Explore niche marketing by developing a successful niche marketing website...

In my initial entry on this goal, I outlined 4 separate goals and have reached and surpassed each of them. This is a slow process but I am actually working fulltime from home now.

I’m really excited because this is opening up more opportunities to do some of the things I’ve wanted to do for a while – like my goals of writing devotionals and having an online Bible study. As well as taking some college classes through Moody Bible Institute’s distance learning program.

I’m still not making a ton of money and not getting rich anytime soon, but my wife and I are working to expand this so we can live more comfortably off of the income. We’re also expanding beyond just “niche websites” and are planning to help businesses with their marketing efforts.

It’s been a while since I’ve been on here. I haven’t really had time to do nearly as much work on any of my web projects a I would’ve liked. Still don’t have internet at my house and won’t until after I move back to Oklahoma.

However, I have done some work on this… actually I’ve done quite a bit of planning, and a relatively small amount of work that directly effects this project but the planning is just as(if not more) important.

I have made a bit more money on here… actually enough to meet my first criteria for success(or at least not failure!) – I have earned enough money to pay for the domain names I purchased.

With that in mind, and seeing the potential here, I have actually spent a bit of extra money on some software and tools that will help me see better results in the future.

So even though I got my ROI from the domains that I purchased, I am still technically in the red for this project. I don’t know how long that will take to change, but I don’t expect it to always be that way. I have high hopes for this experiment.

I already have plans for a couple of future projects as well once time permits more.

This update has to do with my original niche idea.

I have not done a whole lot more as far as putting content on the site or getting it listed in the search engines. However, I did contact a company that sells products in my niche to see about a possible affiliate program with them.

I just saw (hadn’t checked today’s emails until after my other posts) that I got a response back from them with some basic info about their affiliate program. I will probably be doing some experimenting with both their affiliate program and Amazon’s (and maybe one or two others for that matter) to see which works best.

This is more on the Google side of things which will tie in with the getting more traffic part…

When I check this morning, I was ranked #24 in Google for one of the key terms I am targeting. Which I would say is a pretty good place to start since I really have not put a ton of time into developing the site (apart from all of the research).

I just checked again and I am at #20 putting me at the bottom of the second page! Soon I’ll be on page one as well as hopefully starting to rank for the other terms I am targeting.

So, I have not made much progress with my original niche idea since my last post. However, I have done a little bit with my second niche idea(though still not a ton of work really).

Yesterday, I got an email from the Amazon affiliate program notifying me that they noticed I hadn’t sold anything yet and giving me a few tips(did not actually read the email).

I kind of laughed to myself thinking it would probably be a little while before I would actually get enough traffic on the site for people to start buying…

Then this morning(Dec 31, 2010) I woke up and did a few routine checks on some stats for the website… and right as I was finishing up I loaded up my amazon account just to see how many clicks I had gotten on my links. On that page I had a little notification saying that I had earned $7.70 the previous night!

Still think I will need to do more work on the site and get more traffic to the site before this becomes a regular occurrence, but I have officially made my first sale from this experiment and I felt pretty giddy throughout the day. There is still plenty of work to be done, but that gives me hope for sure!

And keep in mind here that this web page was 4-5 days old when it made it’s first sale! I think that’s pretty awesome. I look forward to the rest of this experiment as it has truly only just begun.

Alright, so it’s the Christmas weekend, and I spent most of Friday and Sunday at home alone(Saturday I was off celebrating elsewhere). Which means I got some stuff done. For one, I got the bare-bones setup for my online Bible study site, but there is still on ton to do on that and it isn’t completely relevant to this goal.

More on topic, I also got the bare-bones of my first niche website setup, there is still no content on it, and I need to change the layout some, but I was able to start setting things up and planning out the pages some more…

Oh and sorry if this is a bit vague, I’m don’t quite want to let the cat out of the bag as to what niches I chose, but I’m sure I’ll mention sooner or later.
I also did a lot of reading online over the past couple of days.

Something I came across in my reading gave me another idea… and idea that might prove beneficial if it works as I am hoping. It should allow me to jump up in the search engine ranking a bit faster for certain keywords. It has some limitations and I would not want to use it for every project, but I am going to test it out on at least one just as another experiment, and the best part is that it costs me nothing at all to do this experiment!

I’m going to kind of compare the two paths and see how much effort they take vs the results they get. I found a second niche to attempt with the second technique and I’m thinking I will be able to start earning money off of that with less initial effort, and I think it still has decent earning potential… however I think that technique is more limited in how it can be used.

Since that second technique has an easier startup, I went ahead and started with it and it has a small amount of content on the page currently. I will be adding more soon.

Probably my biggest task before things see much/any forward motion will be in writing more content for both of these which may take a while considering that I still have everything else going on, still want to work on setting up that online Bible study, and have now been asked to teach Sunday school for the next 5 weeks (not a bad thing by any means, just will be busy).

After a fair bit of research and digging around, I have decided on a niche to target with my website. I’ll give more of an update on what that is in another post, but I have also purchased a domain name for the website.

I am getting excited as I think about this challenge I am taking on. I have always liked learning new things, and even before I have done much with this other than purchase a domain name I have learned a lot just in the process of searching for a niche that will hopefully be profitable as well as being possible for me to rank my site high in the search engines. I think I have found one that will show decent earnings if I can do it right…

In fact according to some average statistics, it MIGHT be possible for me to progressively reach all levels of success as I defined it in my last post with this one website. Only time will tell if my research will prove true and if my time and energy will pay off though.

If it works and I can hit a top ranking in Google, I have a feeling this won’t be the last time I do this sort of experiment…

After a fair bit of research and digging around, I have decided on a niche to target with my website. I’ll give more of an update on what that is in another post, but I have also purchased a domain name for the website.

I am getting excited as I think about this challenge I am taking on. I have always liked learning new things, and even before I have done much with this other than purchase a domain name I have learned a lot just in the process of searching for a niche that will hopefully be profitable as well as being possible for me to rank my site high in the search engines. I think I have found one that will show decent earnings if I can do it right…

In fact according to some average statistics, it MIGHT be possible for me to progressively reach all levels of success as I defined it in my last post with this one website. Only time will tell if my research will prove true and if my time and energy will pay off though.

If it works and I can hit a top ranking in Google, I have a feeling this won’t be the last time I do this sort of experiment…

I’m curious and while I’m working on setting up the website for my online Bible study goal, I think I am going to do a bit of an experiment with this. I’ll put some of the things I’ve picked up from reading various articles about search engine optimization into effect and hopefully make a bit of money while I’m at it.

For the sake of this experiment, we’ll start out by defining “successful” by varying degrees of success.

First, if I can develop a site that will pay back the cost of the domain name, that will make it not a complete failure :P

Second, if I can get one to the level where it is making enough to pay for my web hosting account, I think I would count that as somewhat of a success. Not going to quit my day job at that point, but it would mean I’m not sinking money into the various websites I’m already hosting which would be cool.

Third, and this one may take a bit of digging and experimenting to find a good niche and also to learn through some mistakes on what works and what doesn’t… I’d like to develop a site that is consistently earning $100/month. Again no reason to quit my day job at that point. But that would not only be a nice little bonus each month, it would also be something that I could hopefully replicate(depending of course on how my experiments go).

Finally, and this is somewhat of a separate category, I would like to get that site to rank #1 on Google for whatever keyword(s) I am targeting.

I’ve never done this kind of thing before though I have thought about it in the past… I know there are people out there doing it successfully though. I do not have the training or the time to put into it that they do, but I am curious to see how well I can do at duplicating a bit of their success.

Always liked a challenge.