How To Build A Niche Website
Welcome back to my continuing case study of building an affiliate marketing business from scratch. Last time, I talked about choosing a niche for your affiliate marketing business. You want to choose something that your passionate about as well as knowledgeable about or are willing to learn about an interested niche. This will help you in the long run as it will help you come out with more ideas and new ways to add content to your website.
What we’re going to be taking a look at here is creating the foundation of a website centered around your niche. There are a lot of different options when starting out, especially when you’re decided what the best look for your website will be. We’ll be taking a look at choosing a theme, transforming the shell of theme of your website, adding content, adding menus, and more. Let’s now take a look at choosing your theme.
Choosing Your Theme
I’ve talked about this before, but building a website centered around an affiliate marketing business is easier than ever at Wealthy Affiliate as they pretty much have all the tools you’ll need to get that done in one place. You can choose and register a domain name at Wealthy Affiliate and then choose a name for your site as well and once you’ve done all of that, you’re now ready to choose a theme for your website.
If you’re a starter member, you’ll initially get to see the many themes that are available in the first 7 days of your free trial, but then after that you’ll only have access to just a few of them. If you’re a premium or premium plus+ member, you’ll have access to the thousands of WordPress themes that are available. There are many different looks to these themes and it can sometimes be tough to choose one, but just look through them and you might find one that’s right for you.
The good thing about going through the themes is that nearly all of them will have a demo or list details about the theme so that way you can see if it’s a good fit for what you want to build your niche around. Don’t forget, you can always change the theme of your website later on if it’s something you decide is not quite right for you.
One of the things that I do is I try to plan out how I would like my website to look. After I’ve gotten that done and am ready to start building out my website, I then look for a theme that will closely resemble the look and feel for what I’m doing with my website. I’m not going for something extravagant, but I want it to look aesthetically pleasing yet good for blogging and so I chose a theme called Divine Blog. It’s a nice looking one that also allows for nice imagery on the front page and has a nice and clean menu layout. Simplistic and easy to read and look at is what I want. Now, let’s take a look at transforming this shell of a website.
Transforming The Shell
This is extremely important because you are setting up exactly how you want your website to look. Right now, if you went to my website, all you’d see is just a message that says Hello World and not much else. It is now up to me to transform this shell into the website that I want it to be and so I want to set up the layout of the new website.
The things that I will be adding are certain pages, menus, images, widgets, and more. Once I start adding those things and saving them via my wordpress admin area, you’ll start to see things taking shape. You might be wondering what pages to add to your website and I know exactly what to add, but two of them are extremely important. What you want to do is add an About Me page as well as a Privacy Policy page.
Having a Privacy Policy is a must these days as it ensures others that you do not have ways to track them or get access to sensitive information. The training will go over exactly how to add a Privacy Policy page and what it should consist of so that way you can avoid most legal troubles with it.
An About Me page is pretty simple as you talk about yourself and your motivations especially when it comes to why you have an interest in the specific niche your website is targeting. It is usually best to have a picture of yourself so that way your readers will have a snapshot of what you look like and won’t think that you’re just some obscure faceless person. My two current websites have this page as well as a picture of myself and you’ll see me add one as I move forward with the creation of my crypto site.
Adding images to the website is pretty easy, Wealthy Affiliate and the WP-Editor make it extremely easy to add images almost anywhere on your website and as we go through the training, you’ll see just how quick and easy it is to add pictures as well as edit them if need such as resizing them to fit better with the content.I know with images you do want to watch how big they are and how many are placed within a post because in certain instances, they can slow down your site. One thing to remember also is that a majority of people are going to be accessing your website through mobile devices such as a smartphone or tablet and so you want to try to make it optimised for those type of devices.
The good news is that most of the Word Press themes are optimised for mobile devices and you can always check to see how it looks on your own smartphone just to check if there needs to be any changes to make it look better to your readers. Now that we’ve taken a look at adding pages such as a privacy page and an about me page and adding images to transform the shell of your website, you might think you’re done. Definitely not! We need to add the most important part and it’s something you should never stop doing. You need to add content and I’ll talk about that next.
Adding Content
Adding Content will be the most important thing you need to do in order to make your site successful. Without content, especially quality and engaging content, your website won’t gain any traction. You add content to your website by creating posts which will be added to the pages you’ve created in your website. It really is going to be the backbone of your site. What is the difference between posts and pages? Well, in a way, posts are like separate pages, but your posts might target a specific product in your niche and you might have a page created on your website dedicated to that specific product and so when you add this new post to your site, it will also appear on that page as well so that whenever you add posts later on that are newer to your blog roll, readers can click on that specific page to find that post that may have caught their attention related to that product.
You can add all kinds of content to your posts that can include typed blogs, videos, podcasts, and more. I like to write blogs so that is what usually fills up my websites, but I am adding videos here and there as well and it is a lot easier to create videos than you might think and I know I’ve said it many times already, but you don’t even have to show your face on a video. You just need a microphone and a video program to record your computer screen or cell phone screen and you’re good to go.
As for the type of content you want to add to your website, you definitely want to make sure that it is content that your audience will want to read and that is beneficial to them. You want content that will help solve their problems in the niche you chose. Once the audience sees that your content is helpful and engaging to them, your website will start to gain trust and will open the door to even more traffic.
Once you are adding content at a consistent basis and it gets ranked high on the search engines, you’ll be riding the wave to success. The training will teach you how to create quality content and more important, content that will rank and the tools available here at Wealthy Affiliate will definitely make that happen once you learn how to utilize them. Let’s take a look about add menus to your website.
Menus
I believe that menus are a critical component of a website because it allows your audience to find certain kinds of information about your niche much quicker. Let’s put this in terms of what I plan to do on my website targeting the crypto niche. Let’s say that I talk a lot about a particular cryptocurrency so much so, that the articles targeting that particular crypto outnumber all the other ones I talk about.
Now one could search through the blog roll to try to find all the articles of that particular cryptocurrency, or I could create a menu at the top of the homepage that will go to specific pages one of which will include a page of that certain crypto which will have all the articles I ever created about that particular crypto in one spot and I could break things down even further into sub menus on that page if need be.
Menus definitely help keep a cleaner look on your website and make things easier to find so I would say that it definitely an essential part of a website. The training teaches you the methods to add menus and sub menus as well as other items should you choose to go that route. You can set up your website anyway you want to, but I think adding menus is definitely a very helpful thing for a website.
Your Website is Never Finished
Now that I’ve gone through the process of transforming the empty shell into a nice looking website complete with pages and menus, I’m here to tell you that your website will never be finished as you should always be adding quality content to your site so that your readers will want to continue coming to your website. You might be thinking about how to keep adding a continuous flow of content to your site.
You can always search for the latest news in regard to your niche to see if there are ever any new products to review or other new information that might be relevant to your readers. That’s why you always want to be up to date on the latest happenings of your niche. Research is something that you’ll always want to set some time to do and it’s easier to find ways to keep updating your website with relevant, up to date content, than you think.
The training here at Wealthy Affiliate will touch up on how to do just that, but suffice it to say, you can even search for some of the latest information on Google. What’s nice also is that Google will allow you to set up alerts that will be sent to your email with the latest news in any niche that you choose. This should greatly help you with finding relevant content for your website. There are other sites too that you can go to that will help you create content. Question and answer sites such as Quroa is a great one as there are always people there asking all sorts of question for so many topics.
The next thing you’ll want to do is come up with a plan on how to continuously update your website and maybe set up daily tasks, weekly tasks, and even monthly tasks. If you have a plan on how to continuously update your website and stick to the tasks that you set out for yourself, you’ll definitely see the results of your work and success will come sooner rather than later. Wealthy Affiliate has a lot of great motivation posts be different members that can help you out if you ever get to a point where you feel like things just aren’t moving and you start to question whether you want to keep going. Trust me, I’ve been there and so have many others at Wealthy Affiliate, but they will tell you that they kept pushing through and eventually saw the success they were craving and they will tell you to keep pushing ahead.
There is something that I do want to mention that will affect my posts/articles going forward. What I’ve shown you in this study already represents the original core training at Wealthy Affiliate which is in two forms: Online Entrepreneur Certification and Affiliate Bootcamp. I’ve talked about what these two types of training are and how I had originally started going through the OEC training for this study at Wealthy Affiliate.
Well, there are some BIG changes that have recently taken place at Wealthy Affiliate towards the end of last year and will continue into this year. I’m currently creating a new article and video detailing exactly what these changes are. Suffice it to say though, the original core trainings at Wealthy Affiliate are going away in March. There is brand new training at Wealthy Affiliate that pertains to the new changes and tools they have added at Wealthy Affiliate and I have to say thus far it is amazing. Do check back as I will be going over the new things at Wealthy Affiliate.