In the last post I told you that I made the first real sale. This was pretty encouraging and made me want to make this work now.

I’m really happy to say that i’ve had another four pedals sold through the site. One of the pedals doesn’t even feature on the site, but through checking out one pedal, they bought another.

Here’s a screenshot of the sales on this site so far…

Redesigning the site

Up until about six weeks ago, the site was mainly in a blog format with a few links to pedals.

Then I tried making it look like a shop.

I wasn’t happy with either of these, so I then consulted a few Internet Marketing friends on a forum and they suggested that I created the site as a review site.

Creating a review site

I really didn’t want to spend a lot of money on this, so I spent a while looking for a WordPress review theme to transform what I already have into a review site. The best one I could find is the Product Review WordPress Theme.

It’s very easy to implement for anyone that has used WordPress a bit. Also, it has a video tutorial to take you through.

The next step then was getting the reviews. As I told you in an earlier post, my brother was the person that gave me the idea for this, so he’s the one I asked to help me write the reviews.

He did a great job.

Building more authority

By doing all of the above, I have now started to see sales coming through. In the next post i’ll share with you the traffic i’ve been getting and where it’s coming from.

I’m just finishing up my breakfast and having a mooch around the internet.

I thought i’d check my Amazon Affiliates account to see if I had made any sales and to my suprise (although I really shouldn’t be surprised because this stuff works) I had made a sale!!

Here’s the screenshot…

Now, I have made some money from my affiliate site before, as I said in the last post, but they were more accidental than planned.

This is my first sale that is directly related to the actual niche which is Guitar Loop Pedals.

Why is the first ‘real’ sale so important?

For me this is really key because if i’m honest I lost heart when the site seemed to make no real sales after the effort that was put in to creating it and promoting it.

Now I have a renewed energy and I can get working on it again.

In the next post, i’ll tell you about some changes I made and some traffic building that was done that contributed to this working.

Made Some Money!!!!!

But before I go and order that Bentley and the outdoor pool for my wild parties, I better clarify that it was $0.46

… and it wasn’t exactly for a sale that I expected.

When you sign up as an Amazon affiliate and you people click on the products you are promoting, you make a % of all the things they buy when they are there.

For some reason, when someone clicked on a guitar loop pedal on my site, they went to amazon and then purchased a kids book worth $11.55. I got a commission from this.

As I said, this isn’t going to set the world on fire, but it does prove the system works.

Other Ways to Make Income from this Site

As well as having products from Amazon on the site, I decided it would be good to sell an information based product too.

The reason for this is that although people are hopefully in buying mode when they search for ‘Guitar Loop Pedals’, they may also be browsing for ideas and information.

The best place to choose information products is Clickbank. Clickbank is a marketplace for online informational products.

I like promoting these products as you can earn up to (and sometimes over) 50% of the price of the product.

It’s also really easy to use, you simply choose the product in the marketplace you want and they give you the code and any graphics you need for your site.

As I type this, I have had 5 people click on the banner but no sales on the product. I shall keep you informed.

Bear in mind, we don’t need too much content. The focus is on the amount of links.

Building Links with Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking sites are websites where people go to organise their links to the sites they like or think that are useful.

It is also an easy way to build links to your site. HOWEVER … I personally try not to overdo the amount of times I link back to my own site.

This is classed as spammy, but that’s a whole other discussion for another time.

I will simply be linking to my ‘What is Guitar Looping‘ article on the following sites:

www.digg.com
www.stumbleupon
www.delicious.com
www.propeller.com
www.mixx.com

They seem to be the main five sites. There’s a billion other ones, but the point of this exercise is to rank the site as easily as possible.

Each of the Social Bookmarking sites have their own way of submitting, which starts with you creating an account with each one. Don’t worry, this is free and fairly simple. I’ll show you with DIGG.com

Once you have created an account and logged in, you can then ‘submit a link’. You can simply add the URL of your site into here and digg will do the rest

Digg will take the story and add it as a submission. As you can see here:

Other people can now DIGG your story. This isn’t too essential at this point though.

I simply repeated this process across the other four sites.

Building Links with Social Bookmarking

As I am writing this, I am currently in fourth position on the front page of Google as you can see in this screenshot below.

This is pretty good. As you can see, the top results are Google Shopping results and a youtube video that has over 13,000 views.

This is a lesson to me as I really should have looked at the tags and title that we’re in that video and applied them to mine, but that’s ok, I can do that with the next one.

Hopefully, you can start to see from this how it’s possible (with much time and effort) to dominate the front page of Google. If that video was mine and I had some products in Google Shopping, then I would have three of the top four spaces.

This will be part of the plan…

Don’t forget to check out previous posts if you are new here.

Niche Site Duel Part 1

Niche Site Duel Part 2

Niche Site Duel Part 3

Niche Site Duel Part 4

Niche Site Duel Part 5

Apart from actually choosing the niche, I would say that web traffic is probably the most important success criteria.

You could have found the hungriest bunch of buyers on the internet, but if

Traffic from a Youtube video

One of my first tactics is to get a link back from a high authority site. An example of this would be youtube.

As you may remember in part 1, I mentioned that this niche came about due to a conversation with my brother. He was going on about guitar looping.

So now I have my site live, I am going to get him to help me create a video.

Because he knows the subject, all I needed to do was turn up with my FLIP cam. You can obvioulsy use whatever video camera you like but the FLIP cam makes it incredibly easy for me because it plus straight into my laptop when the video is done.

So I got him to sit down in his spare room, I setup the FLIP cam and he explained to me how he uses guitar looping to create tracks.

I then edited it and added a beginning and end and some effects in the middle with some basic software on my Apple Mac called iMovie.

Create a YouTube account

I then created a youtube account. You can do this simply by visiting Youtube and clicking on ‘create account’. There’s a load of ways you can develop your facebook page so that it fits the style of your niche, but for now i’m keeping it simple.

Once my video is ready, I upload it to youtube. In the description area for the video I add a link to my site.

Simple. That’s the first link created from an authority site.

You also need to make sure the title and the tags contain your keywords.

I then embedded that video into a post on my site to create an extra page. This is an example of using content more than once to get more results.

Next post i’ll be looking at more ways of creating links back to the site.

Here’s parts one, two and three for you.

Setting The Niche Site

So, now we have the domain and the hosting set up, we need to create the site.

The easiest way to setup a niche website is to use a blogging platform. There are loads, such as as Blogger, Typepad & Moveable Type.

I will be using WordPress, which to be honest, is the most popular… oh and it’s free.

The hosting I have lets me automatically setup WordPress on the domain name I have chosen.

I won’t go into detail here about how to setup WordPress, I may do a separate tutorial on that.

Styling The Niche Site

I am lucky at this point as I know a fair bit about setting up sites in Wodpress, but to make the job a little easier as niche marketing is all about setting up the sites quick and letting them make you money.

When you start using WordPress you’ll find that you can easily change the style of your webpage with ‘themes’.

There’s a load of free themes available on the internet, just have a search around Google. However, if you want a really slick look, you could also choose one from Headway or Woo Themes (i’ll talk about these at a later point too).

Here’s what the site looks like. I created a big graphic for the top with a bit of a fancy logo.

Adding Content

Content is important to your site. Although the idea of the niche site is to sell products, we need content on the site to give some value.
So far, I have created the first article for the site entitled “What is Guitar Looping?” (see the graphic above).

I thought i’d cover one of the questions people ask that will get them onto the site.

If people have heard about looping, but don’t really know what it is, then they may find this page and then find out more.

Within the body text of the article I have placed a picture of the ‘Loop Station’. This seems to be one of the most popular pedals. If you click on the picture you are taken to the amazon page for that product.

To get the code to create the link to the amazon affiliate page you need to join us as an Amazon Affiliate.

Signing up is free and Amazon explain really clearly how to add the code to your page.

Now What?

To summarise, we now have niche, domain name, hosting, website setup.

Now we need:

• More content
• Setup Google Analytics (to check the amount of people that visit the site)
• Traffic (lots of it)

See you in part 5.

We’ll get straight into it.

Choosing a domain name

Now normally, I would say that your domain name needs be short, memberable and unique.

For this challenge though, we want to get the large percentage of traffic from the search engines, so we are also looking for a domain name that is ‘Keyword Rich’.

For this I am going to use a site called 123-reg to see if my keywords are available as a domain name.

On the screen-shot to the right you can see the available domains. Ideally, we are looking for all the keywords to be in the domain and followed by a .com, .net or .org

I purchased the .org domain because the .com and .net had already been purchased.

Hosting a Domain

I don’t need to go into too much detail here. There’s a load of places you could host your niche site.

My personal favourite for speed and ease of use is Hostgator. They also have a really easy way of setting up WordPress, which we shall talk about later.

So far so good

So, to summarise, we now have a niche, a domain name and hosting for that domain name. The next thing to do is set up a niche site. Depending on how technical you are, this is part that some people outsource.

I’ll show you a way that I think simplifies the whole process.

Please leave your comments below. If there is something that you want more info on, just shout.

http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/nichesiteduel

In the last post on the niche duel we started looking at the area of guitar looping.

I established that my brother keeps going on about it, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a niche that is worth building a blog on.

We now need to work out whether this is something that people search for on Google. Then we need to work out of people spend money when they search for Guitar Looping.

Monthly Keyword Searches

This is where we start to get a bit more technical. Don’t worry though, i’m not really a technical person at heart so i’ll break this down into simple steps.

We need to look at the number of times that our niche is searched. Also, we need to explore other similar words.

I’ll be doing this with a tool called the Google Keyword Tool.

Here is a screenshot of the Google keyword tool once I entered the phrase “Guitar Looping” in:

This shows me that guitar looping is searched 1000 times a month. Google also gives me an indication of other keywords associated with Guitar Looping that I could use as my main Keyword for the site.

For the purpose of this challenge I am looking for ‘buying keywords’. These are words people type in when they are directed towards a purchase. In the case above, I am going to make the assumption that “guitar loop pedal” is a good buying keyword.

It’s quite a specific thing to type into Google, so people are going to be in some kind of buying mode.

The number of monthly searches for Guitar Loop Pedal is 1600. This isn’t quite as high as I would normally go for, but for the purpose of the duel, I am going to go for it.

Is there much competition?

Whenever you have been looking at the amount of searches a keyword has, you must check the competition

Competition is a whole subject unto itself, but I don’t want to overload this site with too much information.

Just to simplify for now, when I search for “Guitar Loop Pedal” in Google, I find there are just 32,800 other sites. This is a relatively small amount based on the amount of searches.

In the next post we’ll choose a domain name.

What is the Niche Site Duel?

The Niche Site Duel started when Pat was challenged by blogger Tyrone Shum to develop a profit generating online micro business.

I’ve been into niche marketing on and off, but never really had a challenge to get my teeth into, so I have decided to give it a go.

I’ll be documenting as much of the process as possible on this blog so you can follow along. Including all the mistakes so you can avoid them.

Why so transparent?

This is a risk being so open in what i’m about to embark upon. However, I am going to trust that there are more people out there that will benefit from seeing the process of making money in full than there are people that will just want to rip off the niche I am choosing to make money in. We’ll see.

So… what’s a Niche?

Let’s get this out the way quick, so we are all clear on what is going on. A niche is a certain segment of the population where you intend to concentrate your marketing efforts.

What’s the process of making money with a niche?

There are many many ways of making money online. If you tried to do them all you would give up very quickly. Trust me, i’ve tried loads.

For the purpose of this project, there will be a process that I will be following. 90% of what I do will be guided by a product I purchased from someone I trust called Gary Gregory. The product is called M.O.B.S (My Online Business Strategy) and it’s created for people that want to make money selling other people’s stuff.

I have the permission of Gary, to give you some insights into his system while I take on the Niche Site Challenge. If you choose to buy his system from a link on this site, I will get a commission. Which would be nice

The strategy pretty much boils down to this six step process:

1. Find a niche.
2. Build a site.
3. Create content.
4. Get some traffic.
5. Traffic clicks on affiliate links or adverts on site.
6. Make money.

Starting to choose a Niche

All of this process starts with choosing a niche that you can work on. One that will make you money.

There’s many many ways to start to choose a niche. You can look at an area you are interested in.  You could check out the top selling books on Amazon to get an idea of what people’s needs and wants are. You can see what is selling on ebay.

I went for a slightly different approach on this.

I didn’t want to work on a niche that interested me too much because it could easily become a distraction to my other large projects.

So I found a niche that brother is interested in instead.

Each time I met him, which was usually at dinner time, he kept going on about Guitar Looping…

In the next post i’ll tell you how I dug into Guitar Looping to find a topic that would make a good niche site.