Pay Per Click Advertising

Send Your New Site Soaring

We “launched” the initial version of Niche Site 1 last weekend. It was meant to be a learning exercise for us and boy was it ever. The chances of it becoming a high (or even medium) traffic site are very low but it was an educational success (we are much, much more comfortable with everything involved in creating mini-sites). Here are some of the things we learned for making our next site a financial success:

• Do your market research. This project was more of a sandbox for us but it still took a significant amount of time. Make sure the potential market is large enough and the amount of competition is small enough to make committing the resources worth it. Take a look at the GTrends tool at WordTracker for help with that. Mike Mindel co-created it from techniques learned in the Thirty Day Challenge. I did not participate in the Thirty Day Challenge but believe it is full of good ideas. By the time we found out about it we were in the middle of a few other things. Also think about micro-testing to gauge demand.
• Create a solid marketing and advertising plan before the project begins for getting traffic to your site. Think about making prior arrangements with associates to do link exchanges. Find out which directories would love to include your content. Consider creating press releases. Use a more established site, if you have one, to promote your new site. Buy pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to drive traffic to your site if appropriate. Submit it to the various social bookmarking sites.
• Be honest with yourself. I am okay at coding but my design skills kind of suck. I know what I like but have trouble creating it. Outsourcing is your friend.
• Stay focused on what is important. It is easy to get lost in the avalanche of little decisions and, potentially, tons of research. Just remember what your top priorities are and ask yourself if you are working toward meeting those goals or just wasting time on something unimportant. If that sounds like something from The 4-Hour Workweek, well, it is and it works.
• Learn from others because you are probably not the first person to try something.
  • Make sure you plan for success. Getting traffic is nice but getting loyal, repeat visitors is better. Doing this from the beginning will pay off in the long run. Take a look at the posts over at problogger for tips about doing that.
  • Tim Ferriss did an amazing job getting his book on the bestseller lists. The case study post on his blog has the details. He is definitely someone who planned for success from the beginning.
  • Places like Digital Point are loaded with people creating and running all sorts of sites. Just reading what worked and what did not work is a tremendous resource.
  • Get the technical details of launching your new site right. That post talks about everything from getting the domain to optimizing for the search engines.

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