Building A Micro Niche Site: See It In Action

Micro Niche Site: Journal #1

Have you heard of a micro niche site? I’m always looking for ways to make a little money on the internet, especially as I transition to a new part of my life.

Hint hint: big announcement coming soon – but you can take a look around this site or my Twitter profile for a pretty good idea.

With that being said, I’ve always been inspired by both Mike Cernovich’s micro niche site, Fit Juice, and am a big fan of Pat Flynn and his blog, Smart Passive Income.

So, I’m giving this a real crack myself to see if I can build a micro niche site (relatively) quickly for a small profit. I’m posting my progress here on This is Trouble because:

1.) This blog helps keep me accountable, weird as it sounds. Really.

2.) I want a way to document the process, progress, and results – and it’s a lot more fun to write it in an ongoing blog/journal format than keep notes in Excel.

3.) I want to give you guys the opportunity to learn from my success and/or failure. There is a lot of bullshit advice out there on how to make money online, and I’m determined to be transparent about this experience.

4.) On top of it, you’re going to get the micro niche site building experience from the ground up. I just bought the domain and built the website on January 2nd, and I’m writing this on January 5th.

Micro Niche Site Goals

1.) Make $200-$300 in profit a month, hopefully this will scale up in time.

2.) Passive income after this initial blitz; i.e. I’d like to not have to post to this micro niche website more than once a week – at most.

3.) Document all processes of this niche website and share here on This is Trouble. This includes upfront costs, traffic, etc.

4.) Depending on results – rinse and repeat process on a new micro niche site.

Micro Niche Site Rules

1.) As of now, I am not going to be linking to the new micro niche site from This is Trouble. At the end of this first month or so, when I’ve “finalized” this series – I will provide the URL of my new niche website so that my readers know that it actually exists, and this series wasn’t all made up. I want this to be something a reader of mine could replicate if he or she wanted, and I want the challenge of starting at square zero. I realize all of my readers don’t have a blog with nearly 500 articles that reaches thousands of people every month to give them a head start on traffic.

2.) Any and all expenses will be tracked and shared here.

3.) I will not be buying traffic of any kind off of Fiverr or other traffic generating websites, as they send bots that destroy your Google rank. If this wasn’t the case I would be all for it. For the record, I have never bought traffic for This is Trouble.

4.) I will, however, be buying ads from Facebook, Bing, and perhaps Google Adsense. I may also look into buying a banner ad on a specialty site for my niche product(s).

5.) Amazon is the only affiliate I will be using for now. I may get into more specialty stuff or release a short eBook down the road if there is a demand for it. But the goal for this micro niche site is simplicity.

6.) Overall, I’m trying to keep costs down on this micro niche site – ideally no more than $100 to get started and meet these initial goals. If you want to do this I strongly suggest you analyze your own skills beforehand – I can build a beautiful website with custom graphics in a matter of hours. You may have to pay someone to help you with parts of this.

P.S. Web design is a skill everyone should have.

Micro Niche Site Timeline

As I said, this officially hit the ground running on January 2nd. That’s close enough to the new year that all of January will be considered the first month. Come February 1st, this is what I will have accomplished:

• Full website functionality built: i.e. all static pages done, contact forms, graphics, etc.
• 50 posts of content for my niche.
• Yes, that is FIFTY. Five-zero.
• An absolute minimum 300 words each article, but I’m aiming for a minimum of 500 words.
• Ten high-quality posts in my niche, this means 1,000+ words.
• Every post must be SEO’d to perfection; i.e. for a specific, targeted keywords – and I’m aiming for the ‘Green’ light as far as the WordPress SEO plugin says.
• My first affiliate sale.
• Possibly a little too hopeful, but I’d like at least one article touching the front page of Google.
• 10 email subscribers.

I will be posting one, maybe two updates a week on this. Since this post is going to launch on a Wednesday, and I’ll be working on it all weekend, you can expect the next update Monday morning (January 11th).

Micro Niche Site Goals:

January 5th update:

• The website has been fully built – this includes themes installed and configured (it’s quite the looker, if I do say so myself). I designed a couple of custom graphics for it as well.
• As of now, it has 9 published posts.
• 2 more posts have been written and are in final draft mode.
• I gave the URL to a couple of friends and my mom but I suspect I have not had any real traffic yet.

Immediate To Do:

• Build the email list and get opt-in forms going.
• Continue writing posts, I’m aiming to get to 20 by the end of this week.
• Ensure Google Analytics and A/B testing for opt-in forms are working properly.

Micro Niche Site Overall Status:

Post Count: 9/50
Email Subscribers: 0/10
Posts on #1 Google page: 0/1
Total Traffic: 0

Micro niche site costs to date: $20

$10 – for domain and one year registration
$5 – hosting the website; I already have hosting for This is Trouble and other websites I run, but it needs to be accounted for.
$5 – I have an AWeber account that I pay $20 a month for, but I use that across all websites as well.

That wraps up the first post here for my new micro niche site. Check back on Monday morning to see what I accomplished this weekend.

Feel free to leave a comment below with your thoughts, or hell – even join in by building a site yourself if you feel so inclined.