Building content for my niche I know little about

This is certainly a tricky part. I know very little about Kung Fu, but the internet has made things a lot smaller...
I decide to write down what I would want to know from a martial art site if I was arriving at it and wanting to learn. The site needs to be targeted at someone that's a beginner (hence the keyword "learn Kung Fu"). Also, I don't have the time to create all this content.
This is when decided to join freelancer.com. An incredible website that allows you to post a project and people bid for the work. This was my first time using it and I was blown away.
I created the spec for the content I wanted written which was six articles covering the history of Kung Fu to fighting techniques and meditation. Within 15 minutes, I had about 10 bids already placed and a few messages directly to me with freelancers telling me why I should pick them. The information wasn't overwhelming either, because I could easily see how they wrote to me (to determine if I thought their writing ability was any good) and also view their profiles to narrow down and create a shortlist. After creating a shortlist, I could request past articles from freelancers too.
It didn't take me long to decide on a freelancer and the content cost me just $50. At the moment, the freelancer has sent me through 4 of the 6 articles already and it is great. His writing is far superior to what I could have written.
The only downside was that my freelancer had no SEO experience like some of the others did. I'm not concerned though, because I can go through the articles myself and insert the SEO I want.
While I'm waiting for the rest of the content, I've simply been organising my site and getting used to the theme I'm using. I'll concentrate on creating backlinks and really pushing the SEO when I have my content. Then it is the exciting part of seeing if the website makes it up the Google ranks.

My niche selected

So I've found my niche at last. "Learn Kung Fu" it is. I'm happy with this, because I know I'll find it interesting which will keep me motivated and the competition is quite low. My only concern with it is that the traffic isn't huge. Still, it has the potential to earn that $10 a day I'm aiming for. Also, I wanted to start off with a niche which isn't too difficult. If this works, I'll tackle something a little more challenging and with a larger earning capacity. For now, my goals are to create a website with good content and get it to the top spot on Google.

I have found a few other similar niches which I'm tempted to tackle simultaneously. I'll focus most of my posts here on "Learn Kung Fu".

I've got my domain now, installed Wordpress and these plugins:
All in one SEO pack
Google Analyticator
Google XML Sitemaps

The "All in one SEO pack" is an SEO plugin that overrides any of the SEO data that is set by Wordpress. It's a must for getting the SEO right.
The "Google Analyticator" sets up Google Analytics.
The "Google XML Sitemaps" creates a XML sitemap. This sitemap will help Google index my website better.

I still have to select a theme for my website. Time to press on...

SEO techniques after Penguin 2.0

Google brought out a major algorithm change when Penguin 2.0 was released earlier this year (mentioned in an earlier post). The algorithms used in Penguin concentrate mainly on webspam and not content and I surely don't want any of my SEO techniques to be seen as spam.

What I've found is that "Authority" and "Anchor Text" are the key players here. Have a look at this article for some good information about these. What's interesting is that Google+ activity about a site is going to help it's rank more and more. Most people will think that the Google+ activity is not going to be seen by anyone, but I'll do it anyway... what ever is going to help my Google rank!

The challenge has started and niche has been found

I've been taking my first steps to finding a niche. The obvious choice for me has been to select a number of topics I'm interested in and see if I can find a niche within any of those. Here's a few of them:

Health and fitness
Surfing
Martial Arts
DIY
Beer
Hypnosis
Magic
Learning/Training

"Health of fitness" was what I started with. Knowing that the exact keywords would show a lot of competition, I went straight for the keyword generation in Market Samurai to try give me ideas of other niche's within this. There's been such a boom in "health and fitness" awareness over the last 10 years that every avenue I seemed to try had stiff competition. I got as far down the road as keywords like "yoga for pregnant woman", but still could not find a viable niche.

I slowly learned that the topics that I had a thought would have stiff competition, did have stiff competition. Time to start thinking a little more creatively.

Although not really an interest of mine, I decided to start my niche searching again with "Maid training", just to see if I could find something with decent traffic and low competition. To my satisfaction, I actually did find something. Not brilliant, but a good start. Here's how I got there:

Within Market Samurai, I typed in "maid training" and hit "SEO Competition". Here were the results:

What immediately got my attention is that the top domains were not taken up by websites dedicated to "maid training" and the URLs that looked more specific to these keywords didn't have great SEO. The page ranks (PR) were all 2 or lower and the page backlinks "BLP" were also really low. The green colours here are a great sign. These keywords showed a bit of promise, but it was time to check out the traffic volumes.

I hit "Keyword Research" and added a few negative keywords like cheap, free, or anything obviously unrelated. I also removed misspelled keywords and anything that had a location in it like "uk". After going through the results I realised that I should also add in common synonyms for "maid", like "nanny" and "nannies". After a decent list of positive and negative keywords, it was time to head to "Keyword Analysis".

As many of the articles I've read before about Market Samurai have advised, I created a few filters... "SEO Traffic" to 100, "Phrase to Broad Match Ratio" to 30, and "SEO Competition" to 100000. It then took the software a few minutes to analyse the keywords.

The keyword "nanny resume" came out with 137 hits a day, less competition and much better "SEO value" than "maid training". "SEO value" is really an estimate of the possible revenue from a keyword everyday. It takes the average Adwords cost per click, and multiples it by the traffic. It's a very clever indicator in my opinion. 

It seemed that "nanny resume" could work, but I needed to check out the SEO competition in more detail, so I clicked the key icon next to the keyword to open a new tab. Here's what the SEO competition looked like for "nanny resume":

The competition looked even better! I found a keyword that I might be able to use. My concern though: Is 137 visits a day enough? I'm not sure, but now I know I can find decent keywords and have a good idea of how to get there. Time to dig a little deeper and find some more. Hopefully I can get a few to widen my options.

SEO techniques... just be careful

I've read some great articles on SEO and had formed some great ideas on how to get to the top ranked spot on Google. Unfortunately, I've had to take a few steps back and think about this a bit more.

Google's algorithms change. Many of the changes are trying to filter out those websites that are trying to beat the system (like Penguin 2.0 which came out on 22 May 2013), but these changes will have knock on effects. This really means that old SEO techniques may not work in my favour. I need to go back and make sure that the techniques I want to use are not outdated otherwise I could find myself struggling.

More on choosing a niche

Over the past few evenings I've been trolling the web in an attempt to find out as much as I can about choosing a niche. I came across a video by Tyrone Shum (the man behind Five Minute Video Marketing) which gives a great overview of pretty much everything I've been finding.

Tyrone also gives a bit of insight into his SEO techniques to get up the Google ranks. It's an hour long video, but if you're just starting out then this video is worth the watch. It will certainly get you heading in the right direction.

He uses Market Samurai which I mentioned in an earlier post. I've also emailed Market Samurai about this challenge and asked if they can somehow give anyone doing this challenge a better price on the software. I'm sure they wouldn't mind a few extra users.

Challenge accepted!

A good friend, Clayton Scott, has taken up the challenge! Check out his blog on the challenge at http://compochallengeaccepted.blogspot.com . You can follow his progress and thoughts there. This is also Clayton's first attempt at creating a site like this, so I'm certain his content will be very helpful throughout the challenge.

Let's hope a few more blogs will be created by others taking part!

Website hosting (and 25% off it)

After a little research into good providers, I've decided to go ahead with Hostgator. Here's why:

Simply put they're affordable and reliable. There's a lot of great reviews scattered around on the internet about them. 

Their basic plan starts at $3.96 a month, but I'll be going for the $6.36 option. This option allows you to have unlimited domains and seen as I'm keen to develop a few of these sites, this fits my needs perfectly. I must point out that both these options come with unlimited bandwidth and diskspace and also a shared SSL certificate.

If you decide to go with Hostgator too, use the coupon "passivecomp" to receive 25% off your hosting as well.

WooCommerce... a great toolkit

I'm certainly no expert on Wordpress, but I have come across a great toolkit. WooCommerce (from WooThemes) seems to be one of the most widely used ecommerce toolkits for Wordpress.

One great aspect of this is the ability to sell digital downloads as well. Here's on overview of it.

 

A quickie for new developers

Those new to website development will be grateful know you don't have to get stuck into html and php learning. Websites do not need to be built from scratch. There are tools that help you develop websites without you having to know html itself. One such tool is Wordpress. 

Wordpress allows you to create your website by simply adding pages, typing in content, uploading images to it, etc. The html is generated for you. The great thing is that if you want something a little more complex on your website (like a shopping cart), there are plugins you can just download and install. These plugins are generally customisable too.

I'm not going to to go into much detail here about Wordpress, because there is plenty information all over the internet about it. Youtube has plenty of tutorials and introductions ( i have posted a nice video a few days ago too). Also, there are alternatives, but Wordpress is the most widely used. 

Choosing a niche for the website

This will never be as simple as just choosing something you like and going for it. Unfortunately, a lot research is going to go into this. When choosing a niche, we need to know how we are likely to fair on Google. Fortunately there are tools out there that can help us with exactly that. These tools will allow us to test out a particular niche/keyword out.... "Keywords" is the big term here.

What we really want to know is whether the niche for our website has a chance to get onto Google's first page and whether we will get good targeted traffic if we are there.

An example? We are thinking about building a site for "cellphone repairs". We could use one of these tools online to work out how much competition there is for the top Google spot when someone types in "cellphone repairs" or something related to it like "cellphone fixing" or "mobile repairs". We also want to know how much traffic these keywords generate. Ideally we want low competition and high traffic.

There are plenty tools out there. "Google Keyword Tool" is one of them and is free to use. I just signed up for a 12 day free trial of "Market Samurai" which looks to be one of the best and easiest to use. You can purchase Market Samurai for $97 (even though they market it at $149). Honestly, I'm hoping the 12 day trial will be enough. Check out this short video on Market Samurai to get a better idea of what I'm talking about.

Getting ready

So we want to build a website that earns us money... great... now what? 

There are number of skills we're going to need in order to do this. Not only skills like website development, but also how to implement SEO, build content, branding, and (probably the most important) how to select the niche for the website.

With less than 2 weeks to go before I dive into this, I thought it would be best to learn a few of the skills I will require and get familiar with some of the tools out there that will make life easier. 

But let's first look at the major steps of building this website and take it from there. Here are the steps I aim to take. These steps assume no outsourcing will be done. I'll decide on whether to outsource particular tasks later.

1. Commit to this (no use being half hearted)

2. Decide what the website will be about (what niche and audience am I targeting)

3. Decide on a look, feel and basic website layout I think will suit this website

4. Find the right development tools (development platform, payment gateway, plugins, etc)

5. Build the website's content

6. Get the website up Google's ranks

7. Add revenue generators

8. Continually work on ranking and other advertising to grow and grow

Following this challenge

Please add your email on the right hand side to follow the posts. Easiest way to keep up to date with what's happening.

Starting my prep soon for the challenge and will post some interesting stuff that will hopefully be helpful for creating a successful website.

Challenge Details and Rules

Objective: Create a website that generates passive income. The goal is set at $10 profit a day. This profit is determined by taking into account operational expenses. Any up front non-recurring costs may be neglected.

Rules: You can use any outsourcing you like, except paid advertising. At no point can you use paid advertising to generate traffic for your website.

Dates: Starts 15 July 2013, Ends 14 December 2013 (5 months)

Who can join: Anyone

Suggestions: Feel free to suggest any rule/objective additions or alternatives. We've got until 15 July to change anything. Feel free to generate your own blog to post about how things are going and the great stuff you're finding. I'll link to those blogs from here.

For those wanting to start on Wordpress, this is a good video on getting started

Challenge Thoughts...

After reading a number of articles on great ways to generate income online, I've decided that passive income sites have to be among the best options. It would be great one day to have a number of sites generating income for me. It may not be millions, but enough to live life without the grind of the everyday job. That said... I decided to approach a few friends I thought would share the same desire and make a little competition of it. This way, a number of different techniques/ideas will be used to generate a passive income site and hopefully we'll all gain good insight into the best approaches. Here I'll post updates on how I'm doing and hopefully get some updates from the others in the competition. Although it is a competition, we'll all be encouraged to share our ideas and methods.