How to build a niche site with a blog
Building niche sites is all the rage these days.
The basic strategy is very simple. Find a niche that is not oversaturated. Develop a list of related keywords that people search for. Then write an optimized article for each of your keywords. Once you have your articles, upload them to your site. Monitor your site with affiliate links and Adsense.
For this type of niche site to be effective and make money, it is imperative that you get free traffic and much more. And that’s exactly where a blog can be your best friend.
In its simplest form, a blog is just a structure. They are the bones of a website. A blog is an easy way to publish and display your content online. Most of us think of blogging as a chronicle of news events or comments on news and articles of interest. Or personal diaries.
Few people stop to think that any type of website can be built with a blog. Actually, a blog can be used very effectively to create a niche site. The fact is, a blog is the easiest way to publish your niche site content. But the most important reason to use a blog is that it can generate traffic to your site much faster than a statically built site. A niche site created with a blog is a very powerful strategy.
First, choose your niche and research your keywords. Write your first article based on one of those keywords, just as you would when building a normal site. Then set up your blog and post that article. Your niche site is now live.
For the most effective structure of your site, be sure to choose a blog that allows the use of Categories, such as Word Press or Moveable Type. Use your top 10 keywords as the name of your categories. Then, register all your secondary keyword articles in those categories.
Why is this so important? If you continue to build your site with keyword-rich articles, you could eventually have hundreds of pages. Each of those pages will have a link to its 10 categories. And each of those links will use the anchor text of your most important keywords. As a result of all those keyword-rich internal links, your site will end up ranking very well in search engines for your category names.
Now is the time to configure your traffic strategy. This is where a blog can really shine. There are many special RSS / blog directories that are hungry for feeds. By submitting your new blog to these directories, you can start receiving traffic almost immediately. Very often these feeds will generate much more traffic than all the major search engines combined. This is why it makes so much sense to build your niche site like a blog. You can have twice the traffic and get it much faster than with a static site.
Once you’ve submitted your site to directories, you can get Yahoo indexing it almost immediately by adding your RSS feed to your MyYahoo page. If you don’t have a MyYahoo page, go to http://www.yahoo.com. Now click on the MyYahoo link at the top and set up your free account. Once you’ve set up your account, click Add content, then add your blog’s RSS feed URL in the Search for content box.
When you return to your MyYahoo page, your blog and your first post should be displayed. If you check your site’s web statistics, you will find that the Yahoo spider has already made a visit. Your new site should be indexed on Yahoo in just a couple of days. This is a strategy that some marketers were selling for $ 50 just a few months ago. And it works like a charm.
Every time you add a post, you can alert the RSS / blog directories by “pinging”. There is a wonderful site at http://www.pingomatic.com that makes it very easy. Just type in your blog URL and Pingomatic will ping Yahoo and 15 other large directories. That will get the spiders back on your site almost immediately!
During the first month, I suggest that you write and add a new article every day. Blogs that update frequently get the most traffic. And you will find that the major search engines will crawl your site every day. At the end of a month, you will have a 30 article niche site that is already getting a lot of traffic. If you’ve monetized your site with AdSense and related affiliate programs, you should be making money too.
Once you’ve started building your niche sites with a blog, you’ll never do it the old way again!