Questions About Niche Takeover Answered

I’m excited to see that so many of you are taking action on this challenge. I want to keep you moving so, here’s the answers to the questions brought about by yesterdays post on niche takeover.

Domains
I know I sort of blew by this, but I wanted to go a little more in depth about choosing a domain name. This was probably one of the most popular questions I received.

Here are some tips we follow when choosing a domain name:

• Always purchase a .com – they are more valuable and people have the .com automatically engrained in their head when they see a domain. It’s so much harder to type in a .net or .info because we see .com so much in our daily lives.
• Always try to target specific keywords. I want you to look at that list of keywords you created yesterday from the wonder wheel tool. Do you remember the A-level, B-level, and C-level keywords? Well you want to get the A level keyword sin your domain name. However, this is probably going to be HIGHLY unlikely. So then you’ll want to move to the next tier of keywords, and then slowly move down the list of keywords until you find one that fits.
• You should try to get a domain with your keyword in it. But if you’re having trouble with that, we’ll often get a domain with a keyword in it by adding another word to the beginning or end of it. For example,
  yourtopic+secrets.com
  yourtopic+academy.com
  best+yourtopic.com
  
  Don’t let these examples cloud your thinking though, there are plenty of other words that can replace secrets or academy. Justin and I often pull up Thesaurus.com and play around with words that mean the same until we find one that fits really well in our niche. In a recent website, I wanted to project that my site would be the benefits of my website, so for example since “tomatogrowing.com” is taken, I’d look into growgianttomatoes.com, or tomatogrowingsecrets.com

Hosting
With the hosting – we suggest getting a baby Hostgator account. This ranges from $7.95 – $9.95 depending on the payment plan you choose. It’s definitely enough to get you started because you can host multiple websites on it. If you go any lower you’ll be limited to only 1 domain name.

If you came into this challenge with a website or blog already established in a niche – there are a couple things to consider.

1. Do you scrap it and start all over?
2. Keep it and just make changes as you learn in the challenge?

I would hate to see your work go to waste. So my first response is to keep it and start applying what you’re learning to that website. AS LONG AS – it meets the criteria of Justin’s post last week on niche research. So, take some time to reexamine that niche to be sure it fits. If it does – great just start applying what you’re learning. If it doesn’t – I’m sorry, you should start in a new niche that will fit into the process.

I like to refer back to making bread – missing just one step in the recipe could ruin the entire loaf…

Blog Posts
The blog posts seem a little intense – do I have to write all those articles every month?

When I wrote that you should write 20-35 articles a month it was based on your availability and resources. If you’re not able to make 35 articles a month, then sit down and realistically choose a number of times that you can consistently post content to your blog. This should be at least 3-4 times a week in the beginning and may slow down to 2-3 later on, but you really want to strive for as many as possible for as long as possible. If you can do 30 this month, but next month a schedule changes – then try to make the change, but be consistent with the change.

Also remember that you can outsource articles through Scriptlance. Often times you can pay $2-4 an article to get it 80% of the way complete, and then just spend an hours or so of your time putting the finishing touches on the articles you had outsourced. If you outsource, please remember that no one is going to be 100% you – they can get it close, but you may have to add the finishing touches to get the content just the way you want it. (Just a lesson I’ve learned from the last 2 years of working with personal assistants and outsourcers).

Permalinks
I was going to try and rephrase this question, but it was so specific that I didn’t want to confuse anyone. Here’s the question:

With this method am I free to organize my posts into categories and optimize the permalinks in terms of seo? As in /%postname%/%category%/ where ‘postname’ might be “Leash Training A Puppy” and the category “Puppy Training”. Does that make sense?

It does make sense – for those of you that said, “WTH?!?!” in your head… this question is referring to setting up the permalink structure on your Wordpress blog. Yesterday I mentioned that you should change your permalinks, but didn’t give specific details. Permalinks are what will optimize the links to each of your post for the search engines (so that the keyword in your title is in the URL to your post).

This challenger wants to know if he can put both the postname and the category in this permalink structure so that the A-Level keyword and B-level keywords are in the URL. My answer to this is YES. You can add both the category and postname into the permalink structure.

Google Wonder Wheel
I received a LOT of messages from people having difficulty finding the Wonder Wheel in Google. Here’s a quick picture to show you where I’m referring to:

I also found a video on Youtube published by Google on how to use and find the wonder wheel. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ah7ZWYjxdM

I received a few other questions about product creation, email marketing, and some other topics that we’ll cover over the next few weeks. I’m going to hold off on these until that week because of two reasons. 1. I want you to focus on the task at hand – when you look at the big picture you’ll get overwhelmed and most likely discouraged because its such a big undertaking. And 2. Because when we teach the lessons on those topics we’ll most likely answer your questions in the process.

Thanks for submitting questions – it does help us to see that people are out there following along (and that I’m not making the content too hard for people to understand). My favorite quote – “The only dumb question is the one not asked”

Keep moving forward!
Chaunna