Okay, so if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’re probably convinced that writing high quality niche sites with original content is a great way to make money online.
But…can you do it? Can you write enough original content on a topic to fill up a website? The more articles you write, the more hooks you have in the water to tempt visitors from search engines. 30 pages would be a minimum number for a viable niche web site, 50 would be better, and even more is best.
How long would that take you? Would you run out of ideas before finishing?
The best thing to do is to write the website before you purchase a domain name, buy SBI!, or anything. So you know you’ve got it in you to do all that writing and keep your energy and enthusiasm for the subject.
But come on, who wants to write a 50 page website and not be doing anything with it? And there’s an advantage to having a website grow over time with search engines, too.
So how do you know if you’ll be wasting your time and money the first time you try to write a niche website?
The short answer is, write a niche website for someone else first. Do it for free, and you’re not out anything if you fail.
Realistically, nobody is going to pay you to write a niche website when you’ve never done one before. But there is a website that will let you be the editor of a niche website, and write articles each week to add to it. It’s free, and you don’t get paid anything, but you get a great deal of training and experience in writing articles for a website.
The site is BellaOnline, and its angle is that it’s a site designed for women to visit. Luckily, they allow men to be editors, so we’re not left out in the cold. But the site itself is targeted toward women web surfers.
They have umpteen dozen different niche websites under the BellaOnline banner. Each has an editor who has full control over the content on their website.
Including the ability to use affiliate links to earn income from recommending products.
The requirements to be an editor are that you must write one article each week for your site, maintain a presence in your site’s discussion forum, and be reachable via email for your visitors.
BellaOnline is the absolute best place I’ve found online for a new writer to start out. Your copyright stays with you, and you can at any time request that they remove any or all of your articles from the site. They don’t mind affiliate links, and don’t require that you share any of your earnings with you. They have an extensive training program to help you succeed.
You’re basically getting an existing niche site, complete with traffic, to do with what you want. I’ve just recently become the editor of the Role Playing Games site, which had been idle for a few months. Within hours of posting my first article, over 50 people visited it, and the traffic stats estimate about 5,000 page views a month.
It’s really a win-win arrangement, and by the time you’ve written 30 or 50 pages at BellaOnline, you’ll be confident enough in your ability to write your own niche website to know you wouldn’t be wasting the money by getting an SBI! site. And you’ll probably be able to write that 50 page SBI! site in record time.
Go here for a list of content areas at BellaOnline that are open for editor applications.
Sounds interesting. I hear Squidoo lets you do something similar as well, but they can make you money off ads in their pages.
I will check this out. The backlinks could make it worth while.
Justin Dupre
Squidoo gives you the ability to put web pages up and get a cut of the Adsense profits, along with putting in your affiliate links. But it pretty much assumes you already know how to write good content. That’s a big assumption, as shown by the huge number of Squidoo pages that are absolute junk.
BellaOnline has the training program in addition, so if I were talking to someone who thought they wanted to try writing online, I’d suggest they start at BellaOnline, then write at Squidoo after their BellaOnline training had completed.
[quote comment=””]Squidoo gives you the ability to put web pages up and get a cut of the Adsense profits, along with putting in your affiliate links. But it pretty much assumes you already know how to write good content. That’s a big assumption, as shown by the huge number of Squidoo pages that are absolute junk.
BellaOnline has the training program in addition, so if I were talking to someone who thought they wanted to try writing online, I’d suggest they start at BellaOnline, then write at Squidoo after their BellaOnline training had completed.[/quote]
Thank you for the information. I am trying to learn everything I can about this stuff. GEESH a world of learning! Thanks Shanda
The learning never does stop, someone is always coming out with something new online. Have fun!
So, you think that the BellaOnline articles get more traffic initially than Squidoo pages? I’m going to have to add this to my comparison study. Thanks for the link! 🙂
The main difference between a Squidoo page and a Bella Online article is that your Bella Online site already has a following, has existing articles that are pulling search engine traffic, has people signed up for your newsletter, etc.
It’s like stepping into an existing business rather than building it up from scratch.