How To Setup Your Niche Sites The MWR Way!

In the past few weeks we have been working on setting up niche sites to promote high paying affiliate products in niche markets. We started this niche site series following my announcement of taking part in the niche site challenge, Niche Site Duel 2.0 being hosted by Pay Flynn.

Thus far, we have covered:

1.  Riches in Niches Power Challenge – Niche Site Duel 2.0 Announced!

2. How to Pick a Profitable Niche Market!

3. A Practical Guide to Choosing a Profitable Niche!

4. Niche Site SEO Strategy That Will Put You Ahead Of Your Competitors!

And so, having picked a profitable niche market and the right keyword phrases around which we will be creating our niche site content, our next move is to set up our niche site. In this post therefore, I want to give you a few thoughts on how to set up your niche site for maximum results.

Setting up Your Niche Sites for Maximum Results

Setup Your Niche Site To Fulfill Your Dreams!

I’m sure you already know that we are using WordPress to setup our niche sites. One reason for this is because; setting up your site using wordpress is quick and easy and free – many  webhost already have it as part of the webhosting package. Also many of these hosts have some one-click installation scripts that make installing your niche site a breeze!

Another reason why we want to use the wordpress blogging software is the ease with which wordpress sites can be customized and optimized for the search engines.

So, What Do You Need To Effectively Setup Your Niche Site?

The following guide is my personal strategy. I use it for nearly every one of my niche sites and it’s the same strategy I have used for the site I’m currently using for the Niche Site Duel 2.0 (this will be revealed later!).

I want to assume that you already know how to install a wordpress blog and so we will not go into details about that here. However, here are the things you need to ensure that your niche site is setup the right way:

1. A Domain Name – For this you may decide to go for an “exact match domain” (EDM) name or a brand name.

2. Webhosting Account – For this, I purchased a shared hosting account with the ability to host unlimited domains! Why I choose that? I did because like I mentioned in another post, I plan to set up more niche sites in the coming months and this is my simple way of saving some cost. If you have plans to set up more niche sites like me and also if you want to save money some money doing so, then you will need a plan like the one I'm using right now.

Click here to check it out!

3. WordPress Theme – I do not recommend some premium theme for your niche sites except you want to build an authority site with unique branding. So, for the theme a decent looking theme will do. Only remember to have a custom header and logo for your niche site. This will help to differentiate your niche site from the rest that use the same theme.

4.  Plugins – There are thousands of wordpress plugins you may want to experiment with but instead of that simply install only the necessary ones. Here are the few I recommend for now:

All in One SEO Pack – This is superb if you want to optimize your niche site for the search engines.

AdSense Privacy Policy – If you're monetizing your niche site with adsense, then this is one plugin you will need. It’s a simple way of automatically adding an AdSense-compliant privacy page to your site.

Google Sitemap Generator – This is another plugin that is necessary for SEO purposes.

WP Smush.it – You definitely will be adding a lot of images to your niche site. This plugin is necessary to reduce the sizes of the images in order to speed up your site’s load.

WP Super Cache – You may not need this for now but as your site increases in size, you will need it to help with the load time.

Strictly Auto Tags – I love to use this to automatically add tags to every post instead of doing it manually.

SEO Internal Links – Linking your blog posts is a good thing for your site's SEO. There are different options that can be setup with this plugin.

Related Posts – Offer your site visitors a few ways to stay a little longer on your site.

Jetpack by WordPress.com – This will give you an easy way of adding a contact us form, sharing button, subscription to both comments and posts, traffic stats and a few other options.

Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin – Fight spam comments the easy way.

5. Add the Necessary Pages – Some necessary ones include: Privacy Policy, T.O.S (of applicable), Reviews, Resources, Links, etc. This is to give your niche site some “professional” outlook!

6. Optimize for The Search Engines – Make sure your blog has search engine friendly URLs by using the “custom” permalinks together with your installed SEO plugins.  Use the All in One SEO Pack to optimize your home page putting in the appropriate title, keywords, description, etc. You should also do this for each post and pages.

A Word about Customizing Your Niche Blog Site

Niche Site Strategic Setup!Setting up your niche site is not simply about installing a custom theme or the right plugins. You will need to ensure that the site is setup with your MWR in mind.

So, what is MWR?

MWR simply means your Most Wanted Response!

This is one site design strategy that I don't hear many bloggers talk about. A few years ago, I read an ebook, the Affiliate Master Course, from where I got the idea of the MWR.

Now, MWR is a strategic approach to website design which allows you to take into consideration what you want your site visitors to do when they first land on your site. It is therefore not enough to simply choose a wordpress theme for your niche site. You must understand that the different wordpress themes out are built to do different things!

Without deciding on your Most Wanted Respond (MWR) before choosing a theme means you will be throwing away most of the traffic you'd be generating to the site. So, first of all, prioritize what you want people to do on your blog before choosing the theme for your niche site. For example, as much as a magazine theme look so great, if it does not help you with your most wanted response, installing a premium magazine theme on your niche site would amount to a waste of precious space!

Here are some of the common MWR of most blogs:

— Build an Email List

— Sell Information or Physical Products

— Promote Affiliate Offers

— Offer Coaching/Consulting Packages

— Market a Freelance Service

— Get Visitors to Donate Money

— Build a Community

As you can see from the above, your MWR depends on your specific situation and your long-term monetization strategy.  Besides, you may have more than one MWR but the most important thing is that you should choose about 2 or 3 and focus on them while setting up the site.

For my niche site, my MWR are: (1) Guide the visitor to click on the adsense ads on the site, and (2) make them to click on my affiliate links and purchase the affiliate products I'm promoting on the site!

With this in mind my choice of a theme was a simple “Plugin-In-Profit” adsense wordpress theme designed to help the visitor do just what I wanted!

So, if you are setting up a niche site take some time to decide on what your Most Wanted Response is before doing anything.

Over to you: What are the best niche designs you have ever seen? What area do you think I’ve left out in this post? Share with us in your comments below.

8 Comments
  1. Hey,
    I never heard about the MWR strategy before, but it does really make sense. Today I released my own niche site to the public and discussed the theme issue in much detail. Exactly for the reasons you point out here I had difficulties to find a theme.

    In the end I bought a premium theme, because it had most of the features I wanted. Actually I am building an authority site, so this would fit with your direction as well 🙂

    Thanks for the read,

    Phil

    • @Phil,

      Glad to hear that. Frankly, the MWR is one strategy that many bloggers are not aware of. The good thing is that you can avoid of whole lot of mistakes from the beginning if you apply it to your blog setup. It’s a pleasure that you were able to overcome the challenges of choosing the right theme.

  2. Thanks for shearing this post. That was really useful to me as I am quite new to WP. I had know idea about the Easy Privacy Policy plugin. I hope it won’t be hard to put it on my footer.
    About Google Analyticator: I didn’t know that one. I have installed Google Analytics for WP and I don’t know if these two plugins do the same work. If you have any idea, I would appreciate if you let me know.
    Thanks for all your help.

    • @Saanvi,

      The Easy Privacy Policy plugin is just that, EASY! It helps you add the privacy policy without you struggling to know what to put in the page. Besides, it gives you a page url which you can either add to header or footer of your blog. If your theme has a custom menu that automatically adds the pages, it will also be added automatically.

      For Google Analyticator, if you have already added Google Analytics, you don’t need it again. The purpose of the plugin is to help you add Google Analytics and since you have that every added there is no need to for it.

      Thanks for stopping by.

  3. You left out the traffic part because simply leaving it up to seo will make the average person give up too soon. Paid traffic like Facebook ads for example would be a great way to get some initial traffic flowing.

  4. Niche sites are the #1 way of making passive income online but to achieve it, you must set it up the right way. You have explained it amazingly and thoroughly that any one would get an idea about how to set up a powerful niche site.

  5. This is definitely a great checklist for anyone who wants to get started in setting up niche sites. You seem to have everything down that they would need to get a site set up.

    Thanks for sharing these tips.

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