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Building a portfolio of profitable niche sites is a
great way of developing a recurring income stream. A
typical niche mini site may only earn you $60 per week but
at that rate, four such sites will generate a yearly income
of over $12,000. I'll let you figure out the earnings
potential of 100 mini sites! The niche mini site strategy is very straightforward.
First, find a niche market with profit potential that isn't
already oversaturated with competitors. Identify a list of
related keywords that people are searching on and then
create keyword rich content pages that are optimized for
each one of your keywords. Traditionally, once you have your content pages, you would
normally upload them to your site and monetize them with
affiliate links and pay-per-click programs such as
Google's Adsense. However, why not make it easy on yourself
and gain an added search engine advantage... We now have access to an easy to use and versatile content
management system that means building a niche mini site can
be done on the fly. Yes, that's right - The Blog! At its very simplest, a blog is just a structure for
managing web content. It's the backbone, or skeleton, of a
web site on which to hang the flesh. A blog is simply an
easy way to enter and publish your content online. Blogs don't just have to be journals, rants, personal
commentaries or diaries; blogs can take on a wide variety
of forms and functions. In fact you can just about build any kind of web site with
a blog. Just think about it - a blog can be used very
effectively to build a niche site. In fact, because they
are so easy to use, blogs are one of the most effective
niche mini site building tools. More importantly, one of the most important reasons for
choosing to use a blog is their attractiveness to the
search engines and the effect they can have on attracting
targeted traffic. According to a study released earlier
this month by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a
full 27 percent of all online users now read blogs, a 58
percent increase from the early part of 2004. So, how can you take advantage of blogging technology to
build a successful niche mini site? First, choose your niche, identify your primary keyword
phrase and pick out about ten secondary keywords - the
remaining keywords that you discover will be used later in
the process. The next step is to compile some relevant content based on
your primary keyword phrase, just as you would when
building a regular site. Then set up an account at
http://www.Blog4Cash.com and publish your primary keyword
content to your main category. Your niche mini site is
already up and running. Now create a new blog category for each of your 10
secondary keywords using each keyword as the name of a
category. The next step is to compile content for each of
the ten keywords and post that content in the appropriate
category. You can then compile content for each of the
remaining keywords and post that content in one of your ten
categories. The more keywords you find the more content you can add to
your blog. I try to aim for at least ten keywords /pages
per category. Eventually you could have hundreds of pages.
Each of those pages will have a link to your 10 Categories.
And each of those links will use the anchor text of your
most important keywords. As a result of all those internal
keyword-rich links, your site will end up ranking very well
in the search engines for your Category names. Your next step is to set up your traffic system. This is
where using a blog to build sites gives you a real
advantage. There are many special RSS/blog directories that
are hungry for feeds. By submitting your new niche blog to
these directories, you will begin getting traffic almost
immediately. Quite often these feeds will result in a lot
more traffic than all the major search engines combined.
This is why it makes so much sense to build your niche site
as a blog. You will enjoy much more traffic, and get it
much faster than with a traditional HTML based site. Here is a list of some of the top specialist directories
you should submit your niche site to:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55 As soon as you've submitted your site to the directories,
it's time to get it indexed by Yahoo! by adding your RSS
feed to your MyYahoo! page. If you don't have a MyYahoo!
page, just go to http://www.yahoo.com. Now click on the
MyYahoo! link at the top and set up your free account. Once
you have your account set up, click on Add Content, then
add the URL of your blog RSS feed into the Find Content box. When you return to your MyYahoo! page, your first niche
blog post should be shown. If you go look at your web stats
for your site, you'll find that the Yahoo! spider has
probably already made a visit. Your new site should be
indexed in Yahoo! in just a couple of days. Every time you add another content page to your blog, you
can alert the RSS/blog directories by "pinging" them. There
is a wonderful site at http://www.pingomatic.com that makes
this very easy. You just have to enter the URL of your blog
and Pingomatic will send your ping to Yahoo and about 15
other large directories. That will bring the spiders back
to your site almost immediately! I would recommend that you write and add a new keyword rich
content page every day until you have between 40 to 60
pages. Blogs that are frequently updated tend to get the
most traffic. After a couple of months, you'll have a 60
page niche site that will already be getting a lot of
traffic. You will also discover that your regular updates
will stimulate the major search engines to spider your site
every day. And, if you've monetized your site with Google
Adsense and relevant affiliate programs, you will also be
making a healthy profit! Once you learned how easy and profitable it is to build
your niche sites with a blog, you'll soon be building more
and more money making niche sites!
John is a prolific writer and is the author of several
books including "Testing & Tracking"
(http://www.Test-and-track.com). John enjoys significant
earnings as a top affiliate across a broad section of niche
markets. He also runs the very popular
http://www.ClickForContent.com web site
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