If you are going to blog you should check out the niche site challenge from Pat Flynn who had a challenge on his website. Here is a list of all the niche site challenges Pat has documented which is well worth reading. That was the motivation for me to start my first blog.

My First Niche Blog

My first blog (niche website) was to motivate me to pass the PMP exam while learning all about blogging and SEO. It has been the driving force behind getting my PM qualifications. 100% the reason I’m now qualified, Project Management Professional (PMP) and PMI-ACP (Agile Certified Practioner).

It also led onto a teaching job where I got the opportunity to teach fellow project management professionals looking to attain their PMP.

I definitely thought at the time I was doing things smartly but looking back now I know I couldn’t have done it much harder. I created 40+ articles with no backlinks, spent 40+ hours on an e-book that I couldn’t publish because of copyright to name few of my mistakes.

Driving Traffic Niche Website Tips

Just having content is simply only the 1st step you need to build up backlinks to get high rankings. I originally was going spinning articles, posting in directories, build up a web 2.0 related sites, anything really to build up backlinks. Luckily I got distracted before I started all of it and then when came back to working on the site had decided I wanted to do only scalable ethical SEO techniques.

At the same time, I started following Brian Dean from backlinko who is famous for the skyscraper technique so I decided this blog had the potential to create some epic content.

I have created 3 pieces of epic content which should be beneficial to the readers and draw natural links.

I kind of did things backward where I studied other websites while actually studying for the exam and the most helpful thing was the practice exams. I’m now in the process of creating forum posts and commenting appropriately where people will also find my exam useful for their studies.

For the list of 100 Agile technique, it was created while studying as study notes and then converted it to epic content with a lot of formatting and nice images (one of the images above). Now at the moment reaching out to influencers I mentioned on the list

Blogging Monetization

To make money you need to drive traffic, more traffic the more money opportunities. That is basically it in a nutshell. I have identified 3 possible revenue streams for the website.

Amazon Affiliate Program: By promoting books and having affiliate links to Amazon I get a commission from anyone who buys a book after clicking to Amazon from my site.
Affiliate PM Training Programs: I have banner ads and a resource section recommending a high-quality project management course. Also, have cheaper alternative a Udemy course.
Paid Links: People will pay for a backlink from my site once I have a high domain authority.

11 Tips for Successful Blog

Create great content don’t just create a 300-word article for an easy keyword and let it rank. I originally created 40+ 300-word articles based on keywords but a lot of it was rubbish that I was only writing because of the suggested keywords. Write quality.
Picking a niche you have a general interest in will keep you motivated. If it wasn’t related to project management I would have dropped this project after the 2nd or 3rd obstacle.
Immerse yourself in the niche. Know what is going on and who are the key influencers. Follow industry leaders, join social groups, join mailing lists.
Check any copyright infringements. I had to scrape a domain name because of infringement and never got to publish an ebook which I spent 40+ hours on creating.
Use WordPress.org and cheap hosting, don’t let yourself think these things are too hard because of your not technical. If you can use Facebook you can use WordPress.
Set key metrics to aim towards.
Make the website easy on the eye with nice images and make sure mobile optimized.
Use SEO Yoast to make sure your website content is optimized and readable.
Install Grammarly to make sure all your content has no grammar mistakes.
If you are doing something do it right. Don’t expect things to happen overnight it takes hours upon hours so don’t go taking shortcuts and expect great results. Put the time in and it will pay off.
Don’t give up!

Do you have more tips for people creating a niche website? If so add them in the below comments 🙂

If so add them in the below comments 🙂