Building Your Niche Site Content Strategy
An Easy, Free Step by Step Learning Guide for Beginners
Congrats! You have completed setting up the base niche website that you will use for the next 4-6 months.
Now to focus on how to use keyword research and tools to really identify some targets for you to write about.
Go To Step One
Helping You Build Your Niche Site Empire...
Josh Koop
Primary Editor and Content Builder
Last updated: November 3, 2020
With your site being online you now will want to shift to focus on how to start building your content up, this is what will yield you traffic from Search Engines.
While you can get traffic from YouTube, Pinterest, and other sources this phase for us will focus on building high quality content that you will use to monetize your site as you grow.
The first section is going to be a focus on how you want to structure the content and how this can help you maintain focus as you write, this is where MOST new niche site bloggers will fail.
Assembling your content into a well understood structure helps you to make content choices that make sense for your business along with helping your visitors read more from your website which is invaluable to you as a niche site owner.
Avoid New Niche Site Failures
Theme Changing (Stop Fiddling Start Building)
Content Based on Your Feelings (Maybe later but no one searches for this content)
Random Posting (Talking about baseball, then knitting, then babysitting, STOP THIS!)
If you make sure to focus on the things that will get you traffic you can be successful, after you become popular maybe then you could introduce more "lifestyle" content but you need fans for this content to work.
Also the need to keep changing your website look and feel, you need to let this all go and instead focus on content, people will visit any crappy looking site if the content is good. Bad content or no content on a beautiful site will yield no results in the end.
Our guide below is to help you think through your content strategy and how you can assemble this in your favor to help you to build a successful niche site from the ground up.
Ready? Set? Let’s Go…
Table of Contents (Content Strategy Building):
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If you get stuck setting up a website using this guide, we offer free help through our contact page.
Step #1: Building Your Niche Category List
When you start your niche you will want to know how to categorize your posts and this is a way to help align your content when a bot comes to read the information and that it is all closely related.
What is a Category?
Categories is how WordPress organizes content (posts) into a list. This can be used then to show everyone all your posts related to the category as an archive. This is viewed by many as a way Google starts to see that you are more knowledgeable on that specific category of information.
What is a Silo Structure?
Typically a silo would be one very long post (4000 words or more in many cases) that is the main topic in depth. Then underneath the main post you would build a substructure of posts which cover related topics and all link to the main topic for more detail.
This process actually may help build better internal link structure and this allows users to get to that bigger content and help the larger content to rank better for shorter tail keywords.
What is a Silo Structure?
This process actually may help build better internal link structure and this allows users to get to that bigger content and help the larger content to rank better for shorter tail keywords.
Grab Our Google Tracking Sheet
Helpful Links
Step #2: Understanding Content Types
Your content will be what makes and breaks your website, choosing too highly competitive words will leave you on page two or later gaining only random clicks from random strangers.
What I want to help you to understand is that you must find lower competition keywords to target and rank for, these are also known as "long tailed keywords" and typically are 4 or more words in length and much more specific.
There are an infinite amount of long tailed keywords as they are very specific, where you want to be cautious though is in choosing the ones that can provide you traffic. Some may be so specific that they will only yield small results, these are still beneficial to you but will lack the power to get you to that 100,000 pageviews a month line.
Why the Type of Content Matters
A niche is a subject of focus for your website, this could be as large as "outdoors" or as small as "tent camping". This knowledge will help you make your domain choice to fit your brand and niche.
What is Informational Content?
A niche is a subject of focus for your website, this could be as large as "outdoors" or as small as "tent camping". This knowledge will help you make your domain choice to fit your brand and niche.
What is Money Content?
A niche is a subject of focus for your website, this could be as large as "outdoors" or as small as "tent camping". This knowledge will help you make your domain choice to fit your brand and niche.
Content Type Links
- TBD
Step #3: Finding Your First 30-50 Keywords
Now you understand types of content and you can start to look at content options and when you start a fresh website you would like to find the best content that you KNOW you can rank.
For me, this will always be informational content, the problem with a vast amount of buyer content is that it has money behind it so they will need more work to rank as they may need links to overcome competition and reach page one.
Informational content also can help pull in people who may be just before the purchase stage and the content you write and link to may be able to convert this traffic better than pointing them at a buyers keyword along with giving you more pageviews.
Find Keywords with Google Auto Complete
While this is a manual process it can yield very amazing benefits and an amazing amount of searches when you find a key phrase that users are searching for frequently on Google.
Google Auto Complete is the phrases and suggestions that Google will frequently give you when you type into the search engine search bar, they are phrases that are being typed enough to have Google key on them.
This method will take you some time and documentation with a spreadsheet like Excel or Google Sheets so that you can record the keyword phrase and the competition you see within the SERP, this will help you know the word total and what is expected in the SERP.
Find Keywords with Free Tools
This method can help you when starting to find long tailed keywords that you can then investigate further and figure out whether they are good starter posts for your website or whether they should be saved for later.
This can involve tools like AnswerThePublic, AlsoAsked, and Google Trends. Each of these tools can help you take a seed keyword and expand on it to show you more longer tailed searches that are more targeted.
Find Keywords with Services or with Paid Tools
These tools can help you look and locate keywords while also providing additional details like how easy they may be for you to rank in the Search Engine. This comes at a cost though as these tools aren't cheap and I wouldn't suggest them for new niche site builders.
Content Type Links
- What is Google Auto Complete?
Step #4: Writing Your First 30-50 Posts
Here is where you put this all together you will need to write high quality, no fluff, posts that are more on point and better detailed than the others in the SERP.
You need to look and really evaluate every one of the top 10 posts on page one, look at the way they approach the topic and what they are using for headings and images. This will give you a roadmap you can use for your content and a way to understand where they all lack and how you can win.
This is a skill though and you can expect your first posts may not be perfect, more than likely very far from it. Stop worrying about building a "perfect" post and instead focus on making sure to hit publish each and every day, I promise it is better than many.
Writing Informational Posts
When you are writing informational content stay on course and avoid beating around the bush, the old methods of burying the answer lead to bounces and drops in ranking.
Instead, provide the answer as up front as you can and instead provide more information on the topic to provide the complete answer to your user and not just the 200 word quick and short answer that never will rank.
Writing Cornerstone or Pillar Content
These are the content that holds your site up above the rest, as such your content should be incredibly lengthy and detailed. This is the content Brian Dean spoke about with Skyscraper building, make the content that HAS to be first due to covering each and every aspect to the point no one can compete.
Writing Reviews and "Best" Style Content
These lists should be well thought out and not just be focused on making income, you want to work on providing value to your visitors not just to your pocketbook, sell more often not just more expensive.
Then work on why they should choose an item, building a huge list of 20 products will just typically lead to someone leaving as it will look like you don't have a clue what is the best, more that you just compiled "stuff".
Content Creation Links
- Buy Sell Text
- TextGoods
- Fiverr (Research Writers First)
Congrats on Completing Phase Two!
Content generation will take time unless you can outsource, I would not recommend outsourcing this content though as you need to build a foundation along with beeter understand the subject so that you can feel out how to successfully outsource content. Also you don't want to pay for content when you haven't figured out YOUR keyword strategy fully.
Phase Three - Outreach