Blueprint for Building Niche Websites and Generating Traffic, Followers, Fans, and Revenue

So you want to launch a new website or blog with the purpose of generating revenue through the Internet? What a great idea! Building websites or blogs about certain topics, subjects, or “niches" is a great way to proceed towards this goal for a number of reasons. For one, people love websites and blogs that focus on certain subjects they have interest in. So, make sure to build your niche website or blog with a laser-focus to ensure you will get traffic, repeat visitors, and build a following over time. As you build out your site, your traffic and followings will increase. you can then monetize your site by posting advertisements and follow widgets in the layout, such as:

  • Affiliate banners ads
  • Google Adsense ads
  • Email list sign-up
  • Twitter followers
  • Facebook fans/likes
  • Youtube subscribers
  • LinkedIn connections

All of this can be accomplished with very little cost at all. Niche website/blog building is an integral to publishing content on the web, generating traffic, and therefore monetizing. Content is king and the more fresh content you are able to produce and allow the search engines to index, catalog, and then rank, the more possible traffic you can generate to your sites. Here are some niche website, SEO, social networking, and linking concepts to get you moving in the right direction:

Site Building Tools – I highly recommend WordPress to build sites with. There are many sites builders you can use to get a presence up on the web. Make sure to set it up properly with good page titles and categories. If using WordPress, utilize tagging as well which multiplies the actually amount of spider-able pages on your site. Blogger.com is also a good free platform to use to create a site, add affiliate banners, and start posting fresh content. Many people spend too much of their time working on their site's layout and not enough time producing content and sharing.

Site Organizational Strategy – When you go to launch niche websites, to promote affiliate merchants, make sure to stay organized in a spreadsheet with info like: merchant promoted, platform used to build it, login info (passwords), and posting frequency. This will help you stay organized and will allow you follow a pre-established plan of action. Strategize on posting frequency and article topics to maximize your efforts. Use Google keyword planner to find popular and less popular keyword phrases in your niche to post articles around.

Daily Content Posting – Posting content daily (i.e. articles, bog posts, essays, merchant reviews, or product reviews) is a great way to ensure that the search engines will be coming back to your site frequently to check for new content to catalog. Over time, the more frequently you post, the more pages you will have in the search engine’s repository or "cache." The more pages you have in the search engine's index of pages, the more possible times your site’s pages can come up in the search results for various search terms contained on your pages, i.e. “Purchasing flowers in Las Vegas”. Daily content posting is the best way to increase the number of pages on your site and therefore increase the amount of possible traffic you can generate with that particular site. Posting original content is always the best course of action because the search engines love original content. Try to stay timely with your posts by setting up Google Alerts on your core keyword phrases so you are notified as soon as something new about that subject happens, then you can go make a post on your site about it which can increase your chances to get traffic to that page.

Use the Best Plug-ins to Enhance Your SEO – One of the advantages to using WordPress to build your sites or blogs are all the amazing plug-ins you can add to your site to increase functionality and “stickiness”. Here are some links to the top plug-ins available:

http://yoast.com/top-wordpress-plugins/

http://wphacks.com/wordpress-plugins/

http://mashable.com/2009/03/20/wordpress-seo-plugins/

Social Networking – Create a Twitter account and Facebook Fan Page for each site you wish to build up. Example, you are running a site advertising flower affiliate merchants, so you would create an identity “FlowerGuru” for instance on Twitter and a FlowerGuru Fan Page on FB. Also an account on Instagram and Pinterest posting pictures of flowers. This will allow you to advertise these social profiles on your sites and generate followers and fans. Then, these followers and friends can be engaged and communicated with to generate traffic back to your sites. Social networking is very powerful and shouldn't be used too obnoxiously. Always remain professional and post content you think your followers and fans would benefit from, i.e. helpful tips, informative articles from trusted sources, interactive polls, and great affiliate deals. Try to avoid being annoying because or you will lose followers. You should also have a main personal identity that you can maintain in order to network professionally on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Coupon Promoting – Coupon sites are all the rage because people are increasingly looking for coupons to save money with their online purchases. Many affiliate merchants provide coupon codes to affiliates directly to help them promote something exciting. Some merchants provide coupon feeds that you can grab and publish on your site on a page or per merchant. Posting unique merchant descriptions and merchant reviews will allow your site to rank well for their merchant searches because it has unique content and isn't just posting coupon codes. Unique content is absolutely essentially to good rankings, especially for a coupon site when there is so much competition.

Communities and Forums – Launching your own social community is great way to build something real and substantial that will grow over time. Social communities are great for repeat traffic and building a large member base. Like sites, the larger it builds the more traffic it can generate. Ning.com is a tremendous tool for niche community building, but has a small monthly fee. Vbulletin is great for online forums. Forums and social networks are just more ways to publisher content online, create ad space, and generate traffic. The nice thing is they are built up with user-generated content, which can add a significant amount of content depending on how active your community is. Over time, it can really grow into something formidable. LinkedIn Groups are great to launch and manage for professional discussion forums. Facebook fan pages and Facebook Groups are great for cultivating people into fans and active group members on Facebook.

Link Building Strategies – Acquiring inbound inks to your sites is essential to building better search engine rankings over time. There are many different ways you can get links to your site, such as:

  • Blog Roll Links – When a fellow blogger links to your blog with a site wide link, you can reciprocate with a link. Goes on every page so it can be powerful.
  • Blog Commenting – Posting comments on blogs related to yours. Make good comments or they won’t be approved.
  • Forum Posting with Signature Link – Join multiple forums, set-up signature links, start posting good comments and interacting.
  • Online Press Releases – great for building links from quality news sites. I recommend eReleases.com for maximum distribution and effectiveness.

Site Stickiness – "Site stickiness" is a profound concept to grasp and implement. Making your site more sticky will allow you to capture more from your site’s traffic. Some essential sticky features are: newsletter signup, bookmark this site, social network sharing buttons like follow on Twitter and FaceBook Like. See Sharethis.com and Addthis.com. Basically anything that will help you capture more of your visitor's information. Another great way to engage visitors is to run sweepstakes or contests through tools like Woobox and Wishpond. This is a very effective way of engaging your visitors and capturing them into your web so you can re-market to them later on.

Article Ideas – Coming up with article and blog post ideas can be challenging at times. Look at other related sites and see what they are posting in their blogs and article sections. Here are some examples of article titles:

  • “Top 10 ways to Find a Date Online”
  • “Best Ways to Lose Weight in the New Year”
  • “What are the Top Phone Service Providers for Home Phone Service”
  • “How to start a garden in your backyard”

Also, "how to’s", breaking news, and new product launches are good topics to write about.

Brand Your Affiliate Sites – Creating a brand with your affiliate site or blog is a good idea because people will remember your sites and revisit them frequently. Give people a reason to bookmark your site or join your newsletter. Treat them well and grow them huge over time! Personal branding is all the rage, so make sure to create your memorable brand and then represent it to the fullest online. Anything can work with the right amount of push and effort behind it. I hope you enjoyed some of my niche website building tips. These tips can be used by anyone looking to generate traffic and affiliate commissions.