Notice that the URL of the site I have created is ‘nichesite’. In hindsight this is probably not
the best choice as I have used fishing as the subject material for the content. However,
although I cannot change the URL I can change the name of the site.
From the WordPress dashboard click on Options and then the General tab. The very first
field is Blog title – edit that.
Also underneath this field is a Tagline. This is a single line description of the site and may or
may not be included in the theme of your blog. The ProSense theme does support it. You
can now see the new Title and Tagline in action below:

With the niche site that I have been using for demonstration purposes throughout the Ebook
I have left the default setting of displaying blog posts but now I’ll edit that post to make it into
a welcome message for the site:
From the WordPress Dashboard select Manage and then Posts. You’ll see a list of blog
posts which by default will just have the single Hello world post listed. Look to the right and
click the Edit link and then you’ll be in the standard WordPress editor.
Note that all blog posts automatically have the Discussion options switched on by default
and as I am using this particular blog post as a simple welcome message for the site I have
turned those options off.
In fact, even if I choose to keep a blog for my niche site I would almost certainly still turn off
the discussion options because of the SEO implications that I mentioned earlier. Plus it
avoids the headache of having to deal with comment spam.
A word of warning when editing posts – remember the page slugs that I mentioned earlier? If
you edit the title of a post or page, Wordpress does NOT automatically edit the slug – you
have to do that yourself.
So you can see that in actual check out the post I just edited:

http://caroline-middlebrook.com/nichesite/hello-world/
As you can see, the original slug remains “hello-world”, even though I have edited the title.

By default, WordPress assumes that your site is a blog. What I have done so far is created a
bunch of static pages but they sit in the sidebar only. When you go to the home page of site,
you see the latest blog post which is currently still the Hello World default post.
So what if you decide not to include a blog? No problem, WordPress makes it easy for you
to display a static page instead of blog posts as your front page.
From your Dashboard select Options and then Reading. You’ll see the following section at
the top:

As you can see, by default it shows your latest post but you can select a static page instead.
The drop-down will show all of the static pages you have created.
So if you decide not to use a blog then you would create a static page, perhaps called
Home, and set that as your front page. And that’s all there is to it!

What we have done so far is created a bunch of static pages but what we want to do now is
have links to them permanently displayed on the sidebar. That way, no matter what page or
blog post the visitor arrives at, he can see all of your pages which makes the site look
content-rich, which is good.
Displaying Your Pages in the Sidebar
At this point I have created 5 static pages (they are pretty crap but this is just for
demonstration purposes!) Now these are automatically displaying in my sidebar but there
are a couple of issues. Look at the screenshot:

First of all notice that the one with the tips on finding a fishing guide is a little too long and
wraps around. Now this isn’t really too much of a problem because there is a dotted line
separating each entry but personally I find this messy looking.
The problem here is that this page list is generated automatically for you and the title you
see here is the exact title you used for the page. You can’t change this without changing
your page title which you don’t want to do.
A second problem is that there is an About page mixed in there. Whilst it is probably a good
idea to have an About page somewhere, notice that this list is alphabetical order so because
I have a page starting with a number, my about page turns up in the middle of my fishing
articles which is not ideal.
Basically this boils down to the problem that we are relying on a generated widget to display
this information. I haven’t talked about widgets yet but there is not much to it. The sidebar
you see on your site is made up of a number of widgets that are built into the WordPress
theme and using the Widget editor you can simply drag and drop widgets as you see fit
which is very nice.
An Introduction to Widgets
What is a widget? A widget is some kind of functionality that can be used with WordPress
that has been packaged up into a self contained unit. A WordPress theme that supports
widgets allows you to use the drag & drop facility to add them to your site.

Not all themes support Widgets but ProSense does which is another reason why I use it.
Now what I do here is to use another widget – the Blogroll that I spoke about earlier for
managing my internal link structure.
First let me show you where these widgets are. From your dashboard click on Presentation
and then on Widgets. This particular theme has two sidebars defined:

Sidebar 1 is your big skyscraper AdSense block so you’ll want to leave that alone. What we
want to do is fiddle with Sidebar 2 which is the one on the right that has lots of different
widgets in it.
Now look underneath this area and you’ll see available widgets. Let me take a moment to
explain what all of these are:
Akismet – Displays statistics about how much spam has been captured on your site.
Pointless if you ask me!
Archives – Allows your visitors to access your blog post archives.
Calendar – Shows a calendar in which each day that you wrote a blog post is highlighted.
This is probably not necessary for a niche site (or any site really!)
Categories 1 – When you write blog posts they are filed under a category. This plugin will
display a list of categories in use as links to the posts in that category.
Links – Displays your blogroll. This is what we’re going to use to create our list of internal (or
external) pages.
Meta – Displays the login / logout section currently shown at the bottom of the sidebar.
Personally I find this very useful as a way of logging into my sites so I always have this as
the last widget in my sidebar. Note that it’s only useful for you, not your visitors so you need
to make a judgement call as to whether or not to include it.
Pages – A list of all pages. This is what we’ve seen so far.
Recent Comments – As you would expect, a summary of the recent comments received.
Probably not suitable for a niche site.
Recent Posts – Shows links to the last few blog posts that you’ve made. May be useful if
you want to show some activity on the site.
Check For Updates! Revision 1.8 31
RSS 1 – Shows the RSS button to allow visitors to subscribe to the feed. For the ProSense
theme the button is already built into the header so it’s not needed in the sidebar.
Search – Allows visitors to search your site. Always a useful tool to provide. This is currently
the first widget on the sidebar – personally I’d move it lower down as you want your own
links shown higher up on the page.
Tag Cloud – This is a new feature of WordPress. In addition to filing blog posts under a
certain category, you can now tag a post with any number of tags that again make it more
search engine friendly. A tag cloud shows all of the tags used. This is nice for proper blogs
but probably not for niche sites – too distracting.
Text 1 – This is a special widget that allows you to put in any text you like including HTML.
This is very useful and allows you to create your own links etc.
Configuring Your Sidebar
To configure the sidebar, simply drag the widgets from the bottom section in the sidebar box
above and then click the Save Changes button. Here is what mine looks like now:

The problem I have now is that there are no links so that item doesn’t actually appear on the
site and it just shows the search and the meta section.
Using the Blogroll To Manage Your Links
To have complete control over the links you display in the sidebar you would use a Text
widget and put HTML in there to display the exact links you want. However, not everybody
has enough knowledge of HTML to do this so using the Blogroll is a nice non-techie way of
doing it.
Just a quick note – the Pages widget does allow some customisation such as the ability to
exclude certain pages which would solve the About page problem, but by using the Blogroll
we can add links that we could not otherwise do and this will become useful if your
monetisation strategy incorporates affiliate links as I’ll explain later on.
Click on Blogroll from your Dashboard. We saw this already when we deleted the default
links:

We need to get some links into the Blogroll. Click on the “Add links” link to get started.
However, before you start adding them, take a look at the Categories area to the right of the
screen:

Notice that we have a category called “Blogroll” already defined and that it is checked which
means that any new links will automatically be filed under that category. Instead, choose a
better name, I’m going to use “Fishing Articles” and add that as a category.
Now when you add your links you can choose your own title, URL and description. The title
will become the anchor text of the link which means that it will help that page rank in the
search engines for the title you provide. I’ll make the assumption that each page you build is
targeted towards some keyword phrase so here you need to try and make the link title
incorporate the keyword phrase too.
The URL is the permalink to the pages you created. Click on the links in your site and copy
them from the address bar. The description doesn’t show up so I tend to leave that blank.
Now if you just got rid of your pages from your sidebar like I just did then you can always
quickly pop back to your Widget editor and temporarily put the pages widget back in so you
can access the pages to get hold of the links
Okay I have added links to my five pages and removed the pages widget (to remove a
widget simply drag it from the sidebar back down to the bottom area) and my sidebar now
has this section at the top:

Incorporating Affiliate Links
Look again at the last screenshot – do you notice that there are six articles and not five?
What’s the odd one out? Well this site is actually live so you can take a look for yourself:
http://caroline-middlebrook.com/nichesite/
Have a look at the article called “Fly Fishing for Beginners”. This is not an article at all! It’s an
affiliate link!
I’m not going to go into details of affiliate marketing as that is really a topic for another book
but I wanted to show you why I use the blogroll for my sidebar rather than the pages widget.
You can add any link you like in this way and I have put the affiliate link right in the middle of
all the other articles.
Sneaky? Perhaps. But that’s the whole point of a money making niche site! I do this on my
current niche site and it’s a good way of getting clicks through to the affiliate. Having said
that, if the affiliate program does not match the content of your niche site then those clicks
are unlikely to convert for you so be sensible with this strategy!
Adding NoFollow to Selected Links
Google has recently done a crackdown on paid links and has begun to penalize websites
that it suspects have been selling them by reducing their PageRank which can hurt search
engine rankings.
Since then it has become generally accepted practice to explicitly mark links that are not
designed to be followed by Google – this includes advertisements, affiliate links and other
such revenue-generating links.
So far most of the links we have created have pointed at a page containing an article
targeted towards a keyword phrase and so we want the link to be followed to help it rank in
the search engines for the title we used for the link.
However, if we mix in affiliate links as I did in the previous section, it can be wise to prevent
Google from following that link as it is not a static page but a dynamic link to an affiliate
product. There is a mechanism for that called ‘no follow’.

Rather than explain the technicalities of the no-follow tag, I’ll instead just show you a plugin
that allows you to mark a link as no-follow and show you how to use the plugin.
Install the BlogTactics NoFollow Links plugin from the following page if you have not already
done so:
http://blogtactics.com/plugins/
Now go back to the Blogroll links and click the ‘Edit’ link on the right of the screen for the link
you wish to add the no-follow tag to.
Expand the ‘Link Relationship (XFN) section and check the box marked ‘nofollow’ as shown
below:

Save the changes to the link and you’re done.
Ordering the Blogroll Links
By default, the built in WordPress Blogroll widget has a few options for ordering the links
within it such as by name but it is not easy to have complete control.
If you have a little technical knowledge and are comfortable modifying one of the theme files
then continue reading the rest of this section. If not then skip to the next section.
Ok Install the following plugin if you have not already done so:
http://geekyweekly.com/mylinkorder
Click on the Blogroll link from your dashboard and in the menu bar underneath you’ll see a
new option called ‘My Link Order’:

Click on that link and then click on the button ‘Order Links in this Category’:

This button will bring up a page showing the links that you have in that category and will
allow you to simply drag and drop them as desired. Remember that affiliate link I
mentioned? I have dragged that to the top as links near the top tend to get clicked on more.
Once you’re done ordering the links you’ll need to click the button at the bottom:

In order for this plugin to work you need to edit the sidebar.php file in the ProSense theme.
The exact change to make is as follows (taken from the plugin instructions):
Modify sidebar template to use correct function (additional parameters seperated by
ampersands):
<?php wp_list_bookmarks(’orderby=order&category_orderby=order’);?>
If you have a problem with it not ordering, make sure you have a plain “&” and not “& amp;”
between the parameters which could happen if you copy straight out of the browser. Also
make sure quotes are plain straight ones, some people have had problems when copying
and pasting code out of the browser and PHP chokes on the bad quote character.

It’s extremely easy to create a static page in WordPress but there are a couple of things to
look out for. From your Dashboard, click Write and then Write Page. For the purposes of
Check For Updates! Revision 1.8 28
demonstration I’m going to use some PLR (Private Label Rights) material to create some
content for this niche site of mine. I’ve chosen the subject of fishing as I have a bunch of
articles I can use.
Discussion
Now when you write your page have a look at the options on the right of the screen, and
drop down the one labelled Discussion:

Allow Comments will allow users to type in comments to this post. Allow Pings will display a
special type of comment known as a trackback (as far as I am aware, ‘pings’ and
‘trackbacks’ can be used interchangeably) when somebody else links to this post. Note that
these two options are on by default and I have disabled them both.
There is a very good reason for this. Your static pages are the backbone of your SEO work
for this niche site. Now in this Ebook I’m not trying to teach you SEO – (buy Aaron Wall’s
SEO book for that!) but I want to warn you of anything that could sabotage your efforts.
You want your pages to be highly optimised towards your chosen keyword phrase. But if you
allow comments and trackbacks, you have no control over that content. If somebody posts a
load of crap in the comments (and they will!) then it will dilute the message of your page so
turn them off!

Page Slugs
Recall when we set up the site that we used a permalink structure that uses the title of the
page or post. This can be a problem for SEO. We want our titles to appeal to humans so that
they get clicked on in the search engine results pages but we want the URL to be keywordfriendly.
Sometimes the two do not mix all that well.
One of the articles I have used it called “7 Tips on Finding a Fishing Guide”. This is a nice
title for human readers but if the keyword I am optimising for is “finding a fishing guide” then
the three words at the beginning are somewhat redundant.
I could change the title of course but we can also use a WordPress feature called the Page
Slug. Have a look over the right and drop down the Page Slug section:

The page slug is simply the URL of that page. You can see here that I typed in my own slug
which is very similar to what would have been created by default except that I dropped the
first three words.

As I have alluded to several times, the reason I prefer to base the site around static pages is
that it makes the site maintenance free. However, if you wish to put in more work there is
Check For Updates! Revision 1.8 27
nothing stopping you from also including a blog in your niche site and in fact it carries a few
advantages if you choose to do so.
Advantages of Having a Blog
· Regular content will give Google a reason to crawl your site more often
· Google likes sites with a regular dose of fresh content so it can help your rankings
· Adding a blog gives you an RSS feed which you can publicise separately
· That RSS feed can also be used to freshen external pages (advanced tactic)
· It makes the site look more up-to-date and interactive to your visitors
Disadvantages of Having a Blog
· You need to update it on a fairly regular basis or the site looks ‘dead’
· If you have a bunch of sites it can become a time sink to update all the blogs
I think what this really boils down to is how many sites you plan to have. I know people who
make their living by creating a niche site, populating it with 5-20 pages of content and then
just leaving it. They then simply repeat this process over and over so over time they are
building themselves a huge number of assets which do not require maintenance. That is the
basic strategy that I am advocating as a starting point with this book.
If this is a strategy that you plan to adopt, then it may not be a good idea to include a blog on
every site. On the other hand, these blogs are only really here to provide a bit of fresh
content for Google – you’re not trying to be the next ProBlogger here so the content can be
short and quick to produce.
I have a blog on one of my niche sites and the posts only take me about 10 minutes to
create unlike the ones on my personal blog that typically take 1-3 hours each! Plus I don’t
update my niche blog every day – once a week would be fine.
So to crunch a few numbers, let’s say it took 10 minutes to create a post, you could update
six blogs in an hour. 6 x 8 = 48 so in a day you could update 48 blogs. Of course that is not a
terribly realistic calculation but you get the idea. You will need to decide the kind of time it
would take to write the blog posts that would be needed for your particular site and weigh up
the benefits accordingly.
Of course another consideration is whether or not you would have anything to blog about.
Some niches have news and others don’t so really you have to look at all the factors and
choose.

Most niche sites that are designed to make money have just a few static pages of content
that are highly optimised towards a particular keyword and are heavily loaded with ads. The
idea is to be able to draw search engine traffic that will click through to those ads.
For the site to be of value to your visitors, you need content. How much you need is highly
debatable. I would say that you need a minimum of five pages to make the site worthwhile.
There isn’t really an upper limit but if you find yourself with enough content for more than
about 20 pages then you have the makings of an authority site on your hands!

As I mentioned in the introduction to this book, the emphasis here is on the technical
aspects of using WordPress and not so much the money-making aspect of it. However, I do
feel that this subject needs a little elaboration.
One of the advantages of using WordPress is that it has a mechanism called ‘pinging’ which
ensures that services such as Google will be notified when you update your site. The idea
then is to pick a topic (I have used fishing for the example site that I build here), do some
keyword research using a tool such as Keyword Elite in order to find high-traffic / lowcompetition
keywords and then build pages that are optimised towards those keywords.
Over time the pages that you create will begin to rank in Google and other search engines
and the traffic will start to flow. In order to make money you will need to monetise your
pages.
Now the subject of monetisation is a whole Ebook in itself. I am not an expert on the
monetization aspect but my friend Josh Spaulding is. He has written an excellent free report
called the $5 Mini-Site Formula which complements this Ebook perfectly. It doesn’t have any
technical details of how to build the site but it tells you just how to pick your niche which will
result in the high paying AdSense ads getting displayed on your site, and how to optimize
them properly.

At this point you have installed WordPress, made it AdSense-Ready and installed some
essential plugins. That’s all the boring administration out of the way so now you can get
down to creating the content.
In this section I’m not going to tell you what to write, but how you can use WordPress to
organise the structure of your site.

Depending on what you want to do with your site you may want to also consider the
following plugins:
My Link Order Plugin
In Chapter 6 I am going to show you a technique to manage the links on your site using the
Blogroll feature of WordPress. One difficulty with the Blogroll is that it is not easy to explicitly
order the links within it – unless you have the following plugin:
http://geekyweekly.com/mylinkorder
Install this plugin and I’ll explain how to use it in the next chapter. However note that to make
the plugin work you have to edit one of the theme files so if that’s on the techy side for you
then skip this plugin.
NoFollow Plugin
If you plan on including affiliate links in your niche site then install this plugin. I’ll explain what
it is for and how to use it in the next chapter.
http://blogtactics.com/plugins/
It’s called the ‘BlogTactics NoFollow Plugin’
Akismet Spam Filtering Plugin
This plugin is only strictly necessary if you plan to allow comments to be placed on your site
by other users. If you do have comments then you’ll definitely need this (there are other
spam plugins but this one works pretty well for me and it comes pre-installed).
Having said that, I am told that even if comments are not enabled for your posts, spam
comments still manage to find their way into your database which can be prevented by using
Akismet.
Check For Updates! Revision 1.8 25
No download is necessary as it comes with WordPress by default. However, you do need to
get a key to make it work. To get your API key visit the following link:
http://WordPress.com/api-keys/
Sign up and they email you a key. Now I have been using the same key for all of my
WordPress sites – not sure if that’s supposed to be the way it works.
Activate the plugin from your Dashboard and you’ll see a warning message appear at the
top:

Click on the link in that warning message and you’ll be shown the configuration screen for
Akismet which looks like this:

Simply copy in the key you were sent in the email and click Update options. All done.
YouTube Brackets Plugin
This plugin is only necessary if you plan on embedding any YouTube videos on your site.
Personally I find that a little video here and there really livens up a website so I do try to
include them.
Usually when embedding YouTube videos you have to copy in some complicated code but
this doesn’t work with WordPress as by default it is not supported and it screws up your site.
With this plugin you can simply use the following format within your posts:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeJKQuvmDro]
I actually explain all of this in more detail in a blog post that I wrote:
Embedding YouTube Clips Into WordPress Without the Hassle