The Niche Blogger -Follow me as I build a niche blog empire using Amy Bass' new course!

I spent the first few days reading over posts on topics I am already familiar with. These included how to buy a domain, how to setup website hosting, and similar topics. She has a great first post about. She has a great first introductory post about laying the foundation for your niche blog empire.

Sept 1: I got to work on a few days worth of topics today. My favourite today were here posts encouraging us to pick 5 random niches we would be interested in working with. I started with 3 topics, then put them through her two tests to see if they are good niches to work with (ie. seeing if they are searched enough, and making sure there aren't too many competitors in each niche). She provides all the necessary free resources to ensure that we are able to run the proper tests on each niche. I was able to use her easy-to-follow instructions and come up with three great niches in one day!


Sept 2:I was able to have a light day today concerning work I had to do for the niche blogger course today. My job for the day basically consisted of registering two domains for a few of the niches I researched yesterday. I use HostMonster Website Hosting for all my hosting and domain registrations.

Sept 3:Well I was planning on having today be just a quick day in terms of what I would do for The Niche Blogger course. Boy was I wrong! I ended up spending hours installing wordpress and starting some basic configuration. But, I know any subsequent sites I setup will have this step be much quicker. After today's work, I now have WP installed on my two domains. One of them has it customized with a theme I really like, and has some great WP plugins installed. Plugins are basically quick ways of adding great features to the sites. The most important plugin so far is "All in one SEO pack" and should really help me rank high on important keywords for each niche.

Sept 4:Was working on a separate project today. Amy did put up two great posts today explaining some of the main wordpress configuration pages. I had already configured one of them yesterday and she pointed out something that I missed. On the "writing" wordpress settings page, I followed Amy's advice to set the niche blog up to ping 30+ pages every time I add a new post. This is great because it will help spread the news about the niche site with every new post. More links back in = more visitors. Read more about Amy Bass' Niche Blogger Course.

Sept 5/6/7:I took most of these two days off to spend time with my family. Amy posted several more great lessons on the rest of the important wordpress settings to change. She also gave some great links to awesome wordpress themes to use as we create our first niche blogs. Back to some serious work tomorrow.

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Sept 8: Today I decided to focus on just one niche blog for the next week. I finished customizing the wordpress settings for my first blog today. I then spent ~45 minutes doing the finalizing my keyword research for this niche. I wanted to stay organized so I started a Microsoft Excel file with four columns entitled: Keyword, Monthly Searches, Competition, Blog Post Title. This was based on a suggestion by someone in the forum of niche blogger course. I have realized that the forum is a very great added bonus to the content Amy Bass provides! Well, I'm tired from the keyword research. Maybe tomorrow I'll start writing some content for the niche blog!

Sept 9: Well I ended up taking a sick day from work today so I wasn't able to sit down and write any articles yet. At night, however, I did get the chance to have some fun coming up with unique blog post topics. I mostly worked on the topics for the lower-searched keyphrases, and left the most-searched keywords for later on. I'll want those posts to be in the most recent section of my niche blog anyways, so they'll be posted near the end. I'm still having a blast with this work at home blogging experience.

Sept 10: Today I worked on a side project for a niche blog I setup before I started Amy's course. It's a completely different technique for a niche site. It was sitting ready except for updating the ebay and adsense codes. I changed those and now will be marketing it with article marketing like Amy's course teaches. It will be a great way to test my article marketing techniques and also to compare income potential between this technique and the one Amy teaches. Lookign forward to seeing the results.

Buy at AllPosters.com

Sept 11/12: I'll admit that I worked on the separate projects again these two days. Sept 12, Amy posted about writing blog posts. Looking forward to testing it out all weekend. I also want to do some article marketing for my first niche blog site. See you tomorrow with some results hopefully!

Sept 13/14: I did a lot of work on my first niche site today and yesterday, though no one would ever suspect so. I added the last wordpress plugin and configured it. I then setup my adsense adds and tweaked them so they look as good as I can get them. Perhaps my biggest accomplishment is writing my first blog post. As you can probably guess after reading the last week of my comments here, I have been nervous about taking the writing plunge, but once I started it went very smoothly actually! It took about an hour total including research and writing time (not on a topic I'm hugely familiar with). So, I then uploaded my post and did the appropriate links back to the main URL of my site from within the post text (to help with keyword rankings in Google and other search engines). I hope to get a bunch more blog posts written and uploaded tomorrow!

Note, as of Dec 3 these will include earnings from one previous site that has been updated using Amy's techniques.

Affiliate Sales
Nov. 30: $5.39
Dec 26: $8.98

Earnings for the Last month
Dec 3: $0.26
Dec 4: $0.51
Dec 11: $0.12
Dec 15: $0.11
Dec 16: $0.29
Dec 19: $0.64
Dec 21: $0.36
Dec 23: $0.60
Dec 27: $0.05
Dec 29: $0.08

I still don't consider my blog effectively monetized yet. This will improve dramatically as I add the amazon and clickbank products.

Total Income: $17.90

If you're curious as to why I choose the water drop as the image for this section, I'll explain. It's because my goal for the next two weeks of my niche blogger course experience is to start seeing some of my hard work start to pay off. I want my previous effort to let my niche blogs ripple through the internet. Hope to have a blog indexed in google and maybe even getting some traffic and earning a bit of money. Here's hoping!

Sept 15: I worked late tonight so I didn't have a ton of spare time for The Niche Blogger course. I did do a little bit of backlinking strategies today though.

Sept 16: Great news today. Wrote another blog post for my first niche. Scheduled it to be posted in the AM tomorrow. As I was doing some research for an article marketing article, I accidentally found a niche keyword that has 74,000 monthly google searches. It has only 22,000 competing webpages so I'm pretty sure I'll be able to market that well and dominate the niche. I would have to get a .org website since the .com and .net are taken, but it will make a great, profitable niche blog! Best of all, it's in a field I already know a lot about :)

Sept 17: Every day I'm getting more work done than the day before. Today I wrote another blog post for my first niche site. I scheduled it to be posted tomorrow around 11am. Amy suggests alternating between 3 and 4 days between posts to average 2 posts per week. I think I'll do a little more frequent at first to get some content up quicker, then I'll slow down to her recommended rate. Then, I wrote an article for article marketing one of my prior niche sites. It was a topic I am very interested in so it was a fun article to write and should help many people. Finally, I did some backlinking efforts for my first niche blogger site. Basically posted some comments with tagged backlinks on appropriate blogs at blogspot.

Sept 18-22: Spent the weekend away from a computer unfortunately. I was able to continue to do some backlink building to my first niche site. I also wrote an article and a webpage for one of the non niche blogger course sites I mentioned.

Sept 23: Great inspirational lesson on The Niche Blogger site today. Basically about what our goals should be for the rest of the month. Amy wants us to finish writing the first ~30 blog posts and get them scheduled to post automatically at a rate of 2 per week. I started chronicalling this on the Sept 1, but Amy started lessons 4 or 5 days before that. I will make the 30 blog posts my goal for the end of September. Next month is all about monetizing and marketing the niche blogs - a process I am really eager to learn about!

Sept 24/25: More writing of niche blog posts and scheduling them for gradual publishing. Need to write less than 5 per day to get to the 30 scheduled by the end of the month. Google is starting to spider my blog quite regularly now, and has indexed 10 pages so far. Googlebot seems to like my pace of posting to my first wordpress niche blog :)

Sept 26/27: Didn't do much today as I was taking the night off after work. Will work twice as hard tomorrow! Unfortunately the traffic blast from stumbleupon has slowed down. It didn't turn into daily traffic like I had hoped :( On a plus note, I am on the first two pages of google results for my main keyword.

Sept 28-30: Finally my fist month is up. I now have access to the second month's blog and about 7 days of posts that are already there. There's some really great content about monetizing blogs with step by step techniques to add ebay ads, google adsense, and clickbank products in effective positions. I've spent these three days continuing to write blog posts and add new monetization options to my niche blog. I'm still loving being a niche blogger. To signup with the Amy Bass Niche Blogger course, click here.

December

December is being classified as month two since I had to basically take most of October and November off.

Continued to write more blog posts. Have met another bloger in my niche and she linked to my niche blog from a new post because I nicely helped her solve a problem related to the niche. Will let you know if this provides much traffic.

I have started to see some clicks on Google Adsense to my secondary site that I have applied Niche Blogger tactics to. Getting daily traffic now. No eBay sales from it yet though.

Unfortunately, something in my life has taken over for the month of October and into halfway through November. I have had to put Amy's course on hold for now until then but I look forward to giving my niche blogs a boost! Can't wait to get back at it in a few weeks!

Some of my sites are getting what seem like completely random google searches resulting in hits. Looking at them though, it's usually related to an ebay ad that showed up on the site that brought the traffic in!

December
Week 1/2 - started my second blog on a great niche that I think has tons of potential. Ordered 10 blog posts for $1 each for this blog and can't wait to see how they turn out. If they're high enough quality I will be ordering more for sure. I have done all the initial setup including domain, installing wordpress, setting up feedburner for RSS, first blog post, header creation and WP theme customization. most of that was done in one night!

For niche blog 1, I have 5 posts up and ready to be posted. They will be scheduled to post twice weekly for the next few weeks to let me get ahead with blog posts. I also setup the feedburner for this blog finally which should help increase traffic.

I changed the adsense around and will try to target ebay ads since the adsense isn't doing much on this niche for some reason. Will have to test this more accurately in the near future.

January
Second blog is well on it's way with posts scheduled a few weeks in advance. Time has caught up with the first blog and I have to rewrite another month of posts and reschedule them. I'm not good at scheduling 6 months in advance like Amy teaches, but I'm getting better.

On another front, I have purchased a new domain. It is aimed at helping people find available domain names. I will be adding a niche blog to it to help draw in traffic. I absolutely love the domain name it has and I think it can be a big money maker. Since it's already setup, I just changed the adsense and text ads to link to my various accounts, and have started adding it to my appropriate forum signatures. I'll have to start seeing how it does since it was already bringing in traffic on its own. I'll start doing a bit of article marketing on this domain to bring in more traffic and see how it converts.

Second week of January: Lots going on this week. Bought a niche blog that came fully setup with 7 or 8 articles (not PLR) and clickbank product linked to. No sales from them yet, but it's only been a few days. Update: earning on adsense already within first day of adding my own ads to the design.

Also completely redid an old site and turned it into a niche blog using Amy's techniques and lessons. The next few days have seen increased traffic and much improved adsense stats compared to it not earning anything previously. I also added a physical product to the blog and had my first sale within 12 hours (site already has decent daily traffic for a micro-niche).