Week 2: Early Challenges in Niche Site Research

Week 2: Early Frustrations of Niche Site Building

Hey everyone! Wow, week 2 came around so quickly it feels like yesterday I was writing my review after the first week of getting started in the niche site challenge.

Week two definitely hasn’t been easy it has been a real challenge. The challenge comes with its pros and cons.

The pros being so many people give up at the first hurdle and I know I am not one of those people so it gives me an advantage on everyone else starting out their own sites.

The con is that it is a big learning curve and you have to dedicate a lot of time to getting your systems right, and getting them right to a point where you are able to duplicate it.

Let’s get into some specifics of what I did this week.

Based off some feedback I received from a mastermind group member last week I decided to not pursue a niche site idea that I was passionate about and instead look at a niche where the numbers made more sense to pursue it in terms of reaching my goal of making $500 a month within 6 months. In saying this I still wanted to choose an area where I had some interest.

Now this doesn’t mean I have completely ruled out building that other niche site what I wanted to start originally. The more I have been researching some other niches the more I have thought why don’t I just work on two sites as an experiment. Again this has pros and cons, I have dedicated 10 hours a week minimum to working on this project and working two sites would essential double that work load.

Or I can concentrate most of efforts on the niche site where the numbers make sense and work on my other site just in some spare time where I need to move away from other site for a while.

Before I even started researching I needed to get some ideas to spark my thoughts so I went to alltop.com and clicked the myalltop tab​ and searched through every single letter to find potential areas I would like to build a site on. I had a list of 23 areas I could potentially build a site on.

During the start of the week the frustrations really started to kick in. I was researching potential niches for 5 hours on one of the week nights and had very little to show for it and yes I was getting frustrated.

The problem I was facing was the majority of niches I was finding were just too competitive. I was using SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner for the majority of my research and just Google itself to research search results that I would type in if I was trying to find something in the chosen niche with the aid of Moz Bar I could gage very quickly whether or not there were some sites that I could rank against in a relatively quick time.

After about 5 hours it was getting very late at night so I called it a night and decided to sleep on it. When I approached it the next day Spencer from Niche Pursuits had released his coaching call 3 with his student Samara and when I read Samara’s thoughts on the post it was like reading an insight into my own thoughts, she was struggling with the exact same things I was struggling with. The coaching call was very informative for me and helped me spark some new ideas for potential niches which a better search tactic. I recommend reading the article especially if you are getting frustrated at any point of the early research phase.

I went on a research adventure with each niche.

• For example if took my Google search query and found a low domain authority (DA) typically under 25 I would take that URL and place that in SEMrush to get a general indication of the monthly traffic.

• If the site had over 10,000 monthly search traffic I would get intrigued and have a look at what else they were ranking for.

• Then I would search their competitors and see what they were ranking for and it would take you down a research rabbit hole that can spark so many new ideas as you see what keywords they are getting traffic for or you see new keywords that you may not have ever thought about.

So where am I at currently?

I am going to give you a little bit of an insight into some of the niches I looked into, but won’t be revealing yet what niche I am looking to build my site around. Some of the niches I looked into were Ocean Sport Activities/Extreme Water Sports, Co-Working Spaces, Post Work Out Recovery Strategies. They are some of the examples of where I started my niche site research. It was a broad approach of topics that I was looking for a potential sweet spot.

I have narrowed it down to 3 potential niches and to be honest I am much happier with the potential compared to the first niche I was going to pursue. My goals for this week are to do deeper search into these 3 niches and pick one and start grouping the keywords so I am able to structure the site and create 2 pillar articles to start my niche site.

​Mastermind Group

In terms of accountability within the mastermind group I am apart of we now have a roster out where we communicate with at least one person from the mastermind group once a week as a bare minimum. Having this in place is just a form of accountability and helps keep everyone focused.