Eric Nagel

Build a Niche Site, Quick

Eric Nagel
Scout & her pumpkins

I have been, or can be if you click on a link and make a purchase, compensated via a cash payment, gift, or something else of value for writing this post. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

I was listening to the Affiliate Juice podcast, featuring Girly Checks, and learned a bit about the checking business, so thought I’d make a small niche site on Border Collie checks. Here’s why I chose border collies:

  1. Girly Checks top seller is Yellow Labradors Personal Checks
  2. Girly Checks top selling category is dogs (cats is #2)
  3. My dog is a border collie 🙂

So first, I wanted to do some research. I found a list of the top dog breeds, and copied that data into Excel (Calc).

Next, I deleted all of the ranking data (since it’s already sorted), which left column A as a list of the dog breeds. These are the formal names, and I wanted common names. So I went through and put common names in column B. I filled column C with “checks.com” and in D, put =CONCATENATE(B1;C1)

Now, column D is filled with possible domain names (ex: yellowlabchecks.com). I then went to GoDaddy and pasted this list into their Express (or bulk) purchase box, and found which were still available.

Paste into GoDaddy bulk purchase
Results of which domains are still available

Now that I have a domain (or more), it’s time to get the products. Login to ShareASale, click on Datafeeds, then search for Girly Checks. Download the zipped .csv, extract the zip file, then rename 24053.txt to 24053.csv and open in Calc (or Excel). As you import, the deliminator is the pipe character: |.

Before you do anything else, find & replace YOURUSERID with your ShareASale user ID (found at the top of the ShareASale interface, once you’re logged in).

Find YOURUSERID and replace with your User ID

Now you have to find the products to put on your site. Here’s what I did:

  1. Insert a column between B and D
  2. Enter formula in C (new column) 1: =SEARCH(“border collie”;B1)
  3. Copy all the way down
  4. Sort by column C, descending
Finding products in Calc
Now, you can see what products to put on your new site. In this example, there will only be a few to add, and you can do this manually. However, if you use this for another niche, you may have hundreds of products, and would want to use something like CSVPig.

The next parts are easy, but tedious. Set-up your domain with your hosting provider, install WordPress, add Thesis, then add a post for each product.

Keep SEO in mind! For example, on the Border Collie Agility Personal Checks page, I copied the image from Girly Checks, renamed it, and am hosting it myself (Border-Collie-Agility-Personal-Checks.gif)

Add some fluff (YouTube video, RSS feeds, other banners, etc) and you have a mini-niche site, done in a couple of hours.