Niche Site Challenge Update #3 – Creating Passive Income Is Not So Passive After All

Creating Sites is Hard Work

I’ve been busy for the past little while, working on niche site #1′s marketing strategy and also starting up niche site #2.  Creating these things is hard work!  Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s easy in the beginning.  It’s the exact opposite.  I’ve put in so much time and effort into certain parts of the project that it becomes difficult to stay focused and motivated at all times.

On the bright side, I moved up a notch to rank 28 for my primary keyword and started to move upwards for some of my other related keywords.  I got onto page #1 of a Google search for the term!  I still can’t believe that it’s only been about 2.5 weeks since I started this whole affair. I think that I’m making good progress although tracking (Google Analytics) tells me that I’m not getting many visitors per day.  Being stuck on page #3 of the search results for my main keyword sucks and I can see why getting to the first page is so important.

I’d like to take a moment to outline the experience so far.

Research Takes Time

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Finding a good keyword to market for takes awhile.  A long while. Having never done keyword research before I watched a few videos and purchased Market Samurai and got going with it.  I think that I spent a total of three days going full throttle looking for that low-hanging fruit that ended up being my primary keyword.  The key here is not to suffer from analysis paralysis too much.  Sometimes, I tend to over-analyze things before acting upon them, especially in this case where I had never done keyword research before.  The concept is simple enough, but in practice it took at lot longer than I thought it would.  The key here is to take decisive action and act quickly and efficiently.  You need to think outside of the box when looking for terms that people are searching for yet are marketable at the same time, so you can push your site up the ranks.

Content Creation Takes More Time

I find that writing articles is fairly straightforward, although it takes a little more time when you’re writing about a subject that you know nothing about due to the research involved. You have to be able to research quickly and come up with you article in a matter of an hour or two.  That’s fairly easy to do when most niche site content is less than 1000 words per post, but it still could take an hour or so.  Where you run into overtime is when you need to start adding pictures, worry about formatting, on-page SEO, writing appropriate title, description, and keyword meta information, etc.

If you’re willing to invest a little into your site, you can outsource content creation to places like oDesk, TextBroker, The Content Authority, and Fiverr for example.  You can find writers to write content for you – at a price.  This is something that I’m trying with niche site #2 in order to see if it’s worth the money invested versus the time (and sanity) saved.

Traffic Generation and Marketing Takes Even More Time

This is essentially what slowed me down the most.  I chose to use a marketing strategy that was straightforward and simple enough to understand for niche site #1.  Unfortunately, I had no idea how much time and effort that it would entail.  If you’re familiar with article spinning, you’ll know what I’m talking about.  Taking an article from scratch that you’ve written and spinning it (essentially creating a special text file full of synonyms for the words that you wrote in the article) takes a massive amount of time.  The purpose, of course, is to create spun versions of the original article for submission to article directory sites so that the content is all unique.  This is to save you time from manually submitting to all of them.  It still took me about 3-4 hours to spin each article that I wrote and that’s not including the time I spent to learn how to use the software.  This is a huge time sink and must be done correctly if you want legible text after you’ve spun it.  Not to mention, it’s the most ridiculously boring exercise.  Fortunately, there are places where you can outsource this stuff.  Again, I’ll explore that for niche site #2.

Where I’m Going From Here

I’ve joined a membership website, Niche Site Mastery, as it best fits my profile for what I want out of a passive income lifestyle.  The site keeps me extremely busy and I plan to roll out many sites in the coming weeks.  More updates will come, but for now, let’s just say that I have a lot of projects in the works.

Tags: Niche, Passive Income

Category: Passive Income