Week 2 - Wordpress Site Theme and Launching the Blog

We put in 14 hours this week. We confirmed a choice for our niche site topic, found a domain name, chose a theme for the WordPress site, and created a logo.

The great thing about using WordPress and Hostmonster.com is that you can get the site up in just a few clicks and about 5 minutes.

For some reason, it feels like we are already behind. As if the website should be finished by now. In fact, we probably could have finished but a few of our choices have forced us to take longer than normal.

We decided before starting our search that we wanted to do a pregnancy related site. If we just made a list of our interests/hobbies and looked for profitable niches related to them, it would have been easier and faster.
We are very picky on web design. With the niche site, especially at the beginning, the look of the website is not as important. Using almost any of the free WordPress site themes would work as long as they are not too visually busy and easy to navigate.
We decided to change the domain, which added an extra hour or two (I explain this in the time breakdown section).

Week #2 Results

Finalizing a niche and WordPress site design

Leah and I have picked a niche that we feel has the potential to make us some money through Google Adwords Ads. I am not going to share with you yet what the niche is or the web address for the WordPress site until the end of our eight weeks. This is to keep our numbers from being skewed by visitors coming from this niche site journal instead of organic traffic.

This will help us, in the long run, to get accurate numbers as far as organic traffic from the search engines.

Income: $0

No Income yet.

Costs: $115.37

$93.39 went to pay for 12 months of web hosting with a domain name. I also used the Whois domain privacy option that was $9.99 (already in the price). I did this so that we do not have to use our address and contact information in the website directory (it is for privacy). I also spent $21.98 was for the second domain with the Whois domain privacy.

I used Hostmonster.com because I have had websites hosted by them for several years and have always had great service with them. I have used 2 or 3 other services since hosting my first website in 2002 and have to say Hostmonster has been the best out of all of them.

Hostmonster.com also makes it easy to launch a WordPress site with just a few clicks. There are plenty of other hosting services out there, and if you want to get the best deal you might want to shop around, but make sure that they provide high-quality service and have a low rate of website outages.

I also want to mention that I am an affiliate seller for Hostmonster, meaning if you follow my link to their site and order web hosting I make a little bit of money that helps pay for this blog. I want to tell you this so that you know I’m completely transparent and honest with you, but I also want to mention that I only recommend products that I use and love.

Time Breakdown: 14 Hours

2 Hours going over number needed with Market Samurai for a good Niche Site. I was still unclear on what were good numbers in Market Samurai for choosing a keyword that was few enough searches to have low competition against other sites, but enough search traffic with high enough AdSense click value to make it worth creating a site.
4 Hours finding keyword. I spent another 4 hours finding a keyword that matched the criteria I set for myself. I could have done it in half the time, but I wanted to test several options and figured I’d rather spend the time choosing the right niche instead of creating it and not get any traffic.
1 Hour finding good domain name. After choosing the niche, I needed to find a domain. This wasn’t too hard; as all I did was take the keyword and add the word “on” in front of it. What took so long was once I bought the domain, I decided I also need to by the plural version of the keyword. So, I bought two domains; one with an “s” at the end and the other without.
1 Hour setting up WordPress site. This normally takes just a few minutes, but because I had two domains, I decided to have one domain just forward the viewer to the domain that holds the WordPress site. The problem I ran into here was I put the WordPress site on the wrong domain.
This meant I had to delete and uninstall the first WordPress installation and create a second one. Then I had to point the nonplural domain to forward the user to plural version.
2 Hours on WordPress site theme. I love well-designed websites, so choosing a theme took longer than it needed. If you are in a hurry, you could use the theme that comes with the WordPress installation. I searched out a free theme to use that I felt would make the site look better. To get closer to what I want, I had to do some slight modifications to the CSS of the theme, but if you don’t know what that means or how to do it, don’t worry because you can just use whatever theme you like with no modifications.
2 Hours working on logo. We could have done this in half the time, but Leah wanted to make sure we had a good one that we wouldn’t want to change down the line. My suggestion for those not skilled in digital art is to either not worry about a logo or go to a website like fiverr.com or 99designs.com to get one created for cheap.
2 Hours writing first post. Leah went ahead and wrote a post. It took her about an hour of research and an hour to write an approximately 500-word article on the topic of our niche.

Plan

Our plan seems to be going smoothly for the most part. We went ahead and planned out the rest of the eight weeks as follows:

Week 3 & 4 finishing the WordPress site, adding Google AdSense ads and populating our pages with useful content relating to our keyword.
In week 5 & 6 we will experiment with different ways to market the site and get it ranked on Google.
Week 7 & 8 will then be dedicated to optimizing the WordPress site and the marketing.

Lessons

For Niche Sites, there is no perfect answers, no magic formula, and no way to get a niche site done other than pushing through the process or hiring someone else to do it for you. This week we have learned that while we hope to receive passive income through our niche site, the actual creation of the site takes time and effort. With experience it gets easier but at the start it feels like a slow process.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Those who are looking for a quick and easy buck will never finish their websites or their keyword research, leaving plenty of space for those willing to put the time in (like you and me) to reap the rewards of a well thought out and executed niche website.

Your turn

Are you following along or working on a niche site? Tell me about your experience in the comment section below.

Compulsive Creative

Week 2 – WordPress Site Theme and Launching the Blog