Niche Site Experiment 05: How To Build A Website (Before You Add Your Pillar Posts)

There are many different ways how to build a website BUT there’s a major difference between building a site that makes few dollars a month  and an authority site that creates a full time income for you.

It all begins with the site structure and on-site SEO.
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I’ll  go through my exact process of  setting up my niche sites and how I plan them for growth.

It’s easy to follow and it doesn’t require much know-how.

The first thing that you need to think about is what’s your  site’s domain name is going to be and how it’s related to growth.

This is VERY IMPORTANT and which I did the wrong way before I get my hands on RankXL Niche Site Course .

Why does your site’s domain name is so important?

Because it tells visitors what your site is about.

When I created my niche sites before I used to get a domain name that have my main keyword in it, you know those keywordkeywordkeyword.com.

If I will be doing my old way of selecting a domain name, since my main keyword for my niche site is stock market investing, it will be something like stockmarketinvesting.com or something similar if that domain is already taken.

There is nothing wrong with that, but it limits me to talking about stock market investing only.

It will be weird if I talk about entrepreneurship on it.

In choosing your site's domain name you must think first about your long term vision for your site.
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Is your niche big?

Can you expand your site into multiple categories and create a thousand of pages for it?

If not, then your domain name SHOULDN’T be specific to that niche.

I’ll give you my niche site as an example.

Remember the “stock market investing” keyword that I analyzed here?

The main keywords for that niche get more than 1,000,000 searches per month IF I combine them together into a Pillar Keyword.

But honestly, it not possible to expand an authority to hundreds and thousands of pages in the stock market niche.

That’s one of the reason Investopedia.com was name that way.

So they can talk about different kinds of investing, even personal finance and not being tied into one type of investment only.

THEREFORE, I would NOT name my site something like “stockmarketinvesting.com” because that pretty much limits me to ONLY talk about stock market investing.

I hope it does make sense?

So what I did is think of a domain name where I can talked about different topic like stock market investing, personal finance, entrepreneurship, real estate, personal finance and even interpreneurship.

That where I have come up with my domain name www.wealthstrategies.com.ph

Why is this so important?

I hope you know why already.

If you don’t, I haven’t done a good enough job explaining how an authority site works. It’s a site that is an ultimate resource for my selected niche.

That’s why I don’t want to limit my site’s growth by having a limited number of things I can talk about.

With this set up, I’ll be able to target new niches as categories and rank page for them so much faster than if I were to start a new site.

I will put much work  to build up authority to my site.

And I’m going to take advantage of its power,  the ability to scale.

With this set up I’ll be able to target new niches like what i mention above as categories and rank page for them so much faster than if I will to start a new site and start the process all over again.

What does that mean for my site if stock market investing turns into a category?

I’ll  still going to target only stock market investing in the beginning of the site.

However, because my site is now about “Wealth Strategies”, the homepage will be titled around Wealth Strategies, of course.

I’ll also be able to target that as its own keyword, and it should rank itself naturally in the long-run.

Then, stock market investing will be turned into a category, and I’ll have the option to add the other niches in as additional categories in the future.

I don’t need to add everything at once if I don’t want to, but I will because one of my strategy for content creation aside from getting it from iWriter, and Easy PLR  ,  is ILT (Invest, Learn and Teach) and I want to teach what I am currently learning as I learn them.

Now that I have decided with the domain name, It’s time to set up my blog

For my niche site experiment , I’ll be using my a WordPress blog with a domain and hosting from my hating company HostMonster.com.

There are many other blogging platforms  you could choose from, when I started blogging I use Blogger (because it’s free) , there are also Typepad,Moveable Type and Weebly.

However WordPress is the most popular, and it is what I am using now to run all my websites. And it’s easy to use, with lots of FREE themes and plug ins to choose from.

Do note that there’s two type of WordPress The .com and .org.

The .com is like Blogger where you can setup your blog for free.

You don’t need to pay for anything, and you can have a blog up and running in no time.

Though like blogger where your website ends with .blogspot.com which not only doesn’t looks like you mean business and needless to say hard to remember, It also decreases it’s authority in the search engines and it could be taken down anytime.

The .org is where you can download WordPress to put on your own hosted domain.

There is an installation process that can hold some people back, which is why I recommend using a hosting service like HostMonster.com because you can get your domain and hosting cheap, and it only takes a simple click of one button to install WordPress on your site.

Lets set up our niche site

1. How To Install WordPress in HostMonster.com

a.Log in into your Hostmonster account

b. Click C Panel

c.Click on Install WordPress

d. Click on Install

e. Select a domain where you want to install WordPress

f. Tick the check boxes then enter your preferred Site name, Admin Username and Admin Password then click Install Now

g. There you go, you have installed WordPress on your website.

2. Installing necessary plug ins

As far as plugins are concerned, I install the following  plugins immediately after WordPress is loaded

A. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is one of many SEO plugins out there for WordPress. In my opinion, it’s the best one. For one, it does everything I need it to do and I never have any bugs with it.

Secondly, it’s constantly updated and free of bugs and vulnerabilities.

Third, it’s one of the most widely used and documented plugins out there. I’ll go over how to set it up in the next section.

B. SumoMe

SumoMe is a free plugin that, once installed, gives you a bunch of free tools to grow your site’s traffic and email list.

C. Q2W3 Fixed Widget

It increases your sidebar CTR percentage a ton. This plugin allows you to make any widget “sticky” so it will follow you down the page as you scroll.

D. Display Widgets

Sometimes, you want to display a widget ad on some pages, and hide them on others. This plugin does that for you with the click of a button.

All you need to do is set the widget settings to display/hide on specific pages.

E. W3 Total Cache

The plugin that increases your site speed a TON.

The difference is like night and day.

This is because this plugin creates separate html files of your pages and loads that instead.

The result? Instant loading pages that are impossible to achieve through WordPress without it.

F. EWWW image optimizer

The EWWW Image Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that will automatically optimize your images as you upload them to your blog.

Thus, makes your pages load faster

3. My Theme

Right now, the look of the theme isn’t actually that important, since no one is going to visit my site until it’s on the first page of Google, which is my top priority.

But I have already bought and decided what theme I would use for my niche site/s and it is a theme called MH NewsDesk by MH Themes 

Here is the screen shot of MH News Desk Demo, If you want to try the Demo and see how the site works, Click Here

OTHER POSTS IN THE NICHE SITE EXPERIMENT SERIES:

 Niche Site Experiment 01 – The Plan: Turn AdSense into a Full Time Income

Niche Site Experiment 02 – Finding my Profitable Niche

Niche Site Experiment 03: How To Do A Competitor Analysis

Niche Site Experiment 04: My Content Creation Strategy

Niche Site Experiment 06: Best Way To Get Backlinks That Are High Quality (AND FREE)

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