I have wanted to get into making niche websites for a while now. I constantly come up with what I think are brilliant ideas and I start them and don’t finish or I don’t start them at all.
I am going to continue with the site that I created a couple of months ago that I haven’t done much with yet. I decided to join in Niche Site Duel 2.0 (NSD2.0) that Pat Flynn is hosting on Smart Passive Income so that I will follow through.
Site Selection
The site that I will be trying to rank in Big G and make money with is Coon Hunters Club.
I have a good friend who is helping me out with all of the information. I chose this topic because I know a lot of people who are obsessed with coon hunting and they spend A LOT money on it. I needed a topic that would have relatively low competition and has the potential to make money.
I had thought of other topics as well but when I checked the competition for this particular subject I felt the most confident that I could out do the competition.
I chose the phrase coon hunters club because I think it will be fairly easy to rank for. I wanted the site to just be called coon hunters, but that was taken so I chose coon hunters club.
Pat suggests that the keyword you want to rank for has at least 3,000 local searches per month. Here are the statistics for the term coon hunters.
So you can see there are 3600 local searches for ‘coon hunters’ and 880 local searches for ‘coon hunters club.’
According to Longtail Pro I am ranking number 13 in Google for the term ‘coon hunters club’ and number 26 for the term ‘coon hunters.’ I have barely done any back linking work so I think that these results are a good indicator that this site will be successful with some work.
Content Creation
So far I have 12 articles posted. There were base articles. There is one on each breed of coon dog and includes their history, strengths, and weaknesses.
I paid a writer on Odesk $3 apiece for the articles. They were poorly written but saved me from having to do a lot of research. I heavily edited the articles and fixed all of the grammar mistakes and run on sentences.
I also went back and paid $4 apiece for ten more articles. These articles covered basic coon hunting tips. Once again they are poorly written but I have the information I need and something to work off of.
Now that I have most of the basics either published or ready to be edited and published I am going to write the rest of the articles myself. I am also going to focus a lot of time on doing product reviews.
Pat Flynn suggests making a list of 50 articles that can be written on the topic so I pulled out a spread sheet and began listing ideas.
The Ultimate Resource
For this site to be successful it has to be helpful. I am not impressed with any of the other websites on this topic. I think I can make my website a lot more helpful than what is already out there.
Besides all of the articles that will be posted, I wanted to have a resource on the site that people would be searching for. I decided that I would make a list and link to all of the coon hunters clubs across the country. This way anyone who is searching for a coon hunters club will find the list and hopefully stick around awhile longer.
Money
As of now I have $106 dollars invested in this site. $36 on a domain name and one year’s hosting through Go Daddy (after coupon codes) and $70 on articles. I don’t plan to spend any more money on this site unless necessary.
I will use Amazon affiliate links and Google Ad Sense as the primary monetization methods. I will document the everything I do and the sites success of failure on here.
I am not sure that it is a good idea for me to link to the site through here, but if you guys want to check it out visit www(dot)coonhuntersclub(dot)com
Come back and let me know what you think.
Sounds interesting! I’ve thought about doing a niche site, but I simply do not have the time right now but perhaps will revisit it at some point in the near future. Good luck!
Thanks John!
Very cool! I have only though about joining this duel a little bit. I need to research some more beforehand!
Yeah it took me a while to choose a topic. We’ll see how it goes!
Alexa: You Rock ! It looks like you did a great job with your selection. Keep us posted !
~ Christie
Thank you, Christie!! 🙂
Well done, I had a look at the site and it’s great. I don’t know anything about coons but what I do know is when I moved to Canada I came face to face with the biggest coon ever in a garbage bin. He/she was not happy that I was there so I was not going to stick around to have tea either. Cheers and looking forward to hearing how the site goes for you.
Yeah coons are pretty mean. I am luck to have some experts here to help me with the information for the site :). I am from a small country town and coon hunting is very popular here. Thanks for checking my site out!
Ooooooh! Me likey. I’ve been thinking about doing this as well. I adore Pat Flynn. Wishing you tons of luck. And congratulations on taking the leap.
I noticed Pat Flynn has a new niche site thing going on. That is probably why I’m having such a hard time finding keywords that are low ranking – because his million of followers are eating up my potential keywords! 🙂
That’s great that you are already ranking so highly. I can’t break page 2 of the SERP with my site. I’m sure that with a little bit of backlink diversification you could be number 1.
If you don’t mind, for the income part I’d recommend focusing on the Amazon products or other CPC. The Adsense CPC is pretty low at $0.60, meaning you’d probably only stand to make somewhere between $30 and $60 per month if you were to hit number 1.
Have you considered using a hosting account that lets you host unlimited domains? For example my iPage account that I use for My Money Design lets me host as many websites as I want. So really any niche sites I create like my IRA vs 401k one is basically only $12 extra and it just rides on my hosting account for free. Just an idea.
Usually you can only link to your own websites a very small amount of times. I think I have only about 3 links between my sites. I have noticed that anytime I do more than that Google penalizes it and my site falls way off the grid. When I remove the link, it comes back to #14 in the search results. They are always watching …. 🙂
I very much appreciate your advice. I am thinking getting visitors will be the easy part but converting them into customer will be the hard part. I need to think of some sort of strategy.
You are on Page One of my Google search for ” coon hunting club”. You are Rockin It !
I hope it keeps up. My rank seems to be fluxuating a lot.
Brilliant! I’m definitely interested in joining this challenge…just need to filter through some of the ideas I have for niche sites.
I think its a great idea to join. Even if our sites don’t do as well as we hoped this is a great learning experience!
Hi Alexa congratulations on taking part in Niche Site Duel 2.o, I’m also participating and have just purchased the domain name I want. I just want to say to others that are thinking about taking part to stop thinking about it and join in. All the best to you Alexa I’m looking forward to reading your follow up posts on your progress. Good luck to everyone else who is participating too.
Thank you! If you are posting about your process I will be sure to check your progress as well. Good Luck!!
Well Done! Ive decided to take part in NSD 2.0 as well. Still looking into finding my niche.
Interesting topic. Good luck to you!
Wow already great numbers, that’s HOT I’m entering the duel too I already picked my keyword “online boutique” had a bunch of content created and this weekend I’m building the site. It’s great to see someone already up, running, and rocking it.
Thanks for the inspiration
Great article and I too have joined in Pats Niche site duel. One tip…….for content I use textbroker.com , level 3 and find the quality to be pretty good. Most are good enough to require very little editing and its good for putting content on your sites.
Hey,
great to hear about your site, I think this niche site has true potential. Would love to read an update as I see you posted this in May.:-)
I am also participating in Pats duel, but I can’t show any rankings yet. I hope my site will jump in SERPs soon.
Cheers,
Phil
Wow you go! I’m a huge fan of SmartPassiveIncome and it’s great to stumble on to someone who’s doing it (I came here from MoneySavingMom). I hope it works wells for you. I was a single mom of four kids for five years and it was the hardest job I ever did.
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I don’t know anything about coons, but I fish and know how much I spend on that. I like your single mom site. It looks amazing. How does it do? I’ll be trying to learn from you. I’m not sure how to make money with my site yet, but I’m learning a lot about what not to do?
I have noticed that I am ranking higher with blogger urls. You might want to try a free blogger blog just to see how it ranks. Google does own blogger it only makes sense they would rank it slightly higher.
Bid on keywords that are relevant to your industry. Everything depends on the location of their customers websites on this
page of results. When you provide value to your customers via the content on your website, search
engines will come to know the value of your website and rank
it accordingly.
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Hi Alexa,
When I started my first niche site back in the day – waaaay before WordPress when coding was the only way to go, I chose a niche I thought would be helpful to young women – especially, and it took off instantaneously. Of course there wasn’t so much competition as there is today, and the internet was less saturated, but the income that site has generated and is still generating today (thanks to Google adsense!) is amazing!
I’m saying all this to say, that like anything else, if you believe in what you are doing it will yield favorable results – if you continue on with it. You may not see the results immediately, but your belief and the work you put in it, will pull those results in. I don’t know much about coons, but I guarantee your audience is out there somewhere just waiting for a platform like yours to get on board with.
So,
Keep on rocking it!