site with your keyword anchor text)
4) Bookmark the article sites
5) Repeat the process from step 3.

That's a fairly simple process (it can be expanded if necessary) that most people could do in a days work, yet if your niche is very targeted with low competition you'll probably end up dominating Google for it and as a result get more traffic and sales :-)

That's my advice anyway because I've found from experience that I have much better results when I put some effort in :-)

--

Maybe try your own method first and see how your results go, and if not try what I've mentioned :-)
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christopherNV

Banned 14 years ago

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bilaldsa

14 years ago

I was just wondering what if you use blogger instead of wordpress. It saves you time and money since you don't have to buy the domain.

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piratejoe84

14 years ago

Originally Posted by bilaldsa

I was just wondering what if you use blogger instead of wordpress. It saves you time and money since you don't have to buy the domain.

Yes, it saves you money at first. But, what if the site is a big success and then Blogger decides it doesn't like your niche?

If they kill your site, they also kill your income. The cost of a domain name and a hosting account are minimal and they allow you to control your own piece of internet real estate. It is kind of like the difference between renting and owning your home.

Joe

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bilaldsa

14 years ago

Originally Posted by piratejoe84

Yes, it saves you money at first. But, what if the site is a big success and then Blogger decides it doesn't like your niche?

Blogger kills your site if they don't like your niche? I never knew that!!!!

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Steven Carl Kelly 14 years ago

For free images that you can be SURE you can use, you might want to try:

morgueFile free photos for creatives by creatives
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healthconverter 14 years ago

Here's a few cliches for you:

Content Is King
Quality Not Quantity

Sure, you can accomplish a site pretty quickly, however it won't do that well. Take your time and build out a quality site, then monetize it. We just spent 3 months putting up a teeth whitening review. It went from 0 uniques to just over 12,000 a day. Now that we've monetized the site with offers such as ExtremeWhitener.com, the site is pulling in a couple thousand dollars daily.

There really are no shortcuts. Take your time and build out quality sites.
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theemperor 14 years ago

MarkSherris and HealthConverter you are ... well ... converting me!

The idea of producing quality over speed is appealing. But I need to make sure somehow that the market and niche I choose will make it worthwhile. I need to improve my market research and stop diving in when I get a brain wave! I've done that too many times and I believe the reason why I am still not doing this full time. I guess my plan here is born from the fear of spending too much time on a niche that ain't gonna work, but maybe spending 1.5 hours is selling a good niche short?

Also I would more enjoy spending a day on an interesting niche writing good articles, rather than robotic-ally producing quickie sites. And some degree enjoyment is important... after all it is linked with motivation and persistence.

I have another plan in mind which revolves around writing 20 * 600 word quality articles over a number of weeks on a blog, and before doing that doing massive research into if that will yield a good enough profit.

And before anyone says "Just take action" ... I am fed up of taking action and not making as much as I would like. I make money but seriously it is time for me to make decent money from blogging and site building.
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cashcow

14 years ago

You could use WordPress Direct, but again, when your site gets hacked, it gives more pain then it would otherwise (don't ask how I know )

Yep, been hacked a few times myself so I hear 'ya.

Actually that's another reason to have less sites of higher quality that you can spend more time on. When you are whipping out tons of sites, you won't have time to properly secure them and if they do get hacked then you won't have the time to fix them.

But, just a couple of sites you could spend more time on securing them and if they do get hacked fixing a couple of sites is a lot less time consuming than fixing 100 of them.

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theemperor

14 years ago

Originally Posted by cashcow

Maybe it is easier then to use .html than wordpress. I often consider it

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Leslie B 14 years ago

Wordpress can be safe too, you just need to take the time to learn how to install it manually and how to make sure everything is set correct so you have a safe database and blog. Honestly, doing it manually takes me 5 minutes, which isn't much longer then doing it via Fantastico.

Leslie
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Alfred Shelver 14 years ago

I think this is great, I have a problem I still struggle a bit with WP but that being said I think it is doable. I agree that Time should be a factor as many of us without a time goal will spend too much time during the process here on WF (like I am now).

But the ultimate goal must be quality in a certain time frame so If you think it will take 2 hours take 2 hours but enure the quality of your site.
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PLRwithAlex 14 years ago

The plan is a great starting point. Sounds like you are getting stuff done. Too many people don't get started taking action.

Good job! Listen to some of the posted advice and good luck!
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Niche site in an hour - Critique my plan

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