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Every time we start a new site, I’m reminded of all there is to do to get a site up and running. And I’m not even talking about niche selection or coming up with a domain name.
There’s the process of purchasing the domain and hosting, setting up WordPress, creating the various pages (About, Privacy Policy, etc.), creating the categories, etc.
This isn’t even considering things like picking and configuring a theme, creating a logo, and all the other little things that go into building a niche site.
In our case, we’ve done this so many times now, that we can check all of these off the list pretty quickly in a systematic fashion. When it’s your first site, it’s not that easy.
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While some of these things need to be done before you write that first article and launch your site, most of them aren’t that important. You can come back to them later when your site actually starts getting some visitors.
This could take anywhere from several weeks to a few months, so you have plenty of time to come back to those things to tweak them as you wish down the road.
If I had to choose one thing to focus on from day to day when building a niche site, it would be creating content. Content is the only thing that will get visitors to your site.
Yes, you need hosting, etc., but aside from those foundational items, content is all that really matters. Once you have a barebones site up and running, you should be shifting your focus to writing.
I’ve seen countless people get super motivated to launch a site, spend an unreasonable amount of time making it look good, then never publish an article. It sounds crazy, but this isn’t uncommon.
And remember, it doesn’t matter how good your site looks, without content, it’s worthless. No one will visit it, and even if they did, you don’t get paid for having a pretty site.
When building informational websites like we do, you can expect it to take many months before each article starts gaining traction in Google Search. That’s why it’s so important that you don’t delay the writing process.
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An article that you write today might not generate any traffic for 6+ months, so why not write that article now, then work on site design, site speed, etc. while you wait?
Don’t stop at one article of course, make writing your focus. If you have an hour to put toward your site each day, that full hour should go to writing.
Maybe once a week, you can give yourself 30 minutes to work on those other things that really won’t matter for many, many months.
By putting your content first, you’ll give yourself the best chance of getting through the burnout phase. This is the phase between when you launch your site and when you start getting consistent and growing traffic.
This stretch can last for many months (as you can see in this video), and most people don’t make it to the other side. Instead, they write their site off as a failure and assume the whole thing is a scam.
Even if you stop writing after a few months, if you prioritize correctly and create a ton of content early on while your motivation is still strong, your site will have a much greater chance of succeeding as those old articles start to age.
Ironically, reading this email and spending time researching falls into the category of things not to do while building a new site, so put down your phone (or whatever you’re reading this on), and start typing.