PNUO

Due to the ease of setting up a WordPress blog, one growing method of generating income online has been the method of building niche blogs using WordPress.

What is a Niche Blog?

Niche blogs (also known as keyword sniping blogs) are mini blogs/websites that are designed specifically to appeal to a very specific niche. Due to the size of the internet and the amount of content out there, niche blogs tend to be VERY specific (customized Nike golf balls, Chicago lasik surgery, Iowa prenuptial agreements, Baltimore debt consolidation, etc.).

One of the huge benefits on niche blogging is that they are very low maintenance. Once you’ve built your blog and written 10-20 posts, there should be little to no maintenance going forward, with the exception of keyword adjustments or upgrading your WordPress installation every once in a while.

Niche Blogging Strategy

Some may find niche blogs a little deceptive, but truthfully, they are incredible ways to fill “search gaps” in search engines. Have you ever searched for something and found inadequate information available? The goal of a niche blogger is to fill these gaps and profit at the same time.

Here are a few techniques you should know when building niche blogs:

1. Include an About and Contact Page – According to Aaron Wall and several other prominent SEO’s, Google in particular has started removing sites from their index that don’t include both. I would expect this trend to continue in the future. You’ll also want to avoid “spammy” things like using the WordPress default template (I have seen reports of niche blogs getting banned for something as simple as this default theme).
2. Avoid duplicate content – This may seem obvious, but duplicate content is an easy way for search engines to identify your blog as spam.
3. Link to your homepage – If your blog’s name (and especially the URL) uses your niche blogs keywords, then you will get natural links using your desired keywords from other sources. In the meantime, you want to pick 3-5 keywords you would like to rank in and work them into each post on your webpage, linking to your homepage.

How to Locate a Niche?

There is no guarantee that any niche will work, but the very small cost of building a niche website (WordPress is free so you just need under $10.00 for a domain name and your time) allows niche bloggers to create a large number of websites for minimal costs, and then work on expanding the ones that appear to be working. The first thing you need is to find an under-utilized keyword that receives traffic, then go out and try to find a keyword-rich domain to use.

If you don’t want to purchase software like Micro Niche Finder (which is what I use), then you can use one of the free tools online, such as Aaron Wall’s SEO keyword tool. Though the numbers aren’t 100% accurate, you can use this tool to try similar keywords that receive daily traffic. Then you need to do a Google search and compare how many results are available for that search term and how relevant the top displaying sites are.

How to find a Niche Domain?

In order to find a good keyword-rich domain, you’re next going to want to go to Google’s free AdWords tool and search for the keyword you found above during your niche research. This tool was designed to show you how much AdWords competition there is over your keyword and similar keywords, but for this purpose you will want to export the results into Microsoft Excel (or whichever spreadsheet software you use). Now make a copy and go to GoDaddy’s bulk search feature. Even if you don’t want to register with GoDaddy, you can still use their bulk search tool to figure out which keyword domains are available to register. Here you’ll want to paste all of your keywords into this box, check .com, and do your search. This tool will go out and provide you with any available .com keyword domains. If you aren’t finding much, you can try searching for .net as well, as the search engines see them equally.

Finding a WordPress Niche Theme?

Once you’ve got your domain name, you’ll want to install WordPress on the domain (or use Fantastico to install WordPress) and go pick out your theme/plugins you want to use. With your first niche website, this step will probably take awhile as you take an existing theme and customize it to fit your specific needs. Some things I look for when picking out a niche theme:

1. 3-column centered theme – For some reason, for niche themes, I’ve always loved having two sidebars with the content in the middle. This gives you a lot of opportunities to integrate Google AdSense ads as well as affiliate links and make them look more natural.
2. No Banner Required – There are a number of themes that insert the blog’s title and description for you, negating the need for a custom made banner. This doesn’t mean you can’t add one, but at least it isn’t required.
3. No Dates – If your theme displays the post date, you’ll want to remove this. This is because niche blogs generally don’t get updated after 10-20 posts and you don’t want your search engine traffic to know that your most recent posts may be months or even years old.

Probably my favorite theme that I’ve found so far is the Maggo Mag theme, which we covered on Hack WordPress. You’ll have to remove the date, but it provides a professional look and allows you to easily integrate your banners/advertisements and affiliate links.

Completing Your WordPress Niche Blog

Though you can certainly use portions of commonly referred to articles found in search engines at places like Wikipedia, you’re going to want to make sure that you’ve written 10-20 quality and original articles that fit within your niche. If you find your posts are short, feel free to quote other articles as a small part of your post to help lengthen them a bit, but make sure that a majority of the post is completely original and of course you’ll want to link to the original post. Otherwise, keep external links to a minimum, as you want to filter your search engine traffic to your advertisements/affiliate links (avoid overdoing it with AdSense). You’ll want to make sure you link to your homepage using slightly different desired keyword anchor text in each post. This helps you build a good internal linking structure that emphasizes your homepage to search engines.

Once you’ve completed your niche blog, think of it as a seed you’ve planted. It may take a week or two before it gets indexed by Google, and it will likely be in Google’s Search Engine Sandbox for 3-6 months, so simply work on building links and in time your seed will sprout into a money maker!