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Niche Travel Site Battle

Build a Niche Site or Blog in 18 Easy Steps

April 27, 2011 By 18 Comments

Easy steps to build a blog and websiteThis is an update to the Niche Travel Site Battle that is going on right now between yours truly and 4 other travel bloggers. You can follow all the updates over at the War Room.

Starting a blog or a niche site can be overwhelming, and this overwhelm can lead to paralysis, to putting off an idea because it’s difficult to take that first step when you feel like there are a thousand more still left to go. Building a blog, or a niche site does not have to be difficult and if you have the correct strategy you can get up an running in only 1 hour and just 18 steps (trust me they are not difficult).

I’m deliberately describing both blogs and niche sites here as my strategy for them is the same. It used to be that blogs where one thing and niche sites were static websites. Those days are long past and now it is easy to rank high with a blog, and use it as a static site that is easily updated with new posts and articles.

What follows is the process I go through whenever I build a site. I use a number of paid services but I’ll also include free options where I can as just about all of this can be done for free as well. This is a long post because you deserve the full process!

Step One-Web Hosting and Domain Names

For my blog and for my niche sites I recommend shelling out some money and hosting your site on a paid server. This not only allows you to retain full rights and access to your website, but it allows you to scale up if traffic increases substantially and offer a wider range of monetization strategies. There are of course free options like (Blogger and WordPress.com) but these carry subdomains that will make your site look less professional. The two hosting companies I use and recommend are:

Host Gator (you can get $9.94 off a package if you use the code TWHOSTGATOR or 25% off with TBCHOSTGATOR)

Dream Host (use the promotion code DREAM695 to reduce the price to just $6.95/month)

I won’t go through this process as the hosting companies have it pretty much covered.

I do get a small commission if you sign up using my codes or though the links. Thanks for your support if you choose to. I made the promo codes so they have the maximum discount possible so that we all benefit.

You can also buy your domain names from the same place you get your hosting from. There are cheaper places to buy domain names but I can’t be bothered to save the extra $2/year so I just usually keep everything in one place. Sometimes I use GoDaddy as they are cheaper, but I would not relay on them for hosting.

Step Two- Setting up the Blog

Free and Powerful. Or in another word, WordPress.org. This free blogging AND content management system (CMS) has leveled the playing field between large corporations that have the money to pay programmers and well, the rest of us who just want to work from home or the cafe. You can install WordPress.org in just one click through the two hosting companies I listed above. It is easy and quick. Please note that there is a difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. Both are free, but the former is for self-hosted blogs (the kind I’m advocating here) and the later is the free hosting based on the same software. We will be using WordPress.com later in our Niche Site evolution to help build the authority of our main site. But more on that in another post.

Once you have installed WordPress go to your admin page, to the left sidebar, and optimize it as follows:

Go to Settings and click General

1) Change Tagline to a SEO Friendly Tag that will show up in search engines. This describes what your site is about and should contain your main keyword phrase.

Go to Posts and click Categories

2) Create a new category called “News”.

Go to General and click Writing

3) Change the default Post Category to “News.” This way if you forget to assign a category to your articles it does not show up on the ugly and unprofessional category of “Uncategorized.”

Go to  Settings and click Permalink

4) Change to “Custom Structure” /%postname%/ This makes your URL address look pretty and helps Google know what they are easier.

Step Three- Choose a Theme

The theme of your website (how it looks and and is set up) is very easy to install and change at any time. There are thousands of themes available for WordPress.org some of which are free and some of which are “premium.” You have to pay for the later but you can get a more professional design with additional functionality built in and cleaner coding that makes it easier for Google to read.

I want to make it clear that you do not have to spend any money at all for your Theme. One great example of a free theme is SimpleFolio. It has a clean design and is easy to manipulate to make it look original. However, I can’t speak to the coding of it as I have not used it personally. This one can’t be found in the WordPress directory so you’ll have to download it yourself.

As you can probably tell, the TBC runs on the Genesis Framework. I chose this Theme because it is incredibly powerful when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and there are a lot of skins (designs based on the underlying Theme coding) to choose from and more that come out on a regular basis. As I run the TBC, Todd’s Wanderings, and my growing army of niche sites it made sense to buy the Pro Plus Package. It is expensive upfront, but now I have access to all the premium themes I want for life and can use them on any new site that I choose. For me this is a good option as I am comfortable changing the code to suit my needs. But for others you might want to stick with the free theme or a single premium theme that you like and requires less coding knowledge.

If you are looking for something stylish than I can also recommend Woo Themes. I love their clean designs and easy interface. You can buy a single use license or a developers license that allows you to use with as many niche sites as you can create.

Steps Four-Eighteen- Adding the Plugins

As you have noticed to this point I am not going into detail about any one step. Instead I’m trying to give the essential steps in the process and suggestions on what I use. The beauty of WordPress is the ability to customize and add functionality to it easily through third party software call Plugins. The following is my essential list of WordPress plugins. All of them are free! I use more for my main blog as it requires additional bells and whistles. I’m not going to describe all of these as I can see you are getting sleepy. So here is the list and you can read up on them:

A.  Activate Akismet (prevents spam)

B. Fast Secure Contact Form (let’s people contact you easily without publishing your e-mail address)

C. Genesis Featured Widget Amplified (available only if you bought Genesis Framework, this is a powerful widget that let’s you organize your posts on the homepage)

D. GetClicky (great plugin from getclicky.com to help you keep track of your visitors and where they are coming from)

E. Pingler (notifies Google and other directories of updates to your site so you get indexed first)

F. Redirection (allows you to change the link url for affiliate links so they look pretty and trustworthy. I have used this throughout my post here)

G. Extended Comment Options (tricks out your comments sections)

H. Google XML Sitemaps (helps Google index your full site)

I. Quick Adsense (makes it easy to insert adsense)

J. Whydowork Adsense (same as above but with different options)

K. W3 Total Cache (speeds up your site by caching pages. This can be tough to configure but well worth it)

L. Favicon Generator (allows you at add a favicon next to your web url)

M. Widget Logic (allows you to control which widgets get shown on which pages. Great for advertising!)

N. WordPress Hashcash (helps reduce spam)

O. All in One SEO Pack (essential for helping Google understand what your site is about. This is not necessary if you have Genesis as the functionality is built into the theme).

Content and Monetization

Sorry, but you are going to have to wait for these strategies in another post as this one is far to long. Basically, my content strategy is to write everything myself, and dish out the most useful information on Tokyo that I can. For monetization I’m relying on Adsense and assuming (so dangerous!) that people searching for Things to Do in Tokyo will also be interested in advertising that targets their trip to Tokyo. I will also be adding hotel reviews and tour options in the future.

The whole process above took me only 1 hour in total. Add another 1 hour to make a custom banner for the top.

Things to Do in Tokyo SiteIt took me 1 hour to write each of my articles on my site so far. I have three live so that’s another 3 hours. This makes 5 hours of work to get the site up an running. HOWEVER, it took many many more hours to research these steps, test out and decide on content strategies and map out my site. Lucky you, as you get to benefit from my hours of slaving over the internet :)

I have actually learned something very important about myself, I can’t do anything low quality. I hate the idea of creating information and having others read it unless it is truly useful to them. This means that I will be trying to make my site as much of an authority site as possible, which is a slight shift from a niche site but fits with my overall strategic theme of building up a Japan site for the future. The good news is that Google will love this. The downside is that it takes more time as I will be adding at least 10 more articles to the site over the course of the next few weeks.

By the Numbers

If you have gotten this far you get a reward and that’s an update on where my site stands with only three articles posted.

After pursuing my link-building strategy in a half ass way (more on this later), and exactly 1 month after going live with the site I am now on the 2nd page of Google and the first page of Bing for my main keyword phrase! My site is not getting much organic traffic but has somehow become popular on Stumble Upon and just got 200 visitors yesterday (the average previously was just 2!).

Money wise I have earned a total of .94 cents. Yes, this has been deposited in a high interest bearing account! But I’m not worried about this. I’m now moving full steam ahead with my link building strategies and hopefully I’ll get to the top of Google soon. I don’t want to write about my linking strategies until I have some proven success, or a massive failure. I want this process to be useful for you as much as possible.

I’d love to hear what you think. Leave a comment below and help me get my energy back after this very long post. Thanks for sticking with me!

Photo Credit Top

Filed Under: Build a Better Blog, Business of Blogging, Niche Travel Site Battle Tagged With: ,

Buisness Model and Site Structure for Niche Travel Site

March 29, 2011 By 13 Comments

This is a guest post by Mike and is an update on his area of the war for Niche Travel Site Battle. I usually just add these updates to the Niche Travel Site Battle War Room but as always Mike has produced a very nice post and I wanted to get it in front of as many people as possible.

Building niche sites is not new to me, but I saw this challenge as a great opportunity to get out of my comfort zone and try out a completely different business model. With the changes going on in Google there were several strategies I wanted to test. Before I even thought of a niche I put together a business model.

Niche Site Structure

  • Low maintenance
  • Low setup cost
  • Google Adsense revenue stream
  • Information resource site
  • One day setup
  • Forced funneled income (will explain below)

Once I knew what type of site I wanted to create I decided on a style.

Niche Site Design

  • Clean and stylish
  • No ads other than Google Adsense
  • Structured navigation
  • Short and descriptive posts/pages
  • Visually appealing

Each of the design features and site structures were decided upon solely for the purpose of the business strategy.

Business Model Strategy

I wanted 100% organic search traffic so that each visitor was looking for specific information. The site would provide a general overview of information that would entice the visitor to continue their search. The only way to continue with their search on the site would be through a profitable link. No outgoing links for more information, free resources or external navigation in any form.  This would create a forced funnel, whereby the visitor would be inclined to click on a Google Ad to move on, thus resulting in a high click through rate and ultimately revenue.

Choosing the Niche

The easiest information niche for the travel industry is a “Destination” niche.  I needed a mildly popular destination that did not have too much competition. After some keyword research I chose a few spots and did a domain name keyword match to narrow it down. I chose http://cheapmalta.net

I purchased the domain at 9 AM on February 28th and by noon I was finished with the site minus the content.  (due to time constraints on other projects the content was outsourced for $75) I had planned to write all of the content myself but I was needed on another project.

I used Market Samurai for my keyword research and settled on 15 keywords I felt I could rank number one in Google for. This would bring an average of 1800 visitors per day (in a perfect world) exceeding my goal of 50k visitors per month with an average click through rate of 28% and an average click rate of $0.63. This left me with a maximum potential income of $10,280 per month. Realistically it would reach 50% of that within six months to a year.

I made one modification to the Google Adsense revenue by adding an affiliate page for Expedia http://cheapmalta.net/check-malta-hotels/ This page was designed with no navigation so the visitor could do one of three things;   book a hotel, click the back button or click a Google Ad. I did not want this page to be an exit from the site.

Getting Traffic

The only thing left to do was get traffic. I built, and still are building, link wheels to each of the pages for the various keywords. I use SENuke (Todd here: I’m not a user of SENuke, and am just investigating it now with the free trial, but it seems expensive) for building linkwheels. In addition to that I create various Squidoo lenses, post comments on blogs, educational sites, government sites and other high page rank blogs.  The main techniques I use for link building are:

  • Linkwheels
  • Web 2.0 individual posts
  • Article marketing
  • RSS Aggregators
  • Video marketing
  • Blog Comments

I cannot use link exchange or blog rolls because I do not want any external links. This part is tricky because external links are important for SERP’s. To fix this problem I am making a list of information sites that rank high such as Wikipedia, Malta government sites etc…. No sites that have any sort of monetization. I also will be putting these links set to open in a new window so that the visitor does not leave the site when clicking.

This is a new strategy so I have no idea how it will play out. I guess we will see.

You can get all updates on each of the Niche Site Battlers over at the Niche Site Battle War Room.

Filed Under: Make Money Blogging, Niche Travel Site Battle Tagged With: ,

Travel Niche Selection and Keyword Research

March 21, 2011 By 12 Comments

niche travel site battle: select a niche and keyword researchA Call to Arms

A few weeks ago I started  hitting the war drums. It was a call to stop procrastinating and to enter the Niche Travel Site Battle. The Battle concept is simple, 5 Travel Blog Challenge members have committed to building up a Niche Travel Site from scratch and be completely transparent about our process, highlighting both successes and mistakes. You can find the first post with the Niche Site Battle Rules here. It is also a way for me to put into practice the course I took on Affiliate Marketing for Beginners where the development of a niche mini-site is the main tool.

I have made Two Important Rule Changes:

1) We can now spend as many hours as we like, but we have to keep track and report back on how much effort we are putting in.

2) We are no longer limited to 10 pages. If one of us hits on a profitable niche it would be silly to be constrained.

So, 25 pages is now the upper rubber limit, UNLESS you have a fantastic (read $$$$$, fame, rides in jet fighters) reason for increasing the page numbers.

I have created a Niche Travel Site Battle War Room where you can find all updates as they come in by my fellow soldiers: Mike from Exotic Visitors, Adam from World Travel for Couples, Kieron from Don’t Ever Look Back, and Norbert from Globotreks. The idea is that by having 5 competitors, readers will be able to evaluate a variety of strategies, learn from our wide range of tactics and mistakes, and hopefully get inspired to create your own niche sites. My own updates will go out to the full TBC crowd through the homepage as a main article. Mike, Adam, and Kieron will all update their progress here on TBC as articles for which you can find links the bottom of my own updates. Norbert will update on his own blog. You can also find ALL posts from the Travel Battlers in order through the Niche Travel Site War Room.

The updates will last for 6 months until the End of August when we will crown the winner who makes the most net PROFIT from their site.

WARNING: This post, as well as many of the initial posts are going to be long. I want them to be timeless resources for people to come back to (link to…hint…hint) and to find useful. Despite the level of detail I will not be able to go too deeply into everything, so if there is a topic you want to know more about let me know by Contacting Me, or leaving a comment below.

Selecting a Profitable Niche

Selecting a profitable niche, and doing essential keyword research go hand in hand. But I’ll deal with them separately because it makes my life easier. If at the end of this process you do not find a niche with the 4 Essential Keyword Characteristics then you should start again.

I’ll admit that I made a HUGE mistake right from the beginning. I’m not an expert in niche sites, yet, and I want to highlight all of my mistakes so that you don’t make them as well. Basically, I have gotten into a very competitive niche. A no-no, in the niche site world, but one that I have decided to follow through with for reasons I’ll explain below.

There are various ways to select a Profitable Niche. There is a lot of advice out there related to selecting niches and most start with a very broad brainstorming session. However, as we are limited to Travel this in one way helps us to focus, but also makes it more difficult. There is heavy competition for popular travel words like “hotel”, “travel” “budget” etc. This means that we have to be creative, which is good, I like being creative.

Methods for Selecting a Niche

One method of finding a niche is to list 7 Fears, 7 Desires, and 7 Needs that Viper Chill talks about as well as Pat from Smart Passive Income (the inspiration for this battle in the first place). Another way is to brainstorm a list of Irrational Passions, or Irrational Fears. In this way you are narrowing in on concepts and topics for which people are willing to spend money on. This is very important because you want a Niche that has a market. This is called buyers intent and those interested in your niche should have it or else all you’ll get is people interested in getting things for free.

The first niche I selected was Fear of Flying. I have a few friends who would love to travel but who are terrified to get on planes. I figured that people would be willing to pay for courses that help them overcome this fear. However, after doing Keyword research I did not discover any words or phrases that met all 4 of the Essential Keyword Characteristics. Yes, you have been patient so here they are.

4 Essential Characteristics of Profitable Keywords

1) Relevance to my Topic. This means simply that anyone searching for my keywords will be happy to land my on my website as it is what they are searching for.

2) Decent amounts of traffic (over 1,000 exact searches a month). If the traffic is too low than we are just wasting our time. The higher number of visitors the high number of potential clicks on my ads or sales through affiliate products.

3) Low competition. If there is no possibility of getting to the first spot on Google Search Results than it’s not worth our time. The traffic will not come, and thus the ad revenue will not come either.

4) Available domain URL that includes my Keywords. I know there are many different opinions on whether Google gives greater importance to exact match domain names. To be honest I don’t know. But where it does help is with backlinks. When people link to my site with anchor text they are likely to use the Name of my site and thus have my keywords included. If they only put the url address my keywords are still included. That’s an easy win, so I’ll take it.

Following my strategy I started over and selected a new Niche, one that I have a passion for and which I know a lot about: Japan. Can a country be a niche? You bet it can!

Japan is a confusing place. If you don’t speak Japanese it can be very difficult to get around and discover the “real” Japan. It is also one of the most popular topics on Todd’s Wanderings. Armed with my new niche I then walked through the Keyword Research steps to see if I could find keywords that match my 4 Essential Keyword Characteristics.

Keyword Research

I started out my keyword research using Google’s Keyword Tool in Google’s Adwords sections. This is a free tool that let’s you see the number of searches per month for certain words or phrases. It also helps you see what else people are searching for related to your main keyword. This will help you generate new keywords and gives you getter chances of find one that meets all 4 characteristics.

From Japan, I found Tokyo which had over 6 million searches a month and VERY low competition. This is misleading as this is for a) broad searches (anything with Tokyo in it or related to Tokyo) and b) the competition is fierce as you will not be able to get to the Top of google for Tokyo. It’s just not possible. There may be few people competing for “tokyo” but the ones that do have a lock, such as the tourism board of Tokyo!

But Tokyo is a popular search term so it was worth exploring further. But to do this I unchecked “broad” searches and used “exact” searches instead. This means I am only seeing the number of people searching for the exact keyword. The monthly search numbers dropped to 260,000!

When you start exploring long tail key words for Tokyo (such as “Cheap Hotels in Tokyo,” or “Advice on visiting Tokyo”) the search numbers go down but the competition factors skyrocket as they are targeted by most travel companies. These companies are much bigger than my little Niche Site will be. Then I saw it, my perfect (or so I thought keyword phrase and niche). Can you spot it in the picture?

Google Keyword Search

Low competition and relatively high monthly searches.

“Things to Do in Tokyo” met all of my key requirements. The competition was low, the search volume as over one thousand a month and was even higher than I had hoped at 4,400 a month. It also has buyer intention, or at least this is my theory. If people are searching for things to do in Tokyo than they are planning a trip. If they are planning a trip then they are also interested in hotels, tours, discounts etc. While I can’t compete with the Big Guys on searches for hotels in Tokyo, I might be able to find people interested in the exact same thing but bring them in through the backdoor. This is essentially my monetization strategy (but more on this in a later post).

My BIG Keyword Mistake

After getting excited, and high fiving the air after my wife showed little interest in my online marketing gold mine, I went and bought my domain and hosting from Host Gator. I decided to use a different web hosting from my other sites (on Dreamhost) so that I could benefit from the link juice of a different IP address. I found an exact keyword URL and went and spent money based on my research. The problem was, Google’s Tool only told me part of the story. The keyword phrase “Things to Do in Tokyo” was much more competitive than I ever imagined. I found this all out by using Market Samurai’s free trial period.

Before I go any farther. Everything that I’ll show below is possible to find out for free with a variety of tools across the web. It took me 1 1/2 days to narrow down my niche and keyword with Google’s tools and searching for domains with Go Daddy. With Market Samurai it took me 1 hour to do the same. I ended up buying the software as it helps with everything from research, to finding domains, analyzing competition, to monetization, to backlink analysis and more. I would suggest trying it out for free (yes, I’m an affiliate but only if you buy and I think there is value in the videos you get with the trial period).

By using Market Samurai I found that while my niche had low competition, it was the big boys who have the top spots:

Market Samurai Key Word and Competition Research

That's a lot of RED

What this shows is the Top 10 search ranking for my term “Things to Do in Tokyo.” As you can see Time Magazine is at the top! They are followed by no less than, Trip Advisor, Yahoo Travel, Virtual Tourist, and Lonely Planet. Ugh! This is where the value of Market Samurai comes in. At this point I had to make a choice: stay with this niche after spending the money, or pick a new niche. What do you think I did?

My Choice

Yes, I am competitive, yes, I want to win this friendly battle. All good sense should have sent me running to a different keyword selection. But I decided to stick it out. Why? According to common practice with Market Samurai, the more green you have in the boxes above the lower the competition. Many people argue that you should have at least 3-4 entire rows that are green (maybe some yellow). But, I think I can beat them. Market Samurai is telling me to run the other way. Normally I would agree, but in this instance I have decided to stand my ground and fight. Here are my reasons:

1) None of the posts above have sites that target my keywords exactly. Some are sites dedicated to Tokyo in general, some are sites about travel and have a page or two on Tokyo.  Some have a post about things to do in Tokyo. But my whole site is about Things to Do in Tokyo. I will focus ONLY ON building links to my main Keyword, which I have an exact domain match for.

2) Most of these pages are not homepages (like mine will be) and only have from 100-2,500 backlinks. There is room to bump the higher backlinked pages off as they are NOT focused on Things to Do in Tokyo and instead only “Tokyo”. There is also room to build more backlinks than the large sites have. In fact my strategy will easily pass these numbers.

3) I already have a ton of information about Tokyo. My wife is from there, I visit a number of times a year, and I know the city. This means I can create content easily.

4) I might create my own product for Tokyo and it would be great to have this site to help sell. Also, it will be another group of people potentially interested in my Book on Japan.

5) I’m thinking of creating a larger destination website for Japan. This will be a good chance to see how the market is and what is possible.

6) There is a WIDE range of secondary keyword phrases that I can rank for with my content. This will help me to expand the traffic numbers coming to the site in the future.

I don’t know if these are valid reasons. But they are the ones that I’m running with and it will be interesting to see if I succeed. Part of this challenge is to have a variety of strategies and I suspect that taking on Time Magazine is not in the plans of the other Battlers  :)

My Niche Travel Site

I knew from the beginning that opening up this process to public scrutiny would throw off the results a bit. After all if you click through to my niche site it might affect traffic numbers or that of the other Battlers. This is unavoidable. I do ask one thing. PLEASE DO NOT GO CRAZY AND CLICK MY ADSENSE ADS TO HELP. You will actually not be helping as the numbers will be compromised and if it looks suspicious I could get banned from Adsense. I don’t want that.

Based on everything above I created my site: Things to Do in Tokyo.

Things to Do in Tokyo

As you can see, there is still some more content that I need to put up. The creation of a niche site, how to get it up and running as quickly as possible, the key pages, and a check list of steps and essential plug-ins will be the topic of my next post.

By the Numbers

Now down to what matters, the numbers. I’ll try to keep this as consistent as possible (along with the other bloggers) so that you can follow along easily.

Time Spent: Starting from March 1st an average of 6 hours per week

Current Google Search Rank: Nonexistent! I don’t rank even on the first 200 pages

Money Spent: $10/month hosting; $12 for the domain

Backlinks: 1…the one in this post :)

Follow the other Battlers on their journey

From Norbert: Travel Niche Challenge: The Beginning

From Adam: And So it Begins

What do you think so far? Am I in over my head?

Yes, another warning. Well not a warning just a heads up. Many of the links I use here on TBC are affiliate links, this means that if you buy through those links that I get a cut of the profit and it helps me keep the lights on. As usual I will only recommend things that I use and think are outstanding. When possible I will also let you know when discounts are available.

Filed Under: Business of Blogging, Make Money Blogging, Niche Travel Site Battle, Nuts and Bolts Tagged With: ,

Adam’s Niche Travel Site Battle: And So it Begins

March 21, 2011 By 1 Comment

This is a guest post by Adam and is an update on his area of the war for Niche Travel Site Battle.

Many great resources have come from Todd’s Travel Blog Challenge site thus far, but this could be the best.  The TBC is hosting a niche blog challenge, where five of us are competing to build the most profitable niche site.  Of course there’s me from World Travel for Couples, Todd of the TBC and Todd’s Wanderings, Mike from Exotic Visitors, Kieron from Don’t Ever Look Back, and Norton from Globotreks all taking part in this challenge.  And while it may be a bit of a competition, we are all helping each other out, and the goal is for all of us to build a niche site that becomes profitable.

Luckily for me, I have been pondering a niche site since last summer, so it’s been in the back of my mind for some time now.  There are several reasons why I hadn’t done it until now, but the main one is that I simply didn’t quite know what I was doing.

There’s a lot that goes into building a niche site that is going to be profitable, and it’s not easy.  If it was, everyone would be doing it. Like I said, this had been in my head for months, and I started my research back in early February, about a week before Todd announced the niche blog challenge.  It was pure coincidence this happened.

So I thought to myself, “What is going to be my niche, my topic?”

The first of many mistakes

I know I’m going to make tons of mistakes during this whole venture, but I managed to start off on the wrong foot.  I wanted something popular, right?  Something that a lot of people search for all the time.  So I started plugging in travel related search terms on Google.  I wanted high traffic search terms.  Ones that everyone searches for.  So I came up with the idea to start a site based on the best US cities to travel in.  Great idea, right?  Everyone is always searching for travel related sites on New York City, Vegas, Miami, Chicago, and LA.  Perfect!

So I started building the site.  I even wrote a few pages.  I was on my way, right?

It was about this time that I read about the challenge.  Perfect!  Not only was I a bit ahead of the game, but now I had a support network to help.  This couldn’t have worked out any better.  Or so I thought.

Once the challenge got underway, more resources became available to me.  I had been ignorantly ignoring the importance of keywords since I built my first site about 10 months ago.  Why?  I’m not sure, but I did.  Keywords seemed to be the word of the day when it came to building a niche site, though, so I figured I should start learning about them.

I took the advice of Mike from Exotic Travelers, an established writer and web developer who knew what he was talking about.  I downloaded the free trial of Market Samurai and started learning about keyword research.  I watched literally hours of video tutorials on the Market Samurai site before I even touched the software.  I learned a ton not only about the program but keyword research in general.

A Realization

As I was watching these tutorials, I came to the realization that I may have made a bad decision in choosing my niche topic.  Turns out that this niche is probably going to be highly competitive without a very good chance of ranking highly for the right keyword search terms.

But I tried anyway.  I began using Market Samurai to try to find the perfect keyword search terms related to my niche.  I was pulling my hair out after a few hours because I was not finding much.  It became beyond frustrating after a while.

After wasting the better part of a day searching for relevant, low competitive, somewhat high paying keyword terms and coming up blank, I decided that I should switch my topic.  I know I already spent quite a bit of time building a new site, but I wanted to do this the right way.  Besides, I own the domain name for 2 years and have some content up already, so I can keep that site on the backburner while I hopefully learn how to do this the right way.

The first step you should take

If starting a niche site like this, the very first thing you should do is keyword research.  I can’t stress how important that is.  You won’t make progress by just blindly jumping into a niche without doing any research.  That’s one of the main reasons why the vast majority of websites fail.  They don’t properly research their competition.  How is little old me going to compete with Travelocity, Wikipedia, and Lonely Planet?  I’m probably not.

So it was back to square one.  I began searching all types of different things. I  began with my favorite countries and activities.  I tried a lot of different places and terms.  Colombia beaches.  Hiking Torres del Paine.  Hiking the Inca Trail.  Hiking Patagonia.  Traveling in Patagonia.  Buenos Aires attractions.  And variations of all of them.

I didn’t have much luck until I got to Vietnam.  After hundreds of searches, I plugged in cheap Vietnam travel.  Analyzing the data is a whole different challenge, but after looking it over, I thought this could be a good one.  I next checked domain names and found that cheapvietnamtravel.com was not taken.  That pretty much sold it for me.

The new plan

Vietnam was one of our absolute favorite countries, and we traveled very cheaply there, so this became a no brainer.  So I bought the domain name and started building the site.  This entire process of researching keywords, deciding to switch sites, finding a new one, and building the new site all happened within two days.  But it was about all I did for those two days.

The base of my new site is set up, but I have since been spending my time researching more keywords for my various pages.  This is what’s been giving me the most trouble thus far. I still don’t know that I have a firm grasp on analyzing the data in Market Samurai when searching keywords.  I kind of feel like I’m doing too much guesswork, but I guess we’ll have to see.

What’s next?

At this point I’m still researching keywords before I add more content and start thinking about link building, another thing I will have to learn about.  For me, this whole thing is a big learning process, and it will be slow going as I want to do it the right way.  My weeks get busier and busier with other work obligations as we approach the end of March, but I am hoping to have my site built with all content and start working on link building by the end of the month.

This is a guest post by Adam from World Travel for Couples as a part of the Niche Travel Site Battle.

Filed Under: Business of Blogging, Case Studies, guest challenger, Make Money Blogging, Niche Travel Site Battle, Nuts and Bolts Tagged With: , ,

Niche Travel Site Battle

February 21, 2011 By 28 Comments

niche travel site battle

Earning money from our travel “blogs” is just one of many ways we can earn income from the internet.

Part of my plan this year is to create a number of niche travel sites that are less work than full blogs and bring in passive income from a variety of strategies such as affiliate marketing, pay per click, advertising and good old Adsense. I was inspired by the Affiliate Marketing for Beginners course that I took, and now it is time to earn my money back with a niche site…or four!

In the spirit of openness and friendly competition that I believe is the foundation of Travel Blog Challenge I decided to kick start my own goals and hopefully yours as well with a public Niche Travel Site Battle. Inspired by the niche site dual over at Smart Passive Income, the only real difference is that our sites have to be Travel Related.

Expanding the number of travel related sites you have is one of the best ways to scale up earnings. For instance when an advertiser contacts you it is just better when you can sell ads on more than one site. And for us, it makes sense to keep these all travel related so that we maintain our core audience across multiple platforms. It means less work in the end as well.

How to Join the Battle

I am inviting 4 members of the Travel Blog Challenge to join me in this Battle. A few people have already expressed interest in the forums but to join you need to Contact me and commit to the rules below. While I will only pick 4 to be featured on TBC, others are free to join in and post their progress in the comments or in the forums. To be considered you need to:

a) Be a current TBC 1000-1000 Challenger

b) Be an active participant in the forums

c) Be subscribed to either the TBC mailing list or the RSS feed; and

c) Be willing to follow the rules of the Battle (yes, there will be no collateral damage allowed!)

Niche Travel Site Battle Rules

A few rules will help keep us on track and will make it easier for readers to follow along.

1) Must be a niche site (meaning no more than a 10 pages)

2) Must be travel related (feel free to be creative)

3) You must only use ethical tactics. No black hat SEO crap here.

4) You must have a keyword or words strategy (so we can measure progress on your google search ranking)

5) You can employ any type of monetization strategy or a combination (but you need to document and write about it, basically tell us your game plan)

6) You can only spend a maximum of 4 hours per week on it (who wants to spend all their time at the computer?)

7) You will  write a blog post about your progress, strategies, income etc on the 5th of each month. You can post it on the TBC if your Travel Blog is not an appropriate venue. I will dedicate a page here that links to all of our updates and tracks our progress.

What does this all mean? It means that we will each create a niche site, describe in detail our strategies and tactics, our ups and down. We will only spend 4 hours a week max (I hope less) on our projects and at the end of 6 months we will see who is the “winner.”

Have any questions? Leave a comment. Want to fawn over my brilliant (but stolen) idea? Leave a comment. Want to be considered for the First Battle round? Contact me.

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Filed Under: Business of Blogging, Niche Travel Site Battle Tagged With: ,