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.