How To Setup A Profitable Blog Or Mini Site Part 2 - Site Creation
Inthe first article in this series we looked at the first step tocreating a successful blog or mini site namely, the selection of atruly profitable niche.
Once your niche is selected, you obviously need to create a website to capitalize on it.
Blogsin particular have become such a popular choice for niche marketersbecause of their extreme ease of use, ease in maintaining, and ease inupdating. Not to mention that the structure of a blog is generally bynature, search engine friendly. AND furthermore, where it isn't, thereis always a third party plugin to make it so.
There are manyways to create a successful blog, and the one you choose should reflectan understanding of your target market. What we'll look at here is anexample of one such method, that focuses on the generation of freetraffic, and the promotion of an affiliate program for monetization.
Thefirst thing you need to do is create a blog that's visually oraesthetically sound. A visually sound blog, other than just lookingpretty, is arranged in a way that maximizes all the content you create,by maintaining your readers attention, and drawing the most attentionto your affiliate program.
There are a few ways you want to do this:
1.Choose a blog theme with a predominantly white background and withblack text. Simple advice, but often ignored. Black on white is theeasiest for the eyes to read. Other colour schemes can quickly tire theeyes and make it hard to maintain concentration.
2. Choose aclean and neat theme. You don't want too much going on. It should bevery clear where your content is located, very clear where your sidebarand navigation is located, where your other categories can be viewedand so forth. If a reader comes from a search engine, they should knowexactly where they have to click to get the information they want.Generally I say the less options the better in terms of other featureson your blog.
3. There are certain pages you absolutely want tohave on your site. These are a Privacy Policy page, an About Us page,and a Contact us page. Google in particular looks at these things asindicators of a serious, quality, non spammy site. Furthermore, youwant to have an archives page (easily achieved by the SRG CleanArchives plugin if you use Wordpress), so as not to have your archivestaking up valuable room in your blog sidebar.
There are more factors but for the sake of this article not being 9000 words, we'll move on.
Once you have an aesthetically pleasing blog, you need some reader pleasing content.
We'regoing to assume here that you have a product selected. Of course thenext step after picking your niche (sometimes these tasks are one andthe same) is to select a product that you'll promote to the niche. Thisis where you'll earn your cash.
So once you've got a productselected, and the base of a good blog created as above, your job is tocreate some content that the people in your niche will find valuableand use that content to drive your website's visitors to the merchant'spage and earn an affiliate commission.
At this point, you shouldhave your niche's keywords researched - by that I mean you should havesome idea of what might be a good place to attack the niche from.Ideally you'd have some keyphrase related to your niche that areuncompetitive in terms of the number of pages optimized for them in thesearch engines.
Where you'd ideally start your content creationis by writing an article on this uncompetitive term, posting it on yoursite and getting it ranked in the search engines. From here, you candevelop as much content on search phrases from your niche, as youdesire (remember you got those phrases from a tool like the Wordtrackerkeyword tool) in order to increase traffic to your site.
Somefactors we didn't get to mention in this article are things like Onpage optimization, making your pages of content rank well in the searchengines - and monetization - the art of getting the highest percentageof visitors to your site actually making you money. But for a basicoverview, I think we've done alright.
Once your niche is selected, you obviously need to create a website to capitalize on it.
Blogsin particular have become such a popular choice for niche marketersbecause of their extreme ease of use, ease in maintaining, and ease inupdating. Not to mention that the structure of a blog is generally bynature, search engine friendly. AND furthermore, where it isn't, thereis always a third party plugin to make it so.
There are manyways to create a successful blog, and the one you choose should reflectan understanding of your target market. What we'll look at here is anexample of one such method, that focuses on the generation of freetraffic, and the promotion of an affiliate program for monetization.
Thefirst thing you need to do is create a blog that's visually oraesthetically sound. A visually sound blog, other than just lookingpretty, is arranged in a way that maximizes all the content you create,by maintaining your readers attention, and drawing the most attentionto your affiliate program.
There are a few ways you want to do this:
1.Choose a blog theme with a predominantly white background and withblack text. Simple advice, but often ignored. Black on white is theeasiest for the eyes to read. Other colour schemes can quickly tire theeyes and make it hard to maintain concentration.
2. Choose aclean and neat theme. You don't want too much going on. It should bevery clear where your content is located, very clear where your sidebarand navigation is located, where your other categories can be viewedand so forth. If a reader comes from a search engine, they should knowexactly where they have to click to get the information they want.Generally I say the less options the better in terms of other featureson your blog.
3. There are certain pages you absolutely want tohave on your site. These are a Privacy Policy page, an About Us page,and a Contact us page. Google in particular looks at these things asindicators of a serious, quality, non spammy site. Furthermore, youwant to have an archives page (easily achieved by the SRG CleanArchives plugin if you use Wordpress), so as not to have your archivestaking up valuable room in your blog sidebar.
There are more factors but for the sake of this article not being 9000 words, we'll move on.
Once you have an aesthetically pleasing blog, you need some reader pleasing content.
We'regoing to assume here that you have a product selected. Of course thenext step after picking your niche (sometimes these tasks are one andthe same) is to select a product that you'll promote to the niche. Thisis where you'll earn your cash.
So once you've got a productselected, and the base of a good blog created as above, your job is tocreate some content that the people in your niche will find valuableand use that content to drive your website's visitors to the merchant'spage and earn an affiliate commission.
At this point, you shouldhave your niche's keywords researched - by that I mean you should havesome idea of what might be a good place to attack the niche from.Ideally you'd have some keyphrase related to your niche that areuncompetitive in terms of the number of pages optimized for them in thesearch engines.
Where you'd ideally start your content creationis by writing an article on this uncompetitive term, posting it on yoursite and getting it ranked in the search engines. From here, you candevelop as much content on search phrases from your niche, as youdesire (remember you got those phrases from a tool like the Wordtrackerkeyword tool) in order to increase traffic to your site.
Somefactors we didn't get to mention in this article are things like Onpage optimization, making your pages of content rank well in the searchengines - and monetization - the art of getting the highest percentageof visitors to your site actually making you money. But for a basicoverview, I think we've done alright.
