Developing Money Making Niche Sites with WordPress
The Good The best part about Caroline’s book is the sections on how to setup WordPress. She walks through setting up WordPress using Fantastico De Luxe that is available from most web hosts that offer the cPanel web hosting control panel. Once WordPress is setup she shows you how to change your permalink structure, add a new theme, add some plugins like the WordPress Database Backup plugin, All in One SEO Pack, and how to activate the Akismet Spam Filtering plugin. These are all pretty straight forward and good advice for people just getting started with WordPress.
The Bad The ebook walks you through setting a niche website, so instead of creating posts, you create pages. This is essentially the same as creating an old fashioned static website that you will add content to and then let it sit. Why do this? According to Caroline:
Why would you want to? Because one of the most common ways to make money on the Internet today is to pick a popular topic and put together a small website consisting of articles related to that topic and monetize the site with ads. The traffic comes from search engines and once the site is setup, it just runs on auto-pilot.
I have to question whether making niche websites that never get updated is still popular. Sure if you visit web master forums and check the sites for sale section you will find any number of niche websites for sale, but the money being made is not from running the websites, it is from creating them and selling them. Not to say you can’t make money from a niche website. I have the odd one and they can bring in some money, but the energy it takes to promote them and rank them high in the search engines to make decent money can be difficult depending on the niche.
For you to make more than enough for coffee on a daily basis you could build ten of them or a hundred and just let them sit, but then you could just go and use a free service such as Blogger to create the sites. Your development time would be less and you would not have to cover any hosting or domain name costs. Some people would consider Caroline’s method to be just another way of creating spam blogs, or splogs.
Overall Caroline has done some good work on the ebook, and I believe the sections on installing WordPress and WordPress plugins would be helpful to people just starting out with WordPress or for those that just want a handy reference of things that they need to do when they install WordPress again. I have to question the overall value of creating a niche site the way she describes. At the very least if you do create a site similar to this one I would highly recommend you consider adding a blog portion to the site that you update. This will help provide more value to your readers and hopefully draw them back to your site.
As a side note Caroline also recommends using BlueHost for your niche site. I have used BlueHost in the past and did not have a very good experience with their service. Perhaps it has improved since I had an account with them, but I would recommend you explore another web host. I like Hostgator, which is where Epiblogger is hosted currently. Rhett has been using MidPhase lately and appears to be happy with their service. Two other possibilities for you to consider.
Edit: Opps I was wrong about Rhett’s web host. The nameservers said midPhase but the actual host is AN Hosting.
Comments
Rhett Soveran
Technically, it's AN, but that's just because of the pack differences and not the company. I just thought I would add that AN Hosting has been pretty good, but I have had to contact them a few times because my site wasn't technically down, but it wasn't really running either (it would load after three minutes or so). However that has been fairly infrequent, but it has happened.
Lee Robertson
Opps, sorry about that Rhett. I looked up the nameservers and it said MidPhase. I will correct it.
Simonne
I'd rather say that one can make money with a niche blog, than with a niche site which is made once for all and never updated afterwards. I tried this version, I've built a few sites in several niches two years ago; in a coupe of months they started to produce some money, but because they were not updated anymore, after about 6 months they lost most of the rankings, so I didn't see that as a viable solution to get some residual income. It's better to build niche blogs, and remove the date from all posts, but keep updating the blog at least once a month.
Lee Robertson
Thanks Simonne. I think that is what I was trying to get at. I have several niche sites and while together they make enough money to pay for a coffee every other day, they just don't rank high enough to bring in tons of traffic. A niche blog I run on the other hand does bring in regular traffic and has a good click through rate and it continues to grow in both traffic and search engine ranking.
Jeffro2pt0
I use AnHosting as well and have been very pleased with my hosting experience through them. Although I find out recently that AnHosting has been acquired by another company, it hasn't affected my hosting service.
ram
I didn't read the ebook, but i agree with you on this. Creating sites with few pages won't work in the long run. If you don't update these sites regularly they won't make enough money
Martin Tips
Just found your site by accident doing a search for something completely unrelated. Looks like you have some good stuff here! Added your RSS feed to my rss reader, looking forward to reading more.
Lee Robertson
Martin, Glad you like our blog. Looking forward to the conversations as we grow.
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