Review of Niche Website Builders

For anyone familiar with internet marketing and search engine optimization, you have probably heard of Brad Callen. He is the guy behind one of the most highly rated keyword tools, Keyword Elite. His brother, Matt, is also famous in his own right for his product, HyperVRE (see below).

Well, they have joined together to bring you a free website builder. It was first released the summer of 2008, so is fairly new.

If you want to check it out or create a free account, go to Free Website Builder.

For those familiar with the Weebly site builder, it is similar to that, but after a quick skim through BlinkWeb seems to be smoother and faster. I didn't spend too much time trying it out, so I may be wrong.

Go check it out for yourself.

What Is HyperVRE?
HyperVre is a software program that builds multi-page websites [or mini-sites] in a relatively short time. It was designed by Matt Callen (brother of Brad Callen of SEO Elite and Keyword Elite fame).

Price
GOLD Version: $97 (One time payment)
FREE Version: Free!

There are two versions of this software. Obviously with the paid version there are more profit-making features.

How Do You Make Money?
The websites are basically optimized for adsense ads plus with the Gold Version you can include your Amazon, Clickbank and other affiliate links to your niche site. Add to that some RSS feeds to keep the content fresh and relevant to your site and you are good to go.

HyperVRE Review and Comments:
First, the free version is worth checking out. Why? Well, it's free and you can generate some adsense income with it. Also, the sites set up pretty fast with the free version which means you can have a good amount of sites up in a short time. Adsense is a numbers game, the more sites with adsense ads you have, the more adsense income.

Sets up relatively quickly, with a learning curve, but as with anything, the more you get used to it the faster you can get these little money machines up and working for you.

Figure on spending some time in the beginning to get a grasp on the many facets of the software. Video instruction and a manual are provided and you will need them.

Overall this is a quality product. If you are new to the internet and niche website builders, the free version is a great way to get your feet wet and learn more before going into more advanced areas.

1. This is not a miracle-website-in-a-box
-that-makes-a-kajillion-dollars-overnight product [there is no such thing]. You will need to make sure you have some decent content. The software will search out articles for you according to your niche keywords but you are better off using your own sources for the articles.

When you read Abhishek's step by step account (see below for free report) of how he builds his sites, you'll see that he only uses 25 articles. If you don't want to write your own articles and for the sake of speed, you can just get articles from Ezine Articles, GoArticles or any other free article source. If you have some PLR (Private Label Rights) articles you can edit them.

2. You will probably want to use your own header images, just to make your site look different and original. The free templates that come with the Gold version are usable, but pretty bland. You can try the free trial of Logo Creator over at LaughingBird software. It's really easy and fast to use if you want to create your own logos at no cost. After the trial the software costs around $30.

3. You will need to pay for a hosting service and for domain names. Since we are talking about numerous sites, it doesn't mean you have to break the bank to pay for them. You can still find inexpensive hosting companies, for example HostGator gives you unlimited domain hosting for $7.95 per month and you can purchase domain names from $1.99 at www.GoDaddy.com

It will help you tremendously if you have some HTML knowledge. As Eric Holmlund, an associate of Joel Comm, states:

"..What I love most about HyperVRE is that it's designed to help you build a customized website that is different from anyone else. There are so many customizable aspects within the HyperVRE software that it would be virtually impossible for two people to end up with identical sites.

HyperVRE is push-button simple, so anyone can start using it right away, even if they don't know HTML. Matt provides some great video tutorials as well, so you'll be building quality content-filled sites in no time.

For those who DO know HTML, the sky's the limit. HyperVRE is template-based, so you can do practically anything with it. I've even integrated blogs and forums into HyperVRE sites..."

DOWNLOAD this free 79 page step by step case study to find out how one of Matt's customers, Abhishek Agarwal, went from generating an adsense income of $1.99 per month to over $9000 per month after using HyperVRE for three months. The case study has been updated since the first version and includes some extra adsense tips from Abhishek at the end of the report on how to get the most out of your HyperVRE sites. Abhishek is now earning over $15,000 per month from his adsense sites.

DOWNLOAD the latest case study HERE. [Just right click the link and save to your computer. It may take a while to download]

My Recommendation:
Beginners can try out the free version of HyperVRE to get the feel of it first, but experienced marketers will most probably want to upgrade to the Gold version for $97 to optimize their affiliate income possibilities.

Also, if you upgrade to the Gold version there are many "perks" involved, including the opportunity to join HyperVRE Monthly, a service that provides you with 15 up to the minute fully researched and optimized templates every month for a price that works out at a little over 5c per website per day.

If you are an affiliate looking to have some virtual real estate running quietly in the background (and generating some extra income) while you get on with your other "hands on" affilate work, then HyperVRE is for you.

WATCH THE VIDEOS below from Abhishek where he shows you how his monthly adsense earnings went from $1.99 to over $9000 after implementing the HyperVRE software, then check out the free 79 page case study below where Abhishek explains step by step how he used this software to boost his adsense income.

What is a "BANS" site?

Build A Niche Store or BANS, is basically a script placed on a website template that pulls all the current eBay listings according to your niche subject.

Pricing
$97 (One time payment)

How Does It Work?
The BANS script is a PHP script that you place on a website (or blog) which allows you to take the products listed on eBay relevant to your niche and build a website out of them. The websites can be fully customized with your own colors, headers and content to your own liking, so no two BANS sites have to look alike.

How Do You Make Money?
Practically any way you want. You can put the standard adsense ads, Amazon and Clickbank affiliate links. Since you have eBay listings on your site, you will generate affiliate income from any eBay sales made from your site, plus if someone is not an eBay member and joins from your website, you make a $25 commission. Basically, you are only limited by your own imagination and marketing skills as far as making money from your BANS sites.

THINGS YOU NEED KNOW ABOUT BANS WEBSITES:

1. You will need to sign up with the eBay Partner Network to get an eBay affiliate link. (When you get to eBay's main site page, just scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for the "Affiliates" link.)

2. You will need a MYSQL Database to implement this software. Check with your server or host before you buy. Don't worry if you have no experience with MYSQL, the BANS manual walks you through this step by step with very clear screenshots and directions. To experiment just get a low priced website hosting account and domain name so as not to waste money. As with HyperVRE or in any situation where you want to build a lot of sites, HostGator gives you unlimited domain hosting for $7.95 per month and many BANS owners use Hostgator for their sites. To purchase low cost domain names for $1.99 go to www.GoDaddy.com .

3. Be prepared for the learning curve on this. Don't forget, you will need a domain name and hosting service before you begin building your sites, plus some way to generate your own headers. These are all pretty inexpensive items (see above for hosting company and domain name suggestions). Although it is entirely possible to have your site up within one hour, it will take longer to fine tune it. Once the site is up you can then customize it with your own color scheme, header and content. There is plenty of help inside the BANS community and within the software itself, so you never have to go it alone.

4. Be realistic, unless you are really experienced you cannot expect to have ten sites up in the next week. As I said before, there is a learning curve.

The reason I purchased the BANS software and joined the community was because of very good reports coming from reliable sources, other marketers on the Wealthy Affiliate forum (by the way, the best place online for all you will ever need to know about affiliate marketing), who were seeing some success, and in a very short time. Some were earning between $2000 to $5000 per month from 5 to 10 sites.

So far I have five BANS sites. I have to admit that I haven't optimized them as much as possible, but I had fun playing around with them.

Here are four of them:
Elliptical Live
Cancel The Noise (my favorite -a noise-cancelling headphones site)
Anti-Aging Skin Care Discounts
Perfumes For Her

Here are some better examples of what can be acheived:

Collectible Knives and Swords
My Little Pony - A Niche Store
MackTube Truck Sales

What Is PLR Article PRO V.2?

This product comes courtesy of Mike Steup of PLR Articles. The whole product consists of 900 PLR articles and Mike's software that converts the articles into multi-page niche websites.

Price:
$29.97 (one time payment)

How Does It Work?

The heart of the PLR Article PRO V2 is the Article Site Builder. This is an extremely easy to use tool which will convert a whole set of articles into matching web pages, instantly and automatically.
All you need to do is have a collection of text articles, activate the Article Site Builder, enter your details into the simple form on the software, select your article files and click a button - and a complete article site is instantly built for you, ready to upload to your web host.

Some of the features include:
Ways to monetize using affiliate IDs...
-multiple Adsense units
-Google site search box
-Amazon ads with product pictures and buy it now buttons
- Clickbank (ebook and download) search button

Other features:
-language translation flags to change the language on your site in one click
-automatically generated video wall featuring 12 videos matching your niche topic
-site map for easy search engine spidering
-randomly generated cross-links on all pages to ensure full search engine spidering of your site.

Here is a site I "built" with PLR Article PRO V.2 which, when you add up the time to find, customize and upload a new header image and get some content, took about 1 hour: Alternative Energy

My Recommendation

In the world of niche website builders, along with BlinkWeb, this is fabulous for beginners. PLR Article Pro has got to be one of the fastest ways to have a website up and running and is a great piece of software for those who are new to building websites and internet marketing.

You can literally have a site up and running in 10 minutes, and all you have to do after that is drive the traffic to it.

For the small price, you can get your feet wet building these little mini-sites, and gain some confidence and experience at the same time.

A Word Of Caution
Be Careful: The only problem with this is the temptation to use the 900 PLR Articles that come with this as is, which means tons of duplicate content sites all looking the same. You may risk the wrath of Google if it looks like 50 other sites.

If you use this I would strongly advise editing the articles or writing your own content, and customizing the header template, which may take time and therefore slow down the process.

A positive note: The product support on this is excellent. Mike is a real nice guy. I emailed him with a question and he answered personally within 24hrs. Visit here for more information

What good are niche website builders that give you great looking niche websites if you don't know how to market them?

There are some beautiful sites on the internet but nobody knows they exist.
The owners put everything into them but they end up in Website Graveyard.

Why?

Because they don't know how to promote their niche website.

If you don't know anything about niche marketing and how to market and promote your website, quite frankly, you may as well give up.

Is your website even based on a profitable niche? How would you know?

If you are serious at all about making a living out of internet marketing and are not having any success with your niche websites, then it's pretty obvious you need help.

As far as I'm concerned, there is only one place where you will find everything you need if you want to become a rich and successful niche affiliate marketer and that is by joining The Wealthy Affiliate University

The Wealthy Affiliate has everything you will ever need without wasting your time going all over the internet looking for more information or resources. It's like a little internet marketing village filled with all of your needs.

The teaching range starts from scratch and goes up to professional levels. Even if you know nothing about internet marketing, this is the place to get help and a good sound education.

If you are a total beginner, that's fine. The forum is extremely newbie friendly and the 8 week course will teach you all you need to succeed.

If you are intermediate or above, you can still learn more to get ahead. More advanced members are already earning hundreds/thousands of dollars per day and are more than willing to share for free.

What You Get As A Wealthy Affiliate Member:

While it would take a whole separate website to describe in detail everything you get with a Wealthy Affiliate membership, here are just some of the highlights:

Education
Everything you could possibly need from absolute beginner to more advanced levels. There is an invaluable 8 week course that teaches you from the very beginning how to lay a solid foundation in affiliate marketing. On top of that there are videos, free downloads, tutorials.
The Forum
This is probably the hub of all activity at WA. Aside from Kyle and Carson, there are seasoned, very successful marketers doling out free advice to anyone who asks, 24/7. You could make and sell quite a few ebooks just from some of the posts in the forum.
Research Tools
No jumping around and wasting time trying to do Clickbank research to find your next product. WA has its own Clickbank research module that will give you results within seconds. Add to that a keyword research tool, keyword phrase builder, Google match types, competition spy tool and more.
Website Builder
Site Rubix is your own personal website builder. Along the lines of Weebly and Blinkweb site creation. No HTML knowledge necessary. Very easy.
Website Hosting
Free website hosting for up to three domains to get you started
Article Writing Tool
Rapid Writer gives you a way to re-write articles quickly
Turn-Key Websites and Website Templates
Ready built websites with products already loaded and templates just waiting for your own content
Monthly Niche Marketing Package
NicheQ is the the recently added freebie to WA members. This contains a new red hot niche each month with all the research done for you already by Kyle and Carson. 300 hours of research boiled down into keyword lists, in depth reports, PLR articles, niche ready websites and more, just ready for you to tweak and promote. More about NicheQ.

It really is a great community with everyone willing to share their successes and problems. Really friendly with no superior attitudes.It's probably the kindest internet forum around today (just my humble opinion).

What Does It Cost?
$39.00 per month.
Before you gasp and go on to look for something else, here are some things to think about.
- How many $27-$97 ebooks have you bought or are willing to buy in order to "make money online" - and do these ebooks give you 24/7 support?
- Are you serious about making a living online or just after a quick buck? If the latter, then maybe you should go on wasting your time and money on useless scams and giving your money to "gurus" who only want your money and provide no practical help.
- Once you are making $1 per day because of the teaching in Wealthy Affiliate, you are already on your way to paying for your monthly membership. By the way, people who started as newbies in WA are now producing their own products and bringing in $100+ per day. You can see this for yourself in the forum.

See a comparison of costs between the benefits you receive with Wealthy Affiliate as opposed to buying separate services

If you are considering a membership in the Wealthy Affiliate University today, you can sign up here and receive a free copy of Kyle and Carson's "Who Loves Money" ($77 value). This is 106 pages of no cost and low-cost marketing techniques to get a jumpstart in affiliate marketing. Perfect for newbies.

OR

Kyle and Carson's step by step guide to Pay Per Click advertising, Beating Adwords ($67 value)

If you intend building a lot of sites, you will need to look for the most economical way of doing this.

DOMAIN HOSTING:
Along with many BANS site builders, I have found that Hostgator provides the best deal for hosting and services you will need for your BANS websites.

At the moment you can have unlimited domain hosting for $7.95 per month.

DOMAIN NAMES:
For the lowest priced domain name service just go to www.GoDaddy.com
Right now you can buy a domain name for $1.99. [TIP: You don't need a .com domain name. Domain names with .net or any of the other ones are acceptable and cost less]

FINDING IMAGES FOR YOUR WEBSITE
Finding images for your websites can be tricky because of copyright laws. It is also time consuming trawling through the public domain images if you want free images. In the end the most economical way to get images fast is to pay for them. Then whenever you need an image, you know immediately where to go and can have your image in a matter of minutes.

One site I found which is a great value is iClipart. For only $29.95 per year you have access to unlimited clipart and photos. They have really saved me a lot of time and frustration.

With the website building software taking the burden off you by actually doing all the heavy lifting, you are only left with two real challenges.

1. Content for your website
2. How to drive traffic to your website

LET'S LOOK AT #1: CONTENT
This is a problem for most webmasters. We all know that in order for your site to gain favor from Google, you can't have spammy duplicate content on your site. So...what to do?

You have a few choices. You can either write your own, use purchased PLR (private label rights) articles or get free articles from article sites, such as Ezine Articles.

Since you are building niche websites you probably want the fastest way possible, which is getting your articles from article sites. This is pretty simple to do and each site has its own rules on how to do this, just remember to follow them.

For PLR Articles you can join any number of monthly memberships, like PLR Pro, but be prepared to pay a monthly membership fee and you still have to edit the articles so they are not a duplicate.

Last is the dreaded "write your own articles" scenario.

Don't be afraid. It's easier than you think, just more time-consuming (but Google loves it)

There are a few ways to do this.
-write your article from scratch by researching your topic on the internet and gathering information
-use software to do the above (this is faster)
-use article spinners to restructure articles you already have

Of course you can learn the tricks of the trade from experts like Melanie Mendelson who can teach you how to write quality content articles in 30 minutes.

If you are looking for even more speed, probably the fastest way is to use software to cut down research time.

I found one by Jonathan Leger for $67 called Instant Article Wizard. It's a fast way of researching the internet and gathering snippets of articles that you can personalize and not be charged with duplicate content.

Another software is one I have not used myself, Content Infinity, but it looks pretty interesting in that it actually builds a whole article for you (much the same as Instant Article Wizard but with some different features). This one costs $97. You also get a free trial dowload with some of the features disabled.

The second challenge is how to drive traffic to your website(s). Since this is a huge subject on its own and you could set up a Squidoo empire of lenses on this one topic, the following is just an outline of the more basic ways to get some eyeballs on your site.

GETTING FREE TRAFFIC

Article Marketing
Although this is not the fastest way, it is the cheapest and is suitable for those who have more time than money. Just write some articles based on your website's subject and provide a link to your website at the end (there is usually a bio box where you can place your website link).

TIPS for writing your articles:
- Always give quality information to your readers and stay away from sounding too much like a sales promo. The ezine directories frown on this, especially the top quality sites like Ezine Articles.
- Watch out for duplicate content. Don't submit the same article over and over. You will need to edit your article's title and keywords so that the search engines are not looking at the same thing in duplicate. Submitting duplicate content will place you lower in the search engines and you will never be found.

Some ezine directories:
Ezine Articles
GoArticles
Article Dashboard
Articlesbase
IdeaMarketers

Of course, don't forget about free sites like Squidoo or Hubpages. Just remember to provide good quality content, but if you are using articles to promote your site you should know enough about your subject from the research you've done to provide this.

Apart from article marketing, which is free, there are other methods, such as search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click advertising and email advertising.

Here are some resources for learning more about how to generate traffic to your website:

SEO Mindset by Brad Callen
Ross Goldberg's Traffic Manifesto

...or you can get help from software programs such as:
SEO Elite from Brad Callen
Traffic Travis
SEO Equalizer

Another way to get traffic is with social bookmarking, which can be done manually by registering to all of the main social bookmarking sites. If you are in a hurry, there are now tools to help you. One of the most popular social bookmarking tools at the moment (if you can afford the $97) is Bookmarking Demon which saves a ton of time in posting your sites to social bookmarks.

...OR...

This is a great free way to build a niche website.

Just set up a blog with WordPress or Blogger. My preference is WordPress simply because it is less restrictive than Blogger. The Blogger blogs don't belong to you, so you run the risk of having them shut down by Google. With WordPress the blog is yours to do with what you want and they are a lot more flexible in appearance and feature. The only thing you will need to pay for is hosting (unlimited site hosting on Hostgator costs $7.95/month for 3yrs or $9.95/month for 1yr) and a domain name ($1.99/year for a .info domain at www.GoDaddy.com )


Most internet marketers know the power of blogs for driving traffic to your website, but creating them is so time consuming. Well, you could always check out Amy Bass' The Niche Blogger or Alvin Phang's Atomic Blogging System. Alvin has developed a unique system for generating huge numbers of visitors to WordPress blogs.

There are many ways to find under-the-radar niches to build your niche websites around.

First, the fast way.

Software is usually the answer when looking for the quick way to do anything in internet marketing. This comes at a price, but if you want to see results faster, then it is worth it. Plus, if your niche is profitable then you will make back the price of the software in no time.

For speed and versitality there is an excellent software program for $67 called Micro Niche Finder. The fast keyword retrieval not only cuts down your research time drastically but also locates keywords for markets you didn't even know were there. It also finds license free content for your keyword phrase. This is definitely a huge timesaver for serious internet marketers.

See my review of Micro Niche Finder on Squidoo

UPDATE: James Jones is coming out with a superior Version 5: This software will be updated soon and the price will be going up. For an honest and personal review and to find out more about what is in the new version, visit Micro Niche Finder|Review of Niche Keyword Software and for a chance to get in at the current price go to Micro Niche Finder

To read more about niche website builders, you may like this article: The Popularity of Niche Website Builders.

Articles on Niche Marketing:
The Advantages of Niche Marketing
Micro Niche Finder - Software for Serious Niche Marketing