A couple of weeks ago, I had this idea to do a niche site follow along. This is not an original idea, as you probably know. One of the most popular follow-along’s out there is Pat Flynn’s Niche Site Duel. I myself have followed most of the posts in the Niche Site Duel and have learned a great deal about building niche sites from it. The difference with my follow along is going to be that I am doing everything the “dumb” way. When I say dumb, I mean that I am not using any paid tools or paying anybody else to do any of the work. I am doing everything myself using only free tools that are available. I am writing all of the content myself and doing any necessary link building myself.
Risking Very Little Money to Build a Niche Site
If you want to see how to build a niche site without risking very much money at all, this is the follow along for you. At a minimum, you could build a niche site for as little as $10, which is about what you will pay to purchase a domain. If you use some sort of free hosting site to put up your site and post your content, the domain purchase could be the only money you spend. I am not quite being that dumb about building this site. I pay for my own hosting through HostGator (affiliate link), which allows me to add an unlimited number of domains to that hosting account for one low monthly price. I pay $9.95 per month for my hosting plan, whether I have one site or one hundred sites! If you think this niche site thing is going to be for you and you might build several self-hosted sites, I definitely recommend you use a similar hosting strategy. One that doesn’t charge you separately for each site.
I got a little side-tracked there. The point I am trying to make is that it will cost a little bit of money to properly build a successful niche site, even if you do it the dumb way like I am going to show you. There are certainly several paid tools available that make many aspects of niche site building easier and faster. In the future I plan to utilize and share some of these with you, the readers. But, while I continue to learn the process I will continue to use free services and tools. Not only will this alleviate most of the risk, but it also teaches me the processes behind what the paid tools do. By blogging about it here in this follow-along, I hope others can learn from my experiences.
Plans for The Niche Site Follow-Along
I will have a separate page set-up on the Dumb Passive Income blog with links to each post within the follow-along. This way readers will easily be able to come back and reference any post that they like very easily. I plan to write in as much detail as possible on each separate aspect of building a niche site (the dumb way). Each aspect will be it’s own separate post. I will use screenshots as much as possible, or as I feel necessary in order to best illustrate each point.
If you are reading this in the future, Thank You for taking the time. I’m glad you found my site. If you are watching me build this follow-along live, meaning you are reading my posts up to date, please be patient. I can’t make any promises as to how quickly this will progress. I do need to spend much of my limited time actually working on the niche site, as well as working on improvements to my other niche sites. I will try my best to get at least one post done per week on the niche site follow-along. I certainly hope you check back soon to read my first post in which I will reveal my niche, my keyword and how I came up with these.
Until then, remember that there are several dumb ways to create passive income online, but only one site that is blogging about it! Dumb Passive Income… dot com.
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-Matt
Matthew Allen
Matt – I’m kind of excited to see how this works out for you. I was exploring a few names for my own niche site ideas and seriously considering buying them. Coincidentally, I was also exploring how exactly I will create new sites through my hosting account. Like you, my account lets me host unlimited domains. I think I have to setup separate sub folders (or something – I really have a lot to learn). Do you think there will be any repercussions when you try to one day “sell” these niche sites and its under your hosting account?
Thanks MyMoney, I’m excited to share what I’ve learned to this point. As far as selling repercussions, no. I am not worried. I have zero experience buying or selling websites, but I have learned a bit about it recently in all my research and learning about building niche sites. When you sell a site, you transfer the domain to the buyer and they put it on their hosting account. I believe the files for the site (which contain the theme, content, plug-ins, etc) are transferred separately and loaded onto the domain at the new hosting account. Something like that. This is something I will dig deeper into when the time comes, but to answer your question, no, I’m fairly certain that hosting several sites on one hosting account will not matter.
Do you use Hostgator, or somebody else? The process to add a domain to your hosting account on Hostgator is pretty simple. I might even include a tutorial on that within my follow-along series.
Good luck with your site Matthew 🙂
Thanks Ralph. Glad you took the time to stop by!
Excellent stuff. I’m thinking about putting my Istria/Croatia tourism site back up. Enjoy following along. If I’m going to do anything, it’ll be the dumb way, as I don’t have the room in my life to build link wheels and such.
You absolutely should put your site back up John! Stay tuned, as I am testing a (dumb) link building strategy as we speak. I am very excited about it and can’t wait to write a post about it as part of this series. No “link wheels and such!”
Good news. iPage taught me how to add domains. You were right. It was very simple.