9 questions new niche site creators ask

Key Takeaways

hey what's up everybody I am in my hotel room tonight in beautiful Cancun Mexico but on vacation with the family and now I'm staying for a few extra days for business to meet with some with a photographer down here well today I want to talk about nine questions that new new website creators often ask us the first one comes from here'sh M and I'll go through some that have recently been posted but also if you have questions please post them in the chat if you're watching life hair sham says what do you mean by good-quality content this is actually a great question it may seem obvious but it's really not at all almost everyone when they start creating a website tries to go too quickly and just writing content content content pumping it out there as fast as possible because you hear us say you know get to 30 50 articles on on a website so that you can get the SEO from lots of different bait in the water lots of different articles bringing you traffic and then when you start start doing that the content becomes a little bit thin I learned this when I wrote an article called 21 things you can do today to change your photography forever I learned this many years ago and that was the first post I ever wrote that just brought in a huge flood of traffic and I think what change there was rather than just you know chucking out as many tips as I could think of I really spent I spent like three days writing that one blog post and I tried to make it the very best that I could I tried to have unique tips that weren't just the obvious that everybody says tried to find some original things to put in it and it made all the difference so to me I from that I learned one thing that has completely changed my success with getting traffic to my websites and that's this every time I write a blog post I start with information that somebody wants to find out for example what's the best torque wrench for a dirt bike and then I create the ultimate resource the best thing I could possibly make for someone who's trying to find the best torque wrench for a dirt bike which is a post I wrote not too long ago on dirt bike planet calm in fact Google that right now best torque wrench for dirt bikes and I'll bet you that already that article is near the top by I don't know but I bet you it's near the top even though it's new content because you really put extra effort instead of just saying here's my amazon link click this it's the best one have a great resource drum if you're new to a torque wrench what is a torque wrench if you you know what makes a good a torque wrench good for dirt bikes rather than other things really going into depth for people makes all the difference in the world all right the next question comes from Gerald um who says do you have any tips for creating a website in a non-native language English isn't my first language great great question and in fact 65% of you who watch this YouTube channel are not in an english-speaking country as you may as your main language we get this question all the time you can absolutely do this you can create a website in English even if it's you're not non-native language so both Ricky and I I say Ricky I'm used to having somebody here but when we create videos Ricky and I both speak Portuguese and if you were to ask me to create a niche site in Portuguese it would be really intimidating so I understand kind of how you feel if you're going through this but you can totally do it a few tubes tips to help you one download if you have Chrome or whatever browser you have the grammarly plugin our extension for chrome Vern lovak is asking how we both learned Portuguese we both spent two years on a mission in in Sao Paulo but we were in different missions but we both speak Portuguese anyway but we download the grammerly plugin it really helps if you're a non-native English speaker I even use it because it just checks your your grammar and your spelling of things and so it will help especially if you get the purl 1 then it checks a lot more things so make sure your you're writing good quality content that way the next thing is linked to things in the United States Amazon store even if you're in the UK or Canada Ricky and I are still recommending link to the US Amazon store it's just gigantic yeah it's just really big and now Amazon has tools to automatically globalize that to some other major come to some other major countries and the last thing I would say is to be careful you're using the keywords that your target audience will use if you're for example in the UK and you use a slightly different word now you're using loo instead of toilet for example and you're making a website about bidets well you just cut your audience dramatically if you're using a word that's specific to just one english-speaking country and not others so check that kind of thing before you do it if you're a non-native English speaker make sure your keywords are rock solid and the next thing is just confidence you know don't let this be an excuse even if you're a non-native English speaker don't let this be an excuse to not do a website you can do this it's just gonna take some some work creating some people in the chatter asking about creating websites in languages other than English honestly I just don't know I'm positive there's a big market out there for non non English websites and stuff but neither Ricky or and I have have ever done that and so I don't want to speak to something that I just don't have experience with all right the next question comes from user ID Wyoming he says I'm a fourteen-year-old kid following your videos I have eight articles over two thousand words how do I know when to actually publish my website you should publish it as soon as you write your very first article we've been getting a lot of people asking about this who you know you create your website and we say okay what's your URL and they say well I don't I don't want to share it yet it's not quite ready and so people don't want to put anything out there and I definitely recommend from day one and keep your website public as soon as you write an article publish it right away it will take Google a long time to trust your website and this is total time over the shoulder stuff I don't have any data on this but I've got to think Google can see when a site is just growing organically you're just adding calm to it content to it and it's not this sudden flood that it went wonders of this is a spammy thing that's just how Ricky and I have always done it and that's why for that reason I know it's successful just to do it don't worry about all my sites not ready I can't press publish till it's all ready start from day one on a published site and keep working to make it better and better every single day don't worry you won't have a flood of traffic day one it just won't happen all right wanted to remind you comment on any video we publish in 2018 for a chance to win Ricky and I for a weekend we're gonna fly to wherever you are and spend a weekend with you just dominating your business one lucky winner is going to get it so just comment on every video we put out in 2018 and you'll have an entry next question comes from entertainment videos question is bro how do i monetize my website my answer is go check out our last video 11 legit ways to monetize an audience the next question is from Mike M if you guys don't do any link building how does Google find your site to index it at all great question Google will absolutely know your website exists about as soon as you know your website exists when you install Google Analytics they obviously know that it exists just when the site is registered I mean it's the look they're crawling everything like crazy so don't worry Google will find your website even if no other website links to it yet you just start your website it feel like a ghost town but just start writing quality content even with no link building we've done it over and over and over and over again you will absolutely Google will find your website and and you'll start getting it don't slip into trying to find shortcuts what every other internet marketer is teaching out there you got to spend half of your time link building and doing all this stuff and it's just it's the quality content that brings people in and you know we've built sites with millions of visitors and it's because we just focus on on the content and that and not just the SEO and stuff Roz Wan says what if my target audience is younger and social media is what they use most you know III still wouldn't slip into just focusing on social media and I'll give you a specific data why improve photography and my largest website has I think it has 650,000 fans on Facebook and you want to know what percentage of our traffic came from Facebook last month less than 2% actually less than one person motor traffic came from Facebook and we've tried everything I try and trying to get it Facebook is just very stingy with traffic very stingy with traffic it'll do great when you post this funny meme but as soon as you post a link to your website all of a sudden it just is not sending a great amount of traffic and so you know or Instagram for that matter you can't even have links on Instagram except in your description yeah I'm not saying they're useless a lot of people of course are successful on social media but coming from somebody who has built to following over up of over a million people on social media and now is seeing what that actually creates i guarante well what I want to focus on is traffic to content sources that I can control and right now that's my website a podcast can do this but a podcast has a lot of negatives Pinterest is still sending good traffic reddit sins good traffic and YouTube can send great traffic if used well but Facebook Instagram Twitter are just not sending good traffic to websites so they're not things I recommend even if you feel like that's where your audience is I definitely just recommend going to places where where they will actually give you good traffic all right Danish Malek is asking what's the right time to add Amazon affiliate links on your website since there will be no traffic on a new website in the affiliate account may expire ok great question because when you start your your Amazon affiliate site for example Amazon I think it's if you don't make 3 sales in your first 3 months they shut down your account and this is only a problem for your first affiliate site if you're just adding a new ID it won't shut you down if you have other sites on there that are sending traffic but then even so even if after you get the the three sales you know in month four or five six if they're just noting it all happens they'll still just shut you down it's not a big deal you can just start another account later when you do have traffic but Ricky and I have been recommending to just start right away but now I'm thinking maybe it'd be better to wait three or four months to start your Amazon affiliate account for that reason just so you don't get shut down unless you can send a lot of stuff otherwise from Facebook or something like that just to your personal friends I'm just saying you know hey go use my links and stuff but that is actually against the Terms of Use so I don't know do what you want there but but just know and you may want some traffic before you create your affiliate account or they can shut you down and and you'll have to restart it later on alright someone just asked I just missed the name but said what percentage of your income do you earn from affiliate and that completely depends on what website we're talking about with improved photography it's I would say and I my guess right now is 17% 17 to 20 percent is affiliate maybe a little bit less than that with income school it's very low you know we're and maybe 5% of our income 3 percent of our income from Amazon affiliate though we do do really well on Bluehost for people who are starting their their first web site and and want to know how to do it you can go to income school comm slash new and read our tutorial there that's bringing in good income from there I'm gonna have to check with Ricky Ricky's our numbers guy but I want to say we may we make about 27 sales a month on to Bluehost and they keep increasing our commissions as we're sending more people and so that's there for sites like dirtbike planet you know it's basically a hundred percent of it for camper report it's about 50 percent of it for knife up it's about forty percent of my income is from Amazon affiliate and it's it just really depends penguin in a minute says was Kemper report and an outlier the content was really good but it seems to be getting great traffic well it definitely has been a very quick growing website but I wouldn't say any quicker then then pontoon guide was and or other sites that we've built so I wouldn't say it's our very fastest but it's definitely definitely going well but you know it's also one of our most recent ones that has been given time and as we're refining our recipe for how to grow an affiliate site we're we're shortening that time that it takes for a site to really see that hockey stick still takes time but we're shortening it and as we go along alright next question is from Emily Emilio F Castillo saying I'm looking for a way to send you an email or contact you privately what is the best way to do this now the reason I wanted to include this one in here is it's something that you may want to think about as you're creating a new site and that is how much access do you want your site visitors to have to you when your website is new when you're new that probably is a lot you probably want to put your email on things and have a contact form you just be really happy to hear from people but eventually as your site grows you're gonna realize there's just no way and I had a contact form on improved photography for years as I was starting up the site and I just loved spending time with people and then one day I woke up and I was like holy cow I'm getting 200 emails a day it's just not possible you can't do that and and what I also learned is those those weren't necessarily the paying customers who were spending the time emailing and so eventually you're gonna need to take it down I mean if we put a contact form right now on on on income school now it would just get culminated there's no way we could keep up with it but but some people like having giving users access to them it's great as you're starting your your website to really be in touch with your audience and so it's not something that I would say not to do because it gets you in touch it hears you know they'll give you ideas for four articles you can write and things like that but just just do know that that it will take your time away from instead creating a resource that instead of going to one person can go out to the whole world to make it available for them but that is one model that I've used before is I put a contact form on so people can email me as often as they wanted and then instead of writing a personal email back to that person I would write a blog post answering the question and I just email and say hey great question I just answered it in a blog post and send him a link and so it was kind of doing my keyword research for me by having that contact form on the website so it's something to consider but but eventually if you're doing your site how we you're wanting to do your site that it's that it's growing quickly it's just not going to be possible and that's that's totally ok once it gets to that point you shouldn't feel bad that you can't constantly be answering people's questions alright next question is from Rakesh Sardar who says my website got 80,000 pageviews last month but didn't earn a single penny what that's crazy not if you have 80 thousand page views a month that the website isn't earning money is really weird either this is some kind of crazy very difficult to monetize niche or something is really wrong on how this is set up generally what what my goal is when I have a site is when I get to 30 thousand page views a month it should be earning $1,000 a month and you know if your if your niche is celebrity gossip well that's going to be tough to do that's a difficult to niche to monetize but in most niches if you've done a reasonable job of choosing the niche 30 thousand page views a month should equal one thousand dollars a month from all income sources obviously some are easier than others but that's just what I shoot for and we've been able to achieve with the sites we get I haven't really had any any crazy crazy amount Vernon Levesque says my tile and snakes comm site has 50,000 page views a month and makes very little we've got to work on it man go to income school comm and get a niche site school and just burn and even though your site is up and you have and you have traffic I would love to do a consultation looking at the site and figuring out what is up because you definitely should be able to to monetize if you've got fifty thousand eighty thousand page views that's a lot of traffic to not be earning income from so some things to look for Vern or or what what if you write a quick travel guide to Thailand a travel guide to a certain city I a post that I wrote about and I trout a photographer's guide to traveling to Iceland that's been super super popular and you know that's the kind of thing men wrap that up in in a PDF and sell for 15 bucks make it a quick easy easy sell something like that you should definitely be able to earn money from that penguin in a minute says what's your favorite ex themed mo probably ethos one is the one that we we use a lot of time a lot of times to to lay out our sights to be honest I'm getting a little bit tired of exiting not tired of it in that I'm getting bored with it but I as they have made changes to the theme over the last year and a half I haven't loved what they've changed theme ko I believe is really headed in the wrong direction with the theme it's getting more and more convoluted and hard to use it's still the theme that we recommend right now but effort of full disclosure we are actively looking at and for a new theme that is going to be better for people for to recommend because we get a lot of people following our recommendation of a theme so we're gonna wait until we are absolutely certain that we have a theme that's easy to use beautiful and and very important to us is that it loads extremely extremely fast and right now ex themes still does that but it's a little bit more convoluted than we like project 51 says have you ever linked articles you wrote on LinkedIn as a site yeah you know I haven't really used LinkedIn a whole lot I think it's it's definitely a promising platform and a lot of people have found success of course if you're doing anything you know kind of professional world something like that LinkedIn can be a good place to go and to to start getting your site but again I just feel like if you spend ninety five percent of your time creating awesome content on your own platform things end up going better why don't you link your sites in a video description to get some page views yeah yeah we can do that again yeah we could do that word I don't know that we're begging for page views from from people on on our YouTube channel we must want to just send out great great content but if you want to check out the blogs the niche sites that we're creating and you know check out dirt bike planet cabin freedom check out a camper report etc aren't you guys afraid of getting banned i saw reviews rating on your niche site giving you guys a heads up or would we get banned from what that's what he's talking about all right next question is from Sarah Snyder Castaneda who says are you investing in cryptocurrency answer for me is yes absolutely I am am I putting my net worth in it no absolutely not but yes I'm putting money and into cryptocurrency and yes I think it's gonna go down from the crazy highs we saw at the start of December so why would I be investing if I thought I was investing at the peak well because I think it's an incredible world changing technology and I want to have a little skin in the game so that I really go out and I learn how how how it all works and everything and it's worked because I put some money in and I've read three books on crypto currencies in the last months I've been learning all kinds of podcasts I'm starting a mining rig with my son next month I definitely think it's it's interesting if you're interested in that in the mining section of it I like the Vosk coin YouTube channel vo skk of usk a vos coin a YouTube channel is really cool we're we're building a six GPU mining rig to have in our spare bedroom in the house and we're gonna see my son Riveter and I my son is eight and we're gonna see if we can make a little money doing it mostly I want to build a computer with my son and teach them about this stuff so I think it's super cool but I am putting putting money and enough money if it goes down it's gonna hurt but but you know I'm not gonna put in my my retirement and stuff then it no way but I am putting it in I'm putting most of my money in aetherium right now and a little bit less in Bitcoin I just like the technology behind etherium I think it has some promise so it's cool if you haven't jumped on the cryptocurrency bandwagon and really got on it you know it's fine but I I think it's it's a game-changing enough of a technology that you better not ignore it don't put your net worth into it but I think it would be foolish to ignore it because the technology is incredible well Bitcoin take over the dollar I don't know we'll see in 50 years but it's a it's really an incredible incredible technology alright that sorry Mike Streeter says Jim have you thought about you and Ricky creating your own WordPress theme oh I have thought about this and I'll tell you my vision for it because I hope one of you goes out and makes it so I won't have to I love WordPress WordPress is incredible and credit an incredible platform but I feel like the WordPress core is falling behind a little bit I'd love to see him be a little bit more aggressive with the technology that they provide but a lot of it still could be done with themes that really harness what's possible with it themes are mostly just designs right now for for it but I think it could be so much more you know when we see the amount of time that people spend on the web I mean a huge chunk of it of that time is on Facebook Instagram YouTube I mean they're just dominating it's these massive corporate companies that are that are taking the vast majority of the internet traffic and we can't have that they're way more of us as content creators and I think it's a major part of that is because we don't have the tools that we need why are we creating videos here on YouTube instead of where we could control them on our own website because the tools aren't great for creating our own videos on our own website a hosting video on getting it to displays really hard and and WordPress hasn't hasn't created a good solution to that you know why are people why are bloggers creating a Facebook group on Facebook a different website to have that interaction with their audience because the tools on WordPress aren't that great and there are some plugins to kind of do it but they just don't work that well because there's no mobile solution to it you go to a forum you got a sign-in it's terrible it's a horrible experience but Facebook I can download the Facebook app and I get pinged when things happen and stuff which by the way I don't I don't use Facebook anymore hardly ever but I think WordPress needs to to shape up and start giving better tools like that so that I can have an app for people and then we can communicate that way and things like that it's just I feel like Facebook is or WordPress the WordPress core is kind of falling behind in technology and I'd love to see that change but I do think there are opportunities for content creators like you and me to really step that up and create better tools Chet says does Amazon give you a time limit in which to sell affiliate products before you were kicked out of the program I think it's three months you have to make three sales in three months my wife and I worked for Bluehost in Utah before we lived there and moved to Arizona in the last year but some of the people there are very talented and maybe able to do it yeah Bluehost has some very talented people I think this could happen from a hosting company that could do this to create the tools that makes sense to me because of the video portion is going to have success to be very linked to the Hosting of it so man if a hosting company created that kind of tools for WordPress may not just be incredible the rest of it the interaction part we gotta have an app I have a domain around a topic and installed WordPress what is the link to the video to give me ideas on niche article titles - right yeah just just check our YouTube you're gonna see lots of you'll see our article on that best topics floor or the best titles for for articles okay somebody internet domain asked about the suggested searches I wanted to give a little tip that I use when you're starting your website a lot of people will have you know you you let's say the the content is about the best torque wrenches for dirt bikes like I had mentioned earlier well it's easy to write that in about a hundred words the best torque wrench for a dirt bike is the bike master brand and you're like what else do I say I answer the question and so what I often do when that happens and it does happen to me so we're talking about how to add length to your posts I'll give you two different tips first type your your keyword into Google and then scroll down to the suggested searches and what you're looking for here or what are related questions to what you've asked so somebody might say a best torque wrench for a honda dirtbikes and then you know oh okay so after i tell them get the bike master torque wrench one other thing that people are gonna wonder about is does it matter if you're a Honda Yamaha or a KTM guy should you get a different dirt bike wrench so answer that question and then you may see somebody suggested search is best digital torque wrenches for dirt bikes and then you're like oh yeah some people are wondering if they need a digital one and so you create a subheading do you need a digital torque wrench and then you write write an answer to that and you just kind of keep going you're finding these very tightly related questions and you're making them said subheadings and going along one other thing that I've been doing recently with I would say positive but mixed success is I've been writing my blog post recently using tech or speech-to-text and so on the Mac you can just take function function and it will pop up the dictation which is not that great if somebody has a recommendation for me please post in the chat a better dictation software but it's I've what I found is if I start with the dictation and I just started going just saying the answer to to my question or to the just saying the blogpost as I'm going along I find that I'm able to get way more length because I just say things in a little bit longer way than I would type it out on the keyboard and then after I have my thousand 1,500 words then I'll go back and I'll you know format things and make it look nice and things like that reduce d'Oro says Google dictation works oh I didn't know Google had that boy I should have figured they have everything else out there so definitely one definitely want to check out so those two tricks have have helped me to kind of increase the length of my articles by adding the subheadings and then also using dictation sometimes as has been a great thing to to add so I want to kind of close out the the livestream here with just kind of what Ricky and I are working on for you on income school over the over the next few months income school is growing like a crazy weed it's just been awesome thanks everybody for for your response to what we're doing on income school this is the first time we've done a YouTube live and so that's been kind of fun I think we'll continue to add some of these but we've been releasing a video just once a week and we're definitely gonna go much much faster at that this year YouTube has been awesome for income school we have a lot of great resources on income school comm but we add a lot and here to YouTube as well we also are working on a new plugin for for WordPress that will come out later this year and that will help you like one-click a monetize your website I'm crazy its we're really really excited about it so so I won't go into too much detail about it but monetization is something that I just keep hearing people struggling with you don't do all the work to get traffic and then have a hard time monetizing it and for us that's I feel like that's kind of my jam I'm able to monetize a website once we get that traffic and so so that we are working on on a plug-in there that will just help everybody you know as soon as you get your website bang you can get it monetized quickly and so that's that's definitely something that that we're working on this year Ricky and I are continuing to develop our niche sites and over between November and December Ricky is working on cabin freedom calm as his niche site that he's working on and it's looking awesome and I'm working on dirtbike planet.com and we wrote 50 articles each in 100 days we had the goal to reach a hundred as I've mentioned it out in another video we made it to 50 and I'm just really excited to see what those websites do over the next 12 months we'll definitely be sharing all our numbers and everything as it goes right now the contents brand-new but but definitely something we'll be sharing about so dirt bike planet is an interesting one that's a site that we purchased the site was earning basically no money but it had 30,000 page views a month when we purchased it and and it was on horrible technology it was on soullow build it don't get that it was terrible so we moved it over to WordPress much better and we've been working on I've been working on on building that side up and Ricky's doing cabin freedom so those are definitely two - interesting projects to see I don't know that we're gonna be writing a whole lot more content on those websites I think we've you know written 50 and I think we're gonna kind of sit them for a while like we do kind of you know you're planting a seed in the ground we're writing the websites 30 50 articles on them then we're just planting a seed and kind of leaving it let Google do its thing and then we can come back to them one that we need to revisit is is camper report calm that website has been awesome super accessible without that much content I think we only have 24 articles on there but when we planted the seed and kind of walked away and it's just exploded with traffic so that's been great what what we're gonna try to do there is to not write it ourselves growing it but to instead hire a Content team to further develop that website so that's one that I'm interested to watch because we've never I although you know improve photography has a huge amount of writers and stuff as an authority site so I have done that a lot but we've never taken a niche site that we just throw it a little bit and just had paid authors take it from there on out so I'm really interested to see how that works going forward to have paid paid writers doing that so we're that's our strategy for camp a report this year to to kind of build that up and keep that moving and so it's it's exciting times and and of course our main product is niche site school you know you can learn we have so many free resources on YouTube and on income school comm you know if you're just broke and there's all you can do just get your site started just do it the free way that we have a lot of stuff out there but I mean if you're putting all this work into your website if you believe at all that you're six that your site will succeed if if are eight years of experience in building lots of niche sites if we can put that work to work for you in this course if all of that experience could get you even one week sooner for if your website can start earning an income one week sooner it will have paid for itself and and if we can get your website really earning money I mean it's it's just a no-brainer to get a niche site school it's our exact recipe step by step of how we build our websites it's basically 60 actions takes about an hour per action and you just work on it you know day one let's get your domain name and it's a three to five minute video from either Ricky or I just explaining you know all the things to look for in a domain name only dot-com is what we recommend no dotnet no doubt info etc just because nobody people still don't understand it you say my website is repelling dotnet and people are like repelling Netcom no no people should know how to use it but still we just only recommend calm and then day to go get your logo we'll say you know go to 48 hours logo is where we recommend to get it it's inexpensive it should make your website look professional right from the get-go you don't need to spend a thousand bucks on on branding and stuff I'll just get something that looks nice to get that website looking decent there's two actions down and just goes all through 60 actions at the end of the 60 actions you really should have a great seed in the ground it will take time for that to come we'll show you how we do the keyword research how we write the content how long it needs to be and how to monetize it etc so if you're ready to get started and you're serious about your niche go check it out income school calm and click on niche site school hey thanks everybody for hanging out with me on this You Tube live this is the first strong we've done I appreciate appreciate everybody's time and wish you good luck on your on your project bye you