Just when you think you have it figured out… the bar is once again moved, and you have to relearn a few new strategies in order to succeed!

1 – Starting Without a Plan!

We have all done this and still do! If you start without a solid plan for your website, you are aimlessly heading nowhere! At minimum, your website plan should be able to tell you if you can expect to earn anything from your new site, the exact pages your site will launch with, and many additional pages that may bring traffic for the future! In addition, you should have a basic understanding of the type of information BUYERS within your niche seek out information. Whether that is reviews, product comparisons, specific features of the products, or any other measurable methods they use to make a buying decision.

Here are a couple posts to read:

• 5 Reasons to Avoid a Niche market
• Maximizing the Usability of your Content

2 – Using Site Navigation Links as LongTail Links

This is one VERY common mistake I have made myself and see quite a bit of in others websites. Site Navigation links should be short and sweet, doing nothing more than inviting your visitor to the [brand] or [product] page. Many times, we try to use the site nav links for long tail phrases and it comes out looking like spam!

Save the long tail for in-content links… and keep your navigation links to the point. Look at these examples:

Good Navigation Links:

• Callaway (Leading to several Callaway Items)
• Callaway Odyssey 2-ball (Leading to the Specific item)
• Ping (Leading to several Ping Items)
• Ping Anser (Leading to the Specific item)

Bad Navigation Links:

• Callaway Golf Putter Reviews and Guides
• Callaway Odyssey 2-ball Putter Review (Leading to the Specific item)
• Ping Golf Putter Reviews and Guides (Leading to several Ping Items)
• Ping Anser Putter Review (Leading to the Specific item)

If you find yourself repeating the SAME PHRASE over and over in your Sitewide Navigation links, you have to admit that it even looks kinda spammy to you! Just imagine how search engines and others see it! Save your long tail links for “In Content” and article links, and keep your site navigation as simple as possible!

3 – Building Pages that Have No Benefit to the Buying Process!

I make this mistake as often as anyone – but if your site is attracting people looking to “maintain or fix” something they ALREADY OWN, its not only going to provide you with non-targeted traffic, its going to hurt your new QPC score if they start clicking over to eBay to look at things they already own!

IF you have replacement parts on your site that’s another story… but if you have a site about cars, don’t include articles on washing the car, unless you have a specific section with cleaning supplies, that you use the related content to leverage the buying process!

If your site is focused on attracting buyers – don’t attract non-buyers just to have more traffic! Try to make sure EVERY PAGE supports the sale.

4 – Mixing SEO and Site Planning into the Same Process!

As much as this will be unpopular and present more questions than answers… its the truth! If you start worrying about search optimization as part of your planning process, you are setting yourself up for a failure before you even start! Skip your way OUT of the keyword demand process until AFTER you have the plan for the content in place! Its OK to look and see if there is basic demand for your niche market, but don’t get caught up in the trap of building pages to attract search visitors!

Once you know WHAT PRODUCTS people are buying, only then should you worry about getting them to your site! If you build your site around keyphrase demand first, you may just find that the phrase with a million searches only has $25,000 worth of sales in a month!

What are The Most Common Mistakes You think You Make when Building?

The sole purpose of this post is to help you get the most out of your outsourced review content, or if you are writing your own review articles, how to write them for MAXIMUM usability throughout your site. When you hear the tricks I use for my own content articles… you may have one of those “Nah-uh” moments!

Maximizing Your Review Content Starts With Planning

As you build your review content article list, you are going to see a BUNCH of related terms that just seem to occur over and over. For example, if you niche site is going to be about cars, you may end up with very specific review content about:

• Dodge Chargers
• Ford Mustangs
• Chevy Camaros
• etc… (Can you tell I am a Muscle-Car guy?)

Well – these are great, but what about all the other terms people often use when they are car shopping? Words like:

• Cheap Car
• Sports car
• Resale Value
• Economy Car
• Fast Car
• Convertible
• Classic Car
• etc etc…

You really don’t want to muddle up your review titles and limit your traffic to ONLY the “Types” or “Description” type words like these… after all, “Cheap Used Ford Mustangs” might do well, but it also limits your search driven visitors… there is a MUCH better way!

Seed Your Review Articles by Having the Author Answer Questions!

This is where the duh-huh moment comes in…

When you submit article requests to a place like TextBroker, you have two fields to complete:

• Article Title
• Article Description

After you push your list of requested article titles to the system, most people get stumped about HOW they want their articles to be written. If you just use your “Terms” above, you will end up with “Guide” content, without even trying or having additional articles written!

A Good example of the “Description field” for the articles would be:

I Need the Review style articles to Answer the Following 3 Questions a Visitor may have:

• Provide a brief Introduction to the [article title]. It should include the TYPE of car (economy car, sports car, classic car, etc)
• What is the approximate COST of a [article title] when buying used or new?
• What are the Three MAIN FEATURES of this [article title] (Why do people choose them, gas mileage, speed and handling, affordability, etc)

I NEVER ask an Author to answer more than three questions with my articles… 250-300 words is just not as much space as you may think, and this gives them leeway to put the answers to your questions, into their own words.

The Result of Your Article Seeding

As long as you have a good author… you are going to be able to reuse your articles to build an endless supply of guides. You spot the article topic with 50 or so of your own words, then use 50-150 word snippets from each article.

Example Guides I would build from the list above:

• How to Buy an Affordable Car for a College Student (50 words of your own, 5 links to lower priced review cars)
• 5 Sports Cars Everyone Wants to Own (50 words of your own, 5 links to Sports Car reviews)
• Buying a Used Car That Retains its Value (50 words of your own, 5 links to high resale value reviews)
• etc etc… you could go on and on, even combining them!
• 10 Cheap Sports Cars With High Resale Value

In addition to using the trigger words for Guide Topics, you can do what I did on the Car bike rack site, and use them as TAGS in your posts!

This is just another way to get the most from your Outsourced Content! If you have other tips, please post them up!

I had contacted Kelvin and Adam directly to discuss this last week, and this post should answer many of the questions… based on their own replies, along with sharing how I have built my own new WordPress driven N1Way site!

WordPress Pages or Posts – Which Is Better?

I have at least 100 emails on this topic, to the point that I have considered creating an auto-responder! The main thing to keep in mind about pages and posts, is that “Pages are Static”, “Posts are Dynamic, or Newsworthy”. In a nutshell, when you use a page on wordpress, you are saying that this stuff rarely or never changes… like your contact or about pages. Posts on the other hand have a tendency to be timely, dated, and often change as comments are added, etc.

The other MAIN difference between a page and post in WordPress… Pages are NOT included in your RSS feed, unless you install a plugin that puts them there! In addition to the RSS inclusion, with PAGES, you DO GET a better structured URL, which will be explained below.

In the N1Way Guide, Section 4, it’s clear to see that they chose to build their site using the PAGES function of WordPress.

When I asked if there was a specific technical reason why…Kelvin responded: (They also included this in their email to everyone)

There’s no great underlying reason here. WP is an extremely flexible
site development tool and as our background is in “static” sites and
not “blogs” our interpretation of the WP platform in accordance with
our goals led us to prefer pages over posts. That’s all.

So… whether you choose pages or posts is purely your own preference, based on whats easier for you! (I have heard that before!)

How I Built My Own New N1Way Guided Site

I have previously mentioned that I started and am well into the development of a second (or 3rd) site, using the WordPress platform to build the site. When I started it, i tried to remain as close to the guide as possible, and built all the pages in the page format. As many of you who got the emails from me know, I switched from Pages to Posts, before anything was published.

The PRO Reasons:

• I Prefer to Publish a post once – and have it link everywhere automatically.
• Posts are IN the RSS feed and Indexed faster
• I can make better use of the Custom Fields without much coding. (Used for the images in my case)
• I am VERY familiar with WordPress and have developed more than 200 websites, including ecommerce sites with it.
• Time Savings are Dramatic!

What Did I Sacrifice Using Pages versus Posts?

• Slight diversion from the Guide
• URLs are a bit less properly structured

Just to pull all this into focus…

When using the posts and category structure – I have essentially eliminated ALL extra steps in creating the summary pages, the image reposts, etc. I write the review, and everything else occurs as a function of WordPress! In addition, I can use the tagging system to further pinpoint the exact targets I want users to reach, with little to no effort!

Assume for a second the site is a review site on specific products… (That’s a joke)

In the “Permalink” settings section, I set my category base to “reviews”.

WordPress Pages:

• Home (Automatic)
• About (Custom written)
• Contact (Custom written)
• Guides (Can be automated with a little code)
• Reviews (Can be automated with a little code)

WordPress Categories:

• [Brand 1] – Automatically generated page of the review POSTS
• [Brand 2] – Automatically generated page of the review POSTS
• [Brand 3] – Automatically generated page of the review POSTS
• etc for all brands

This results in a URL structure like: domain .com/reviews/brand/

WordPress Posts:

• [Brand - Product Review] – This is the ULTIMATE Landing page
• [Brand - Product Review] – This is the ULTIMATE Landing page
• [Brand - Product Review] – This is the ULTIMATE Landing page
• etc for all reviews

As the posts are written, I DO LOSE the reviews/ portion of my URL, but its not overly important… and the URL ends up as: domain .com/brand/product-review/

IF I had stayed with a paged structure, the urls would have resulted in:

domain .com/reviews/[brand]/[brand-product-review]/

BUT – I would have had to hand code alot of the pages, or write the code to do it on its own… and lost some of the functionality of the WordPress system for posts.

The Bottom Line

For myself, the bottom line was time savings! While wordpress pages could be just as effective as using posts, I want to do things once… and walk away. I write my post once – everything else occurs automatically by using the category/post system.

If you choose to build with pages, you have the extra step of building your pages to show the summary of each child, or review page OR coding yourself a custom page to do it all for you.

Both are equally effective in the end…

Image from: http://www.gfn.com/sowhatsyourpoint/?cat=105

Having been involved in building just about every type of website from ecommerce, to CMS, to portals and niche sites, over the course of the last 15+ years… I can honestly say, I just learned something new from the Build a Niche Store Guide! Honestly… Wow! Great Job Adam and Kelvin – Thank you!

I wish I could share all the details of the methods they used… but instead, I will just prepare you all by saying the three “Types” of content they focus on building is amazing when it all comes together. I was able to drill into high enough volume terms, that had a high amount of products, and had little demand… Granted it took me about 3 solid hours of work (they said it would take about 30 minutes) but I can immediately see it was well worth the time!

Keeping the CopyCat Readers at Bay

Before I get into the exacts of this new site, I want to stress that as I prepare to build the site, some crafty reader is going to take what they read here and develop a site of their own, ahead of this one ever being live. Ultimately, theirs WILL rank in search ahead of this one, simply due to their launching of the site first.It won’t be the firs or last time this happens…

With that said – I am not going to publish ALL of the site categories, guide categories or many of the sites details, until it is all out here for the taking, or.. the site is launched! Instead, I will provide generalized information for now.

Planning Your Niche Site Content

Based off the research in the Number 1 Way to Make Money Guide, I have determined the following will be built to get the site off the ground, and fill the need for information:

• 17 Product Brand Pages
  • Nike Putters
  • Wilson Putters
  • MacGregor Putters
  • 14 others (to get started)
• 8 Product Type Pages
  • Wedge Putters
  • Heavy Putters
  • 6 others (to get started)
• 68 Answer (Money) Pages
  • Wilson Harmonized Putters
  • Wilson ProStaff Putters
  • MacGregor Face Off Putters
  • 65 others (to get started

This makes the initial “Launch site” a total of 92 “Money Pages” in size, not counting the standard pages like About Us, Privacy, Contact, etc.

Using the basic guidelines provided… the Winner of the Niche Site Contest can reasonably expect that with NO ADDITIONAL PAGE CREATION, they should earn roughly $460/month by this time next year from the Golf Putter Guide website!

How Is Your own Research and Planning Coming Along?

Planning your Niche Website

• The Importance of Planning
• What Does your Niche Site Need and Why
• How to Research Your Niche Market
• Why Paid Keyword Tools Are not that Important
• Creating your Niche Site Action Plan

Learning how to research and set a plan into action will provide you a single workable document to use for the life of your site!

Have you completed Step 2 of the BANS Guide? What is your opinion?