How to Start a Niche Website in 2020 (Step-by-Step Tutorial)

I personally got my
start with niche websites and it was how I was
able to learn how to SEO the right way, which then
allowed me to get clients with my SEO skills that
I developed by building out niche websites. So I'm super excited to show you, so let's jump right in. In this lesson I'm going
to explain the difference between a niche site and
an authority website. Let's jump right in. So let me start by saying that
every website's technically a niche website because you're
going to target a niche, but the big difference is how you decide to target a niche. For example, an authority
site targets a larger niche while a niche or micro
site website targets a niche within a niche. Let's take Gotch SEO, for example. Gotch SEO is an authority
website in the SEO industry. But when you take a step
back my website is actually a micro niche of inbound marketing, inbound marketing is a
micro niche of marketing, and marketing is a
micro niche of business. So technically SEO, as a
topic, is a micro, micro, micro niche of business. So with that said, how do you
decide what route to take? Well I personally think
this whole discussion about whether you should create a niche website or a larger niche website
is pretty useless. All that matters is that
you can find a niche that you can actually
compete in and if you have just a minor passion in that
topic, that's even better. It's not necessary,
but it certainly helps. Now, I'll be covering how to find a niche and whether or not you
should build a brand verse a personal brand in later lessons. But for now, don't worry
about whether you're creating a micro niche or an authority website. Just remember that the
goal is to find a niche that you can actually compete
in from an SEO perspective. More on this later, but before
I sign off on this lesson, I want to establish
some expectations about building niche websites. The first thing you need to
understand is what you do today won't produce results tomorrow, but it will produce
results over the next few months and years. Building niche websites
is a long term game. Now, you will definitely
not get rich overnight using this monetization model, but there is a compound effect. Once your SEO and website picks up steam, the income will slowly
start to roll in and then it will become more consistent, and then you'll know how
the whole system works which allows you to take
your skills and build niche site after niche site. Or you can just continue
to build and reinvest into your existing site, but the hardest part is
going to be producing content and taking all kinds of
SEO actions and not seeing results right away. This is totally normal. Even on Gotch SEO I spend
weeks writing a single piece of content and I
don't technically get paid while I'm producing this content. However, I will drive leads
and sales once I publish it because of my email
list and other audiences on other platforms, but
that's all short lived until the page ranks in Google. That means sometimes I'll
wait two to three months for these pages to drive new traffic. The point is that you
just have to be patient. Just do the work and trust the process. And this is particularly
important for new websites which are incredibly
stubborn in the beginning. You can do everything right
from an SEO perspective and still not rank because
your website is simply too new and not authoritative enough. You can rank for long
tail keywords within three to six months, but it's
probably going to take six to 12 months for a new
website to rank from body or more competitive keywords. So to conclude, think long
term about this process, be patient, trust the
process, and do the work. If you can change your
mindset to think of your niche website as an investment, it makes everything much easier. Whenever you're feeling
down about the progress of your niche website, just read this quote from Warren Buffett. Someone's sitting in the
shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. Or, no matter how great
the talent or efforts, some things just take time. You can't produce a baby
in one month by getting nine women pregnant. So that's all for this
lesson, thank you so much for watching and I'll
see you in the next one. So the focus of this lesson
is going to be on building a list of potential
niches that you can enter. Now, the following lesson
will help you narrow down this lesson and ultimately
allow you to pick a niche, but for now let's just focus
on finding some possible niches for you to enter. So the first thing I
like to do is think about my life in general. Simple ask yourself, what
are you passionate about? What are your hobbies? What are your interests? What are your skills and strengths? What are things that make you happy? What are things that make you mad? And now that I've got your wheels turning, I'm going to actually do
this exercise with you. So let's start with your passions. So my passions are trying to
become a better entrepreneur, helping as many people as
I can achieve their goals, developing myself and trying to get better than I was yesterday,
and lastly giving back and philanthropy. Now what about your hobbies? My hobbies are very
boring, but here they are. Doing fun activities with my wife, going to the movies, going to dinner, spending time with my dogs
and taking them on walks, reading nonfiction books,
watching YouTube videos about entrepreneurship and marketing, watching movies or TV shows on Netflix, watching the Lakers or NBA in general, playing pick-up basketball
and weight lifting, which is not really a
hobby, but a necessity. So the goal here is to
get your wheels turning. Most of what you write down won't qualify as a niche to enter, but
it's important just to get thinking about these different things. Now, I want to show you some places where you can dive into to find niche ideas, but before I do I need to
cover one very important topic. Do you need to be
passionate about the niche that you enter? The short answer is no, but
it can help a ton if you have at least some interest in the topic. To put this concept into perspective, I started many niche
websites back through 2011, 2013 and my motive was to learn
SEO and build a portfolio. So after some research
I decided to enter the under counter ice maker niche. I created the site, ranked
for under counter ice makers and all kinds of product-related keywords, but here was the problem,
I hated every single second of it because it was the
most boring topic ever. I eventually got so
bored that I completely stopped working on it and
focused on the sites that I actually enjoyed working on. And one of those websites was my first, which was a baseball
pitching blog and I ended up selling this blog to a
former MLB baseball pitcher, and the point here is that
it took nearly no will power to work on this baseball pitching blog because I already was passionate about it and I genuinely enjoyed
writing about the topic. On the other hand, I
needed maximum will power to work on the under
counter ice maker website, and even when I mustered up
the strength to work on it I didn't enjoy a single second. My point here is that you
should have some interest in the topic, or at least the
potential to have interest in it once you dig deeper. With that said, here are
some places you can look to find profitable niches. The first place to look
is good old Amazon, and I recommend starting
with non-branded categories. That means you should
ignore Amazon products and focus on the general topics, like home, garden, and tools. Open up the first three
primary categories in new tabs. So I'm going to explore
home decor, furniture, and kitchen and dining for this example. Them I'm going to hover over the drop down for home decor and then
you'll see some micro topics. Add all of these ideas to your list. Remember, we're not
validating these ideas yet, we're just building a prospect list. Just keep going through all the categories and adding the ideas to your list. The goal here is to build a
list of at least 100 ideas. You can probably find more than
enough ideas on Amazon alone but let me show you some other
methods you can use as well. The next method is to use ClickBank. ClickBank isn't great
for finding micro niches, but it can give you some
ideas based on the larger niches you'll see. On the left hand side just
look at the categories and expand those categories,
then add these to your list because I'm gonna show
you how to find sub-niches within these larger niches. Now what you need to do
is take all the ideas you found and find sub-niches. So just copy a topic and open up Quora, and in this example I'll use baseball. So right away you'll see related topics. Add all of these to your list, as well. Go through this exercise with
all your broad niche topics. Now the next method I love
to use is Answer The Public. So once again, I'll just enter
baseball as the primary niche and right away I found all
kinds of potential niche ideas such as baseball
cards, baseball cleats, baseball caps, baseball playoffs,
and even baseball bedding. Now some of these topics
may be too niche to create a website on, and may be
better suited for an authority website about baseball gear, for example. Now the final method is to
install a keywords everywhere plugin and then just open up Google. Then enter one of your
ideas and then click the spacebar and Google
suggested search feature will show you all kinds of
new topics and potential niches to enter. Then you can look at all
the ideas that the keywords everywhere plugin gives you, you can scroll to the bottom, or you can deepen your search
by adding another space, entering each letter of the alphabet, or even adding numbers to your search. The combinations are truly endless. Now these methods I've
shown you will help you find hundreds of potential niche ideas. I'll have a sample list
of ideas I found using these exact methods I've shown
you today below the video. You can take these ideas or you
can use them as inspiration. So that's all for this video, thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson. So the first thing I need to establish is that this is not a full scale keyword research operation for your niche website. I'm going to show you how
to do basic keyword research so that you can confirm
what niche is best to enter. Also, you should only
go through this process with a small number of perspective niches, five to 10 perspective
niches is probably ideal. So here's what you need to do. Let's say one of my perspective
niches is baseball cleats. I'm simply going to take
this idea and put it into Ahrefs' keyword explorer tool. You can also use SEMrush
for this same exact process. Now there are a few elements
you want to examine here. First, is there search
volume for this primary idea? This doesn't necessarily
mean you're gonna target this exact keyword phrase,
but you need to know that searchers are actually
interested in the topic. The good news is that
you don't need to guess, just follow the search volume. The next section to look at
is the keyword ideas section. It's a good sign if Ahrefs is
showing different variations and sub-topics in your primary niche. Ultimately this part of
the process is to confirm that this niche has search
activity, that's it. The next part of the process
is to make sure that it's actually possible to rank. Now Ahrefs' keyword
difficulty tool is helpful for a 30,000 foot view process. In this case, a KD of 11 for
a body keyword is a good sign. Then click on a few
other long tail keywords and see what the KD
for those are, as well. In this case I clicked on
the Adidas baseball cleats and the KD is zero. I would be extremely
interested in this niche based on this information alone. Now keep in mind, you're
going to be doing extensive keyword research and keyword
qualification later on to determine what keywords
to actually go after, but for now we're just
trying to get a general idea. All you need to do now
is repeat this process with all your perspective niches, then give each of your
perspective niches a pass or a fail grade based
on the SEO competition. Then once you've narrowed
your list down to the passes, rate those niches based
on your level of interest in that topic. Just score the niches in
three different categories, either interested, could be interesting, or not interested. Now what do you do if
you don't have the budget to invest in Ahrefs? Well, here's what you do. Install the Keywords Everywhere plugin and install the Moz toolbar. Then just enter your broad niche idea and see if it has search volume. Then using the Moz toolbar,
export the search results and then average out the DA
of the top 20 competitors. If the average DA is
above 50 then it might be a competitive niche loaded
with authority websites. I wouldn't disqualify the
niche through this reason alone since that's only one key word. And then if you examine 10
to 20 different keywords and you're still getting
DA averages above 50, then you may need to move
onto a different niche. Keep in mind that it's possible
to beat these authority websites by having hyper-relevancy
and depth of content, it's just harder and will take longer. I would rather have you go
the path of least resistance, especially if you're new to this process. And if you're using Ahrefs,
you can go through this same exact process with their
Domain Rating, DR, score, and Ahrefs' KD rating is useful, but it doesn't take into
account the overall authority of your competitor's website,
which is a big factor. My last recommendation is to
take your time on this step, do deep research, and
don't settle on a niche before you're absolutely
certain you can compete in it. So that's all for this lesson, thank you so much for
watching and I'll see you in the next one. So the most important
question you have to ask on every niche idea you
found is are people spending and making money in this market? So let's start with spending. The first method is to use
Google Ads data to give us the answers we're looking for. You can either log into
the Google Keyword Planner or search your idea in Google and use the Keywords Everywhere plugin
to see the cost per click. So for the example baseball
cleats the CPC is 84 cents and when the CPC is
higher, it's an indication that it's a high value niche. And also that the lifetime
value of a customer is on the high end because
companies are willing to spend large amounts of money on ads. That's because they know
their customer value and they know they can still
be profitable despite the CPC. For example, look up the term
Los Angeles personal injury lawyer and you'll see that the CPC is $76. That's because personal
injury lawyers know that a single case can net them
hundreds of thousands of dollars. So with that said the
goal of this exercise is to simple see if
companies are paying for ads in this market. And if they are, it's a good sign. The second method is to see if companies are advertising on Facebook, as well. Just go to any Facebook
page for a popular brand in your target niche and
click on the info and ads tab, and then you'll be able
to see what ads a company is currently running. If some of the big brands
in the space are running Facebook ads, it's a good sign. The third method is to go to ClickBank and see if there are any products
being sold in your niche. Click on the affiliate marketplace
and then find your niche. It doesn't have to be the exact niche, but at least look in the
larger niche you're in. Then just look at the gravity score for the list of products. This will indicate that
products are being sold in this niche. So you get the point,
the goal is to confirm that businesses are spending money on ads and making money in your niche. You can also go to Amazon, Ebay, Alibaba, Commission Junction,
LinkShare, and even Offer Vault to get more validation, as well. Once you've narrowed your
list based on the potential profitability, then you
need to see if the niche has a strong trend pattern. One of the worst things
that can happen is entering a non-evergreen niche with
declining search volume and interest. That's why I generally only
focus on evergreen niches, or at least those that
have a long term horizon. For example, I wouldn't
consider SEO a true evergreen niche because Google,
YouTube or any other company with a search engine
could go out of business. Now this is extremely
unlikely so therefore SEO has a long time horizon. With that said, I recommend
using Google Trends to see the trend pattern
for your niche idea. Just go to Google
Trends, enter your niche, and see if it has a trend
that's going upward. Also look at the suggested
ideas below because sometimes those are
attracting more attention and you may need to pivot. Now, the trend pattern doesn't
have to have hockey stick upwards growth, but it
should at least be stable and not dramatically declining. For example, this trend
pattern for Ask Jeeves is an extremely bad one and
would need to be avoided. The next niche validation
method that you need to use is make sure that people
are actually searching for topics within your niche. The fastest way to find out is to use the Keywords Everywhere plugin. Just enter some keywords
around your primary niche and see if there's any search volume. These aren't necessarily the
keywords we're gonna go after, we just want to make sure
that there's search activity since SEO is going to
be the primary method used to drive traffic
to your niche website. You can also use the
Google keyword planner, Ubersuggest, or Ahrefs
keyword explorer tool to validate that there's
search activity in your niche. The final validation method
is to see if there are communities in your niche. Just go to Google and enter
the simple search phrase niche + forum. And if there are forums,
categories, or threads related to your topic then
that's a very good sign. You can also go to
Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or pretty much any platform
and search for your topic. Then just ask, are users
talking about or engaging around this topic or niche? So just to review, you're
going to choose a niche that, number one, you already
have some passion in or can develop interest in as you
dive further into the niche. Number two, companies are
advertising in your niche and people are buying products. Number three, the niche
has a stable trend pattern and the interest isn't declining. Number four, searchers
are looking for answers or solutions in your
niche, in other words, there's search volume in Google. And number five, users on
other platforms are engaging and discussing topics within your niche. This five step vetting
criteria should help you narrow down your list to
at least your top five. So the next part of this
process is to conduct keyword research in your top five niches to see which one has the
best chance of you winning in from an SEO perspective. So, that's all for this lesson, thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. So first, what does it
mean to be an expert? In my opinion, you're an expert in a topic once you know more than
most of the population. Now, this may sound like a daunting task, but it's surprisingly easy
as you're gonna find out. Your goal is to simply
acquire enough knowledge about your niche to be able to produce expert level SEO content. You do not need to be the best
in the world in your niche. You juts need to be better than average and you'll be able to teach
people if you achieve that goal. So how do you actually go about doing it? Well, here's how. Think of these 30 days as
total immersion learning. You're simply trying to
get a broad understanding of your niche. And you may uncover some micro
intricacies within your niche but the goal is to get
a broad understanding. And believe it or not,
your knowledge of a niche will accelerate once you
start doing research for and writing an SEO content asset, like I'll be showing you soon. So here's a four step
approach you can use. Number one, get broad knowledge. Subscribe to the top industry blogs, follow the industry
leading experts on Twitter, join groups on Facebook and
find subreddits in your niche. These different sources will expose you to a large amount of
information about your niche and this is good. You don't have to understand
how everything works, either. You're just getting exposure
and you'll go deeper into this as you start to craft your content. Number two, discuss the topic. If you have a question,
don't be afraid to ask. Asking questions is one
of the most important pieces to learning. Also, as corny as it is,
there's no such thing as a stupid question. There are stupid people
who might condescend you for asking simple questions,
but don't worry about them. I recommend asking questions on Reddit and within Facebook groups. Number three, go deeper. The first steps will
get your wheels turning, but the fastest way to learn
is to seek out knowledge from proven experts. Since most experts within
a field are expensive to hire on a one-to-one basis, you can bypass this cost
by simply buying books. Books are cheap and are the
fastest way to accelerate your knowledge about any industry. I recommend reading at
least three to five books within your niche. Then after that I recommend
enrolling in a course taught by an industry expert within your chosen niche, as well. These may be harder to find
depending on your niche, but search through Udemy,
Linda, and even Google search by using search streams
like niche + training or niche + course. I truly believe structured
courses are the fastest ways to learn. Step four, teach. Once you have broad
knowledge of your niche it's time to teach it. Your knowledge of a topic
or niche will accelerate faster than you ever imagined
when you start to teach it. But for now, don't worry
too much about this step because this will be the
focus on creating your SEO content assets for your niche website. Also, I'll be showing you how to conduct deep keyword research which
will help you identify topics you didn't even know existed during the knowledge acquisition phase. And believe it or not,
this is really all it takes to be better than most of
the world in a given niche. Most people aren't
willing to put in the time or effort to learn a topic, so if you do you'll be light
years ahead of the competition. Immerse yourself in the
niche and become your ideal reader and customer. That's all for this lesson. Thank you so much for
watching and I'll see you in the next one. The first monetization
method is affiliate marketing and this is one of the most common ways to monetize a niche website, and that's for a good reason. The first reason why I
love affiliate marketing as a monetization model
is that it is a truly passive income source. Visitors come to your
website and you drive them to your partner's website as an affiliate. That means whatever product
or company you're promoting is the one that's responsible
for product development, selling, customer service,
and all other elements of a business. That means your only job
as an affiliate is to drive traffic to your website in
pre-sell offers and that's it. Now of course this model
does require you to create content and maybe run
ads, but your entire focus is on traffic growth. This is why affiliate
business models are truly low maintenance because you won't be dealing with customers. While I do love the
affiliate marketing model, it does come with some downsides. First, you're not in control. A company can lower your
commissions or say your commissions aren't valid
whenever they want. They are in control of your income source. This is why so many
affiliates have moved on from the Amazon affiliate
program because they've cut commissions so much. And believe it or not, this happens a lot. Not only that, companies will
often delay your payments or sometimes conveniently
forget to pay their affiliates. And the other big concern
I have about websites that are purely affiliate
driven is when an economic recession hits. When companies tighten their budgets, affiliates will feel the pain
because many of the programs will be cut and commissions
will be reduced. That's why I always
recommend diversifying your income sources and never
solely relying on affiliate marketing on its own. But more on this later. The last issue that you
may encounter with pure affiliate marketing is that
there's an income ceiling. There's only so much
traffic you can drive until you're tapped out in a niche. You will eventually hit a
wall and you'll either need to modify your monetization model
or create another website to push your income up to another level. Now of course, everything
I'm outlining here are doomsday scenarios. Economic recessions don't
happen often and many companies treat their affiliates really well. I just want to make sure
you're not blindsided by these potential challenges
that you may encounter. The biggest issue I have
with affiliate marketing is the lack of control. That's why I recommend
stacking affiliate marketing with more controllable income streams such as products or services. Now more on this second, but
for now affiliate marketing is truly the best income
source for beginners since you won't have to
deal with all the other facets of business. Instead, you can just
focus on driving traffic, pre-selling, and marketing in general. Now there are many ways to
find affiliate programs, but here are some of the best ones. Number one, Amazon Affiliates. Now, it isn't what it used to be, but it's still an easy way to get started with affiliate marketing. Number two is ClickBank
and you can earn some pretty huge commissions on ClickBank if you promote the right offers. But it definitely won't
work in every niche, but it's definitely worth researching. You should also check out Share A Sell, Commission Junction,
LinkShare, and Offer Vault. You should be able to find
plenty of great programs on these platforms and if
you're entering the fashion niche you should look at
ShopSense or rewardStyle. And last but not least, one
of my favorite ways to find great affiliate programs
is to work directly with the brand. Just use the following
search string in Google, brand + affiliate or
brand + affiliate program. Many will direct you to
other affiliate platforms, but it's worth researching. Now the next monetization
method I want to cover is using AdSense or ad
placements in general. You can either use AdSense
or make money from clicks passively or sell ads on your website. The latter is only possible
once you have traffic so we'll probably start with AdSense. Now, like other monetization models, AdSense comes with both pros and cons. Let's start with the cons. Like affiliate marketing,
making money with AdSense has a ceiling and you're
going to need lots of traffic to make a respectable income. The other issue is that having
adds all over your website can hurt user experience
which may indirectly impact your SEO performance. Now this can be avoided if
you're not super aggressive with your adds and instead
you prioritize the digestion of your content over
aggressive ad placements. The other issue with AdSense
is that you're sending people off of your website. Sure, you're making
money from those clicks, but you could be missing
out on the long term lifetime value of that visitor. That's why it's really
important to try to convert your traffic into email
subscribers and make sure you have a Facebook pixel
installed on your site so you can remarket to these
individuals in the future and get them back to your website. On the other hand, AdSense
is truly the easiest way to make passive income with a website. You just slap on an ad on your website and get paid whenever someone clicks it and it's honestly that simple. I recommend that most
beginners either start with affiliate marketing or
AdSense as the initial form of monetization. In the long term, though,
you should consider creating your own product or service because then your niche website becomes a real business and your income can swell to new levels. For example, there are different types of product businesses. You can create an information product like Gotch SEO Academy, you can
create your own physical product, you can drop ship products,
or you can use Amazon FBA to fulfill products. The possibilities are truly endless. Now of course, the downsides
of creating and selling your own products is that
you'll now be running a real business. That means you'll need
to handle all facets of the successful business
such as marketing, sales, operations, and
even customer service. It's not easy in the beginning
and requires constant learning to handle all these areas, but it's worth it if
you're looking to take your income to another level. But at the end of the day
you need to figure out what path is most desirable for you. I use a combination of products, services, and affiliate marketing
within my own business, but I only used AdSense
and affiliate marketing when I first started. My big takeaway here for
you is to take baby steps and don't try to do everything at once. Choose one monetization
model, get really good at it, and then stack another and another as you master each one. And most importantly
don't feel like you're tied down by your decision. Test affiliate marketing, test AdSense, even test your own
products and then decide which one is best for your specific niche. You're not always going to
get it right on the first try, but testing is the key to
eventually getting it right. And I cannot stress this point enough, test, test, and test more
because at the end of the day this is just advice based
on my experience in testing. Your experience is different
and how you'll operate is totally different than I would. That's why you need to
conduct your own test to figure out what works best for you. I could create an entire
course on these different monetization models,
but for now start with the easiest methods if
you're new and if you're more advanced then start moving
into the more advanced models to take your
income to another level. So that's all for this lesson, thank you so much for
watching and I'll see you in the next one. Unlike much of the advice out there, my goal is to help you
build an incredible niche website that you'll be able
to make real money from and maybe be able to sell
one day for a nice lump sum. And that's only possible if
you treat your niche website like a real company. So the first question is,
should your niche website be a general brand or a personal brand? And this is one of the
most challenging decisions you'll encounter. A general brand is like Best
Buy and a personal brand is like Gary Vaynerchuck. I recommend creating a
general brand for your niche website and here's why. First, you need a big personal brand to use it as leverage. This simply is not the
case for most people. Number two, it's easier to
build a company than a personal brand that revolves around
a single individual. Number three, you can
build your personal brand once you've achieved success
with your niche website or other websites. And number four, it's easier
to sell a general brand than a personally branded website. Now it's important to mention
that this doesn't mean you should hide your identity. You, as the author and
expert of your content, should be visible. You can make your website
relatable and personable without having the entire
business centered around you as an individual. So now the next step is
to actually brainstorm and select the brand name. I'm going to show you a few
different ways you can do this, but first do not overthink this process. Most brand names mean
nothing when they're unknown. For example, would Google mean
anything to you if it wasn't the most popular search engine? What about Canon or
how about Donald Trump? These traditional and
personal branded names mean nothing on their own. They only mean something
because of what they are or who they become or
how we associate them. That's why you don't
need to stress to hard about picking a name. With that said, here are a
few ways to come up with a solid brand name for your niche website. Method number one is to create a mindmap. Write your niche in the
middle and then surround the primary idea with
subtopics, keep breaking it down until you find something interesting. Method two, think about how
people feel about this topic. What emotions are
stirred up in this niche? What are customers
achieving in your niche? What are problems being
solved in your niche? What is the end goal
for someone navigating through your niche? Method number three is to use Bustaname. Just take some of your
ideas or words and put them into Bustaname and this will give you all kinds of ideas. You can also use Lean
Domain Search to see if some of your ideas are available. Method number four is to use a thesaurus. And if you're really struggling, just go to thesaurus.com and
start gathering some ideas from there, as well. I recommend coming up with
at least 20 to 50 quality brand names and then
narrowing that list down to your top 10 because
some of your top ideas won't be available for
domain registration. Use Instant Domain Search
or Lean Domain Search to see if your ideas are available. Although there are many TLDs,
which are Top Level Domains, you can choose from these days, I still recommend trying
to land a .com TLD. That's only because it's
still the most well known TLD and Google seems to show
preferential treatment to them. Just look at the search engine results and you'll see this in action. So with that said, keep
coming up with new brand names until you find an available .com TLD. But before you purchase
a domain you need to use two more qualification methods. Open up Archive.org and
enter the perspective domain then look at the history of this domain. Ideally you want it to be 100% unused, but if it's been registered in the past, you want to make sure that
it hasn't been used for spam. This will be quite
obvious as you dig around. The second qualification
method is to take the domain and run it through any
backlink analysis tool such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Majestic. Ideally, the website
will have no backlinks, but if it does the backlinks need to be high quality and natural. Deeply examine the
links and if you see any blog networks or link spam, them make sure you move onto another idea. And then once your domain idea
has passed these two tests it's time to invest in your domain. I recommend using either
GoDaddy or Namecheap to purchase your domains. I'll have discount codes
below the video for both. Now during the domain registration process you're going to encounter
a few different offers. The first is whether or not you want private WHOIS information. Namecheap gives this to you
as part of your purchase, but you'll need to pay extra
for it if you're using GoDaddy. But the question is should
your WHOIS information be private? Well that's totally up to you, but if you don't want
to pay for private WHOIS you can use a PO Box or
an address generator. And from an SEO perspective,
it looks much more trustworthy to have public WHOIS so
that's something to consider. Now the next checkpoint you'll
encounter is whether or not you'll want an SSL certificate. I highly recommend adding
this to your purchase because Google stating a
few years ago that having or not having an SSL
certificate could impact you SEO performance. Plus Google Chrome now
labels websites as not secure if they don't have an SSL
certificate installed. And if you don't want to pay extra, you can use Let's Encrypt
which helps you install a free SSL certificate. It's slightly more
complicated to go this route, but it's a solid option if
you're on a tight budget. The last checkpoint you'll
encounter during this process is if you want to get hosting
from which the registrar you've selected. Both GoDaddy and Namecheap
offer solid and affordable web hosting. And if you don't want
hosting through one of these providers then I highly
recommend you check out HostGator or WPEngine
if you're looking for a premium web host. Now let me recap to make
sure you have all of your bases covered. First, you need to come
up with a brand name and make sure the .com TLD is available. Second, you need to
register the domain using GoDaddy or Namecheap, using a
coupon code below this video. Then you need to decide if
you want to pay for an SSL certificate or use a free
option like Let's Encrypt, and lastly you need to choose a web host. The best situation is to
have your domain, SSL, and web hosting all housed
under a single provider. That way you don't need
to manage multiple logins and deal with unnecessary
operational headaches. Now there's one last piece I
want to cover in this video and that's your brand identity. So at the most basic
level your brand identity is going to be your logo,
your primary brand colors, your graphics, and your images. So let's start with your logo. If your budget is limited
then I highly recommend using Canva to create your logo. It certainly won't be original, but it can pass for the
time being until you're able to invest in a higher quality logo. And if you have the budget,
I recommend using 99 Designs or Fiverr to get a logo designed. I'll have links to both below the video. The next decision you'll need to make are the colors you want
to use for your brand. For example, you'll notice
that Gotch SEO uses the same red on my website, on social media, and pretty much everywhere online. That's intentional because
that's our primary color. Different colors represent
different feelings. For example, red
represents intense feelings including aggression,
happiness, love, and passion while blue can often
represent calmness and peace and can even cause the body
to produce calming chemicals. It's also a symbol that
has positive meanings in the professional world. I'll have a link below
this video to a resource on the psychology of color
which may help you decide. But one big factor that
should dictate your decision are the colors that your
competitors are using. Ideally you should choose a primary color that's different than your competition. For example, when I settled
upon the red variation for Gotch SEO that was because
most people in my niche were using green, blue,
or orange as their colors. So those are all the
steps you need to cover to establish your brand
for your niche website. Brainstorm and choose a brand name, register your .com TLD,
get an SSL certificate, setup your web hosting, design a logo, and choose your primary brand colors. So that's all for this lesson, thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. So at this point you should have a brand, a domain for your brand,
an SSL certificate, and web hosting. Now you need to setup your
content management system, or better known as a CMS. I highly highly recommend
using WordPress because it's the most beginner
friendly and it's optimized for SEO out of the gate. And it's also the most popular. Now this lesson is going
to focus on how to setup your website using WordPress as your CMS, so let's jump in. The first step is to optimize
your WordPress settings. Go to settings and click on general. So in this section you
want to make sure that your preferred WordPress address
and site address are correct. In most cases the URL will
be the same in both fields. Then click on the reading
tab and make sure that the search engine visibility is unchecked. Next click on the permalinks
and select post name and this is the most
efficient and best URL structure for SEO. Econ websites may need more complex URLs, but in most cases you can
just use the post name option and that's what I personally always use. So that's it for the general settings, now let's go over to
the plugins you'll need. First I'll show you what
plugins you need to install and then I'll show you how
to actually set them up. So the first plugin you'll need
to install is an SEO plugin. The two most popular SEO
plugins are All in One SEO Pack or Yoast and you can't
go wrong with either. With that said, let me
show you how to setup All in One SEO Pack. Son on the left hand side
in your WordPress dashboard, click on the All in One SEO Pack and click on general settings. Under general settings
make sure that canonical URLs is selected. Then under homepage settings
fill in your homepage title and home description. In most cases this will
be a general description of your website and won't
be used to target keywords. The next section that's really important are the no index setting section. Make sure hosts and pages are unchecked, and I recommend checking the following; I use no index for
categories, date archives, author archives, tabbed
archives, the search page, the 404 page, and
paginated pages and posts. And the reason why you want
to no index these sections on your website is because
it can help prevent duplicate content related
issues in the future. The next plugin you'll
need is Really Simple SSL. This plugin ensures that
all pages on your website are properly secured. And once it's installed go
to settings and click on SSL. And as long as the first
four check points are marked with a green check, you
should be good to go. I do recommend opening an incognito window and testing your domain to make sure it redirects to the secured
version of your website. The third plugin I recommend
is the Schema plugin. Now this plugin makes it
super easy to implement structured markup on your pages. And this will be super
important if you're doing product reviews in the future. So once it's installed
just click on the settings under Schema and enter
your details under the general and knowledge graphs tab. The fourth plugin is Pretty Links. Now Pretty Links is only
necessary if you're going to promote affiliate offers, but in short, this plugin is going to
make your affiliate links look a lot cleaner and
will track your click data for those links. So to create an affiliate
link using Pretty Links just click on the add new link
under the Pretty Links tab, then paste your affiliate
URL in the target URL and then choose how you
want the Pretty Link to look I usually do /recommend/offer. So for example the Pretty
Link version of my Ahrefs affiliate link is /recommend/ahrefs. The next plugin is the Open Graph plugin. Open Graph is what social
media websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter use
to display post information. This plugin will relay the
right information to these websites so that your posts look correct when they're shared on social media. The good news is that this plugin doesn't require any setup. Just make sure you check
how your posts look by using Facebook's
debugger tool and LinkedIn's post inspector tool. The next plugin doesn't do anything cool, but it's called No Self Pings. In short, it prevents
getting ping notifications every time you link to
another page on your website and it also does not require any setup. The second to last plugin
is Akismet and Akismet prevents spam comments on
your blog and it's very, very effective. You will need to create an
account but it's worth it because this plugin will
stop most comment spam. And the final plugin
you'll need to install is Contact Form Seven. Contact Form Seven allows
you to create contact forms on your website. And to create your first
contact form just click on the add new under the
contact tab and you can then copy your short code and
paste it directly onto your contact page. Now these are the bare
minimum plugins you'll need to have a properly functioning
and optimized website. You'll likely need or want
other plugins in the future, but these are simply just a great start. Now the next most important
step is to install Google Analytics on your site. First, if you haven't
already you'll need to create a free Google Analytics account, then Google will provide you with an analytics tracking code. Now there are a few different
ways to place this code on your website. First you can copy the UA
number and paste it directly into the All in One SEO pack, or the other method is
to place the entire code in the head section of your website. Now you'll need to
understand how to navigate through HTML to do this correctly. Now the last method, which
is my personal favorite, is to install the Insert
Headers and Footers plugin and all you need to do is
copy you Google Analytics code and paste it directly
into the headers section. You can also place your
Facebook tracking code, or whatever pixels you want in the future using this plugin, as well. Now the next type of tracking
I recommend you setup is Google Search Console. Go to Google Search Consol,
click add a property, enter your domain, and click add. Then click alternate methods,
select Google Analytics, and click verify. Now this should work, but if
it doesn't then you may need to use the HTML tag method. Just copy the HTML tag and go back to the Headers and Footers plugin
and paste the HTML tag in your header. Now it may take some time
for Google to recognize it, but it should work. Then the last step is to
connect Google Search Console to Google Analytics. Just open up Google Analytics,
click on acquisition, and click on Google Search Console, and click on landing pages. Then click on setup Google
Search Console data sharing, scroll down and select
adjust search console, click add, select your site
from Google Search Console, and click add a site to Search Console. Now let's quickly talk about
the design of your website. I recommend using a
traditional WordPress theme when you're starting out
because custom builds are a big financial and time investment and definitely not worth
doing in the beginning. You can either use free
or paid WordPress themes. For free themes just go
into the WordPress dashboard and click on themes under
appearance and select add new theme, then just dig
around and use the search function to find an appropriate
theme for your website. And if you want to use a paid
theme then I highly recommend StudioPress, Elegant
Themes, or ThemeForest. I'll have links below the video. Now, the one thing you
need to keep in mind about the design of your site is to avoid tinkering with it too much. Slightly changing your
design will have little or no impact on your SEO
or business performance. Spend more time on the high impact actions I'll be showing you soon. Now I'm saying this
because it's super easy to become obsessed with your site's design and most of the time
spent on it will be a form of procrastination because
it's an easy activity. Just make your design
presentable and make some changes over time, but just don't go overboard. Now there is one more
action you need to take and that's creating foundational pages. These pages include your
about, your contact, terms of service, privacy policy, and affiliate disclaimer pages. I'll have templates
below the video for your terms of service, privacy policy, and affiliate disclaimer pages. And your contact page will
just need to use a short code from Contact Form Seven, and
your about page should be, of course, all about your website and its purpose and mission. So those are all the foundational
elements of your website. Thank you so much for
watching and I'll see you in the next video. So the first question
is what is SEO content? Well there are two types of SEO content. The first is content
that targets a specific keyword phrase. For example, if my target
keyword was dog training, then I would create a page targeting that exact keyword phrase. The second type of SEO
content is link bait. Now this is a more
advanced type of content and shouldn't be the
focus in the beginning. In fact, I recommend
spending 100% of your time creating keyword targeted
pages for at least the first year of your niche website before even thinking
about creating link bait. Now, link bait is typically
some type of asset that's designed to attract backlinks. And these assets aren't
usually keyword targeted, but they can be. For example Moz's open
side explorer is an example of link bait. It attracts branded
searches and backlinks, but it isn't necessarily keyword targeted. But for now, let's just
focus on keyword targeted pages because these are the foundation of your organic search traffic growth. And it doesn't matter how many backlinks you acquire if your SEO
content isn't developed well. Now let me cover some
facts about SEO content that will help you a ton. First, a keyword targeted
page isn't always a blog post. While blog posts are the most common way to attack keywords, it's
not always the best, and why is that? Well the reasons is
because of search intent. In layman's terms, search
intent is a fancy way of saying what the searcher is thinking when they are searching
a keyword in Google. You must model your keyword targeted pages to match the search
intent of your keyword. I've already covered this in
the first part of the course, but here's a refresher. There are four types of search intent. Number one, informational. These are your classic
how-to types of keywords. Number two, navigational. These occur when a searcher
is looking to navigate to a specific brand. For example, if they search best buy it's a navigational query. Number three, comparison. These occur when a searcher
is looking to compare two different types of solutions. For example, they may
search something like Nike baseball cleats verse
Adidas baseball cleats. Number four is transactional. These occur when a
searcher is at the bottom of the funnel and likely
ready to purchase a product. Some examples might be buy
blank or blank discount codes. So your goal should be to cover keywords at all the different
stages of search intent. But more importantly you
should always structure your keyword targeted pages
to satisfy the search intent for the keyword phrase. For example, if someone is searching using a transactional keywords
like best buy coupon codes, then your page must give them exactly what they're looking for. Now, I know this may
seem like common sense, but you wouldn't believe how often people get this part wrong. Just keep search intent in
mind whenever you're planning on targeting a keyword and
analyze the search results to see what types of
pages Google is serving for that particular keyword. Then just model whatever you
see and use all the methods I showed you in the SEO
portion of this course. The second fact about SEO
content is that quantity-based publishing is dead. Instead you should focus on
creating the absolute best and most helpful keyword targeted pages. Don't worry about how often you publish. Just focus on adding
the most value for your targeted keyword and
don't worry about how long that takes you because it will payoff in the long run. And more importantly,
quantity based publishing is a drain on resources
and will ultimately lead to thin content which may
actually hurt you over time. I'll repeat this again, do not worry about how often you publish. Worry about how incredible
and valuable each page on your website is. Live by this principle
and you won't regret it. For example, I spend
weeks developing a single blog post for Gotch SEO. And keep in mind you're
not working any less by doing this, you're just producing more behind the scenes, but when you do publish it's going to have a lasting impact. Focus on adding as much
value as you possibly can for every keyword you decide to target. The third fact about SEO content is that it needs to be unique. Examine the top 10 competitors
for your target keyword and try to find a unique angle
that hasn't been covered. Look for weaknesses on their
pages like lack of video or even lack of depth. These are all your advantages. And I cover this concept
in great detail in the SEO portion of the course, so
make sure you review that. Now let me quickly cover
an effective SEO content strategy you should use
for your niche website. This may vary based on
your monetization model, but for the most part it's a good strategy for most business models. I recommend an 80/20 split
between informational and transactional SEO content. That means that 80% of
your keywords should be informational and the other
20% should be transactional. This is particularly
important if you're planning on doing affiliate marketing. It may seem strange to focus
so much on informational content when you're doing
affiliate marketing, but that's actually
the best way to presale affiliate offers. You add massive value up
front and then link to your affiliate product review
pages as more comprehensive solutions to whatever the problem is. And another important
reason to focus more effort on informational keywords
is because it's easier to attract backlinks to
informational content than it is for transactional content. Think about it, would
you rather link to a page about how to plunge your
toilet or a page about toilet reviews? I think the answer is obvious. And this slight variation
in strategy is what most affiliate websites get wrong. They focus purely on review-based content and rarely focused on adding value through informational content. And this is a huge
mistake on so many fronts. But it helps to visualize
this strategy by looking at a content marketing funnel. A content marketing funnel is broken down into three sections. These three sections are the TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU abbreviations
which stand for top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. All of your informational content will be at the top of the funnel. Prospects at this stage
are just looking for information and most
searchers are at this stage at any given time and that's why the cone is larger at the top. And also the reason why you
want to hammer informational keywords more than anything else. The next stage is the
middle of the funnel, this is often the most confusing stage, but think of it this way, you're trying to persuade someone to take baby steps with you and
the best way to do that is through offering a lead magnet, which is a free offer they
can receive in exchange for their email address. And I have a section
dedicated to lead magnets in the academy, but I
highly recommend you create a site-wide lead magnet
so you can capture email addresses because email
is the best way to promote new content you'll be publishing. And then the bottom of the
funnel, also known as BOFU, is where all the
transactional content occurs. If you're an affiliate website
these will be your review or product comparison pages. If you're selling a product,
these may be sales pages or testimonial pages. Now let's step back and
see what this process looks like from a 30,000 foot view. First you're going to
create a page or a blog post targeting an informational keyword. Second, you're going to create a site-wide lead magnet that will convert
a percentage of people that digest your informational content. Thirdly, you're going to
create transactional content that you can promote
within your informational content and through
email, and lastly continue creating new informational
content and promoting it using your email list. You're also going to
need to acquire backlinks to your keyword targeted pages, but your email list is the
best way to get eyeballs on your new assets as fast as possible. Now understanding the
concepts within this lesson is fundamental for your
niche website success and all your future
online business successes. I highly recommend reviewing this lesson as many times as you
need to fully understand. Also, don't forget that I
go deep into these topics in the SEO portion of this course. So that's all for this lesson, thank you so much for
watching and I'll see you in the next one. So first I always use Google
Docs to create content, and the reason is
because it's on the cloud and you can have multiple
people collaborate on the doc and you can
also write the content on any device. The second tool I use
religiously is Answer the Public. Now, this tool is often
used for keyword research, but I actually use it
for developing structure for my SEO content. For example, let's say
you wanted to rank for the keyword dog training. You then just need to dig
around what ideas that Answer the Public supplies
to you to find possible sections for your content. Some of the results may be better suited for its own individual page, but an idea like how dog
training works is a perfectly relevant topic to cover
in a dog training page. I tried to extract as
many ideas as I can from Answer the Public and
then use that as my guide for creating the asset. Just avoid going off topic. As you'll notice, there
are many ideas here, but something like Pigs
Can Fly dog training book isn't relevant to the
primary keyword phrase. Just keep it tight and relevant. The third and fourth
tools I use religiously are Grammarly which is a
free browser extension, and Hemingway Writer, which
is also a free browser tool. I recommend using both to
make your writing better and more efficient. The fifth tool you can use is Canva. Canva is the easiest way
for the average person to create graphics for your content. Lastly, if you're planning
on producing video content then the cheapest way to
do it is to use QuickTime or Zoom and voice memos on
your phone using a lav mic and then you can use a free
editing software, like iMovie. Editing your own videos is
extremely time consuming so I only recommend
doing it in the beginning if you have a tight budget. But as soon as you have a bigger budget, you should hire a video
editor because it can save you a ton of time. Those are all the tools
you can use to create content on your own. Answer the Public is my
personal favorite for creating deep content so I highly
recommend you use it. But before I sign off on this lesson, keep this one thing in mind. No one or no tool is going to
create the content for you. At the end of the day,
you just need to sit down, or stand, and put your
fingers on the keyboard and start typing. And if you have the budget,
then outsource the writing. But if you're doing this
yourself then you just need to do your research, outline your content, and start writing. It's honestly that simple. Don't overthink it and
don't forget that you can always upgrade and improve
your content in the future. Make sure you review
the SEO content portion of the academy to get a full understanding of this process. So that's all for this
lesson, thank you so much for watching and I'll
see you in the next one. Let's cover some facts
about link building. First, you'll need links
from other high-quality and relevant websites
for your niche website to perform well on Google. Now it's possible to rank
for extremely long tail low competition keywords, but in most cases you'll need backlinks. The key is to focus on
the best opportunities. That means, like your
SEO content creation, you should focus on quality over quantity. Quality links are those
that come from relevant real websites and are editorial in nature. Now the only way to acquire
these types of links is by reaching out and
building relationships. And another important
fact to consider is that you'll need to push
harder to get backlinks when your website is new. However, once your pages
are ranking for their target keywords, you'll
actually start to acquire backlinks naturally. And then you'll encounter
what I like to call the snowball effect. That means your website
will continue to acquire backlinks naturally and,
through your outreach efforts, which makes your website
more authoritative and ultimately helps you
rank for your current and future target keywords much easier. In short, SEO gets much
easier when your website authority is built through link building. So like I said, make sure
you review the link building section of this course, but there are a few link
types that are the easiest to go after when you're starting out. The first is guest posting. All you need to do is find opportunities, reach out to the qualified
opportunities with three guest post ideas, then
create a super valuable piece of content for their website, and lastly inject links to
your informational content within the body of the guest post. Some websites will get
sketched out if you try to add links in the body of the content, but there are a few ways around this. First, link out to other content assets on authoritative trusted
websites within your niche, then when you want to link
out to your content asset, just make sure it's surrounded by other quality external links. I recommend only placing
one link in the body and then you'll also get
a link in your author bio which will go to your homepage. The second best way to get links quickly is through Help a Reporter
Out, also known as HARO. Sign up for HARO and review
the pitch emails daily to find opportunities. And when you find relevant
opportunities submit a detailed high quality response. While quality is important,
landing links via HARO is a numbers came and a consistency game. When your website is new
you'll need to hustle for links so that's what using HARO is all about. Then you can tone down your
HARO actions once you start acquiring more backlinks naturally. The third fastest way to acquire backlinks is through resource pages. Just search queries like
your niche + resources to find these opportunities. Then you'll want to
find leverage and see if these pages have any broken backlinks. If they do you can use it as
leverage in your outreach, and if it doesn't then you'll
have to ask if they are willing to include a link to
your resource on their page. What matters here is the
quality of the resource you're pitching. So many SEOs and link
builders get wrapped up in outreach email templates
and other silly tactics, but listen to me carefully, your outreach can be terrible,
but if your content asset is incredible they will likely link to it. Now the opposite isn't true. For example, if Frank Kern
wrote your outreach email, but the content you're pitching sucks, it won't convert and you won't get a link. Effective and successful
link building is predicated on the quality of your
website and the quality of your content. So get that right before
you even think about promoting anything. So like I said, I highly
recommend you review the link building potion of this course because this lesson is
designed just to give you an overview of the process. Hey, thank you so much
for finishing the video. So I hope it gave you all
the information you need to start and grow a niche website. And if you have any questions whatsoever, please leave it below and
I'll respond as quickly as I can because I do respond
to every single blog comment. So once again, thank
you so much for watching and if you're not
subscribed please subscribe to my channel because I'm
gonna be producing videos like this a lot more frequently. So once again, thank
you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.

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