I swear, working a full time job, raising a family and attempting to get a passive income going is leaving me with very little time to myself. But even with all this hard word, I am loving the IDEAS that are popping into my head. I follow several other passive income blogs, and I don’t know how you all do it. I never want to stop working on this stuff.

While working on my “Niche Site Duel” project BodyArtHQ.com I’ve started going back through some of my old ideas that I lost the sizzle on. Lost the sizzles? Yes. Projects I started on, then lost interest, got busy or just realized I was going about them the wrong way. But while scrolling through my list of domains in GoDaddy.com and realizing how many blogs I have already setup and just left to die, I came across one in particular that I’ve decided to revive!

Did you know….

Several years ago, I was a professional photographer. Even more so, I was awesome at the business aspect of it! I had my head in the game and was on top of the world in marketing, branding, business management, etc. I was an authority on the subject! I even ran a photography forum at one point and taught business classes on how to run a photography business.

Some time ago, I bought HomePhotographyBusiness.net and turned it into a blog. I wrote some articles, put together a “business forms” package that could people could buy (sold several of those actually) and then just sort of let it all fizzle out while I moved onto other things.

My last few evenings have been spent redesigning that blog, updating articles and I’ve even picked up that e-book that I started writing months ago and never finished. As far as a niche content website goes, I think this is a great idea…in fact I wish I could remember why I stopped working on it. As I am rewriting the articles, I am expanding them greatly to be included in my e-book and I am also reposting them on all of the article directories as well.

The REALLY cool part…do a google search for Home Photography Business and see what comes up. It still blows my mind. Without touching it in a years time….HomePhotographyBusiness.net has a #3 position! I find that completely incredible!

My plan is to take the holiday and work more on my e-book and try to have it finished up by January. The business forms collection I sell now, sells for $59 and I am thinking about just discontinuing that item by itself and packaging it together with my e-book and selling the e-book, the business forms package, plus several bonuses for a flat $99. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that idea…

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I know I did. And yes, I ate way to much of course. Last week was rough for me on the passive income side mainly due to the holiday. I went out of town so of course, everything related to passive income went right out the window. But that’s ok, I expected it. But it’s Monday and I’m back on the ball again. Last week I submitted my new niche website to the major engines, by hand of course. I also started running some preliminary ranking reports, which of course, I was a big fat ZERO in ranking after the first week. But…on the positive side they at least have me indexed. Where I will fall…who knows!

Today I’ve started working on creating backlinks. This will most likely be at http://bodyarthq.wordpress.com that I have posted a keyword rich article on as well as links back to my main website at www.bodyarthq.com. Step 2 of course was submitting that Blog onto all the search engines as well. Next I took that same article, and wrote it up as an article on EzineArticles and am waiting for it to be published so I can go ahead and submit and link to that as well. Over the next week my goal is to spread that article all across the universe and submit those links to the search engines in hopes to create a network of links that all in turn link back to my niche content website. I am very curious to check my ranking in another week to see if I can finally make it on the list!

By the way…I’ve already started on a second niche website. It’s slow going because I’m focusing on BodyArtHQ, but I think it is another good choice for me and once I get more content into it I will share it with you here as well. Until next time!

Last week I submitted my new niche website to the major search engines to get the ball rolling. This morning I ran a quick TrafficSeeker report to check my page ranking. As expected, I’m not anywhere in the first 200 listings on Google.com or anything else for that matter. I wasn’t expecting to be, but I still like to run an initial report to check things out so I can watch the progress as it climbs. Although I am not yet ranked, I am indexed. I was able to search for my domain name and it was found. Of course being indexed doesn’t help but it does let me know Google has at least found me.

Over the course of the next week, I will be attempting to add new content out in the world about my topic and of course attaching a BodyArtHQ dot com link to everything out there to build some backlinks. With Thanksgiving this week, I may not get as much accomplished as I want to, but that’s okay, it will give time for Google to get me ranked a bit.

I was hoping to write something to update my niche project this morning but to be honest, I had a change of heart last night. As I was working on the content for this new venture, I realized it was much bigger than I had anticipated. However, I have to admit the topic was SPOT on and really good. And I will develop it one day…however…I have decided it is worth so much more than a niche website. I think instead, I will develop it as a membership based website. I’m not going to reveal the topic because I don’t want anyone trying to develop it before I get a chance but trust me, I will do it and it will be good!

But that brings us back to the niche site duel. Now that I’ve canned my fabulous idea into another project, what to do with the niche site duel? Well, let me tell you! I had a huge brain storm last night. Researched keywords, bought a domain, developed the website and even started writing content and placing ads. What I love about this idea is that even though it is a niche website…it has potential for so many other keywords to go along with it.

The Idea

Ok, so what’s my topic? I am now the proud owner of BodyArtHQ dot com that is fast on its way to becoming an information hub regarding all things Body Art including piercings, tattoos, etc. Why did I choose to go this route? Well a few reasons.

First, I found some great PLR content and since I really want to get this thing out the door and making money I am going to start with some PLR content only initially. I plan to write my own as well, but I’m all about starting with the money first.

Second, when BodyArt.com wasn’t available I remember pat adding the hq onto his and thought…you know I can do that too. So there ya go!

Third, when I first started with the topic of Body Art I almost didn’t go with it. I got scared because there was WAY to many topics that could cover. But then I decided…isn’t that a good thing? And I am pretty good at search engine marketing. I usually have no problem getting near the top. One of my “Dead” sites that I haven’t touched in over a year is still sitting on the first page of google if you can believe that. So my third reason for choosing Body Art as my topic is the possibilities it will present!

Market and Keyword Research

Now check this out! I haven’t worked enough with niche websites to what a “good number” would be in Market Samurai, so this is going to be my baseline I guess you could say. But these numbers seemed pretty ok to me. I could eat my words later of course.

Assuming I had a #1 spot, I could potentially see 2775 click-thrus to my website for body art. I can deal with that. But then I tried  few other keywords that most likely will be found right along side of Body Art. Keywords like tattoo designs (40,110 click-thrus), henna (27,058 click-thrus), body piercing (2275 click-thrus), etc.

If you take a visit over to BodyArtHQ dot com you’ll see I’ve started working on filling with useful content, photos, youtube videos, paid ads and more. I will be working through the weekend on it even more and of course getting it submitted to the search engines, which I started on today.

My next step will also be to start creating some backlinks, but that’s another post!

I’ve started niche content websites before. My problem…I never finished them. In my arsenal of domain names I had a large number of ones I could have picked back up on and continued with easier success. Eventually I think I will pick those old content niche sites back up and re-work them since they are dead in the water for now. But for this project, I decided to start fresh. Buy a brand new domain name, take a different direction and not give up on it.

Research

To research a good and profitable niche, of course there are awesome tools out there like Market Samurai (which I will use), Google keyword tools and other things I can use to analyze keywords. But…I do things a little differently, at least to get myself started. I use those tools to confirm an idea once I’ve already decided. I was always taught to look at people who are where you are and study what it is they are doing. So for the last few days I’ve been reading blogs of people who I admire and want to be like. I’ve documented the “type” of niche websites they are creating.  I noticed a trend among the really successful ones. Some sort of training, either job or hobby related seems to be the most successful. I would imagine these “how to do something” or “how to train for something” type websites bring in so much revenue because you can write guides to sell to go with these websites.

Another things I always found interesting was these passive income bloggers are always writing about something they know ABSOLUTELY nothing about. I’ve never been able to do that but I decided, what the heck, I’ll give it a try.

With a few ideas in mind, I head on over to ClickBank.com’s Marketplace and look at Avg Rebill Totals, Initial Sale $, etc. on the category that a topic I am interested in learning about might fall under (not telling you quite yet what it is). Sure enough, I found it there with a fairly high avg rebill total…$207 in fact! Awesome. My goal with this website is going to be affiliate product marketing so clickbank products are going to be a huge part of it. I’ll go ahead and check it out in Market Samurai as well, which I will post results tomorrow when I reveal my website topic.

Domain Registration Luck!

Next it’s off to Godaddy.com to find a domain name. Amazingly….the EXACT topic I want to write about was available as a .com. Honestly I was surprised. Has nobody really hit this topic yet? Doing some google searching on my phrase I found a couple of ehow articles on it and a few informational websites with domain names as .net’s, dash’s, etc. Mmhhh….maybe the domain I snatched up was recently expired and I lucked out! Yay for me.

Alright, so I have my topic, have my domain name and today I have set up my WordPress blog and installed a theme that I think matches it pretty well. I am going to write my first article on the topic today after doing some research and will start adding some Google Adsense ads and affiliate products to the side bars. Tomorrow, once I have a tiny bit of content I will finally reveal to you my topic, domain name and website.

I’m a big fan of Pat Flynn and his SmartPassiveIncome website. In fact, I ran across it months ago and have been a quiet lurker for quite some time, even when I stopped blogging on my own blog. My boyfriend keeps asking me who this “Pat” guy is I’m always talking to my friends about. I think he may be getting jealous? LOL

A couple of months ago, Pat and another passive income blogger, Tyrone Shum started a great project they are calling the Niche Site Duel. In a nutshell, they have challenged each other with creating a niche content website from scratch and generate passive income from it. The great news is they are encouraging others to join in the challenge with them.

The Rules

The main rule for the challenge is that you can’t use any paid advertising to generate traffic to the website. It must all come from natural search engine traffic or referrals. Other than that, it’s a free open game challenge.

I have decided I will be participating in this challenge myself and documenting and sharing success and failures along the way. In fact, everyone involved in the challenge is doing the same thing. You can view those in the challenge on the Niche Site Duel webpage on Pat’s website.

Next Steps

I knew I wanted to do this challenge a few days ago as I was going through my own website overhaul so I’ve been researching topics, finding domain names and started purchasing a few domains as ideas. I think I have finally decided on one but I’m not going to reveal it until I am absolutely sure it’s the one. Here are the next steps I will be taking to get my own challenge underway:

1.       Decide on my topic of choice to build the niche project around.

2.       Decide if it will be public or membership based.

3.       Decide on a digital product I should create for the topic.

4.       Build the website using WordPress.

5.       Submit it to search engines and start generating traffic.

Check Back!

Be sure to watch all the challenges on the Niche Site Duel page and be sure to come back here to see my progress, view reports and read more about my own niche content project.