I have posted an article More About Silo Structuring on my Work From Home 4 Life Blog giving more details about how to structure your niche sites.

I have included a couple of links to diagrams that show a basic Niche Silo Structure and how to plan your niche site using a sitemap plan.

I hope this helps when you are working on creating your niche sites

Arrggh! The Internet - Gotta Love it - hate it - love it - hate it… Love it!.

As you can tell from my opening statement, I have been having some technical issues with our internet connection.

Although it can be frustrating when your internet connection is unstable, slow or broken, it’s not the end of the world.

It may appear that I have not been doing anything of late because of the lack of activity on my blog but the fact is I have been busy in the background of my work from home business when not online.

I have used my off-line time to develop more niche ideas, write articles for my niche sites and blogs, create content pages and websites, and more recently helping my 18 year old daugher get a niche site of her own developed so she can sell her hand made jewellery online.

In essence it is a niche site about hand crafted jewellery. It’s been slow going because she is so new to the idea of creating a niche site and she has a lot to learn about using html page templates, silo structure, writing articles, creating a newsletter, affiliate marketing to supplement her physical sales, and SEO.

We started with a silo niche site idea but she found this too confusing to begin with so we changed the platform to a static wordpress blog. She is somewhat familiar with blogging as she covered a unit of blogging in her iCreate course at school where the students set up a personal blogger blog as a project.

She is a lot more comfortable with this concept and is beginning to get over her barriers to writing articles for her site.

You can check out Mimzy’s Maiden NZ Jewellery Site here. She hasn’t uploaded any of her own products yet but she is working on content and such daily.

This can be a lesson for your work from home newbies, developing your niche sites is as much offline work as online. If for some reason you are without online access for a time due to technical issues, you don’t have to be stumbled by it.

Use the time wisely and do whatever you can offline so when you do get back up and running you can upload all your work and have more or less instant internet  real estate.

The video lesson on the instruction site shows the basics of downloading and installing a FTP Client and uploading files to your server. These notes cover the video lesson and specific details for members using the NZPCS Million Dollar Blueprint.

After you have completed your web-pages using your web-authoring program (we use NVU) you need to upload them to your server so they can be viewed online. To do this you need to:

• Sign up to a Webhost (if you haven’t already done so)
• Get FTP login information from your webhost (usually found in the webhost welcome eamil)
• Install a FTP Client Program onto your harddrive (several options listed below)
• Create webhost profile in your FTP Program (using FTP login information)
• Connect to the server
• Upload the files and folders of your site

FTP Client Software
There are a number of Free FTP Client Software Programs available on the web. I have made a list of some I Googled for you below.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have written an article that is more in depth in explaining the silo structure to use for your niche-sites.

This is a concept that I struggled with until I understood it fully but is so important to Search Engine Optimization that I felt it deserved a closer look.

Understanding what web-site structure to use, how it relates to the use of your keywords and site-map, makes it so much easier to plan and design your niche site more quickly and efficiently. After all you want to be able to leverage your work from home earning potential by creating more niche sites.

The Silo concept is closely akin to your keyword research so it may pay to go over the posts that cover keyword research in the niche site lessons as well. It will help consolidate your understanding.

The article “Setting Up Your Niche Site” is quite long so I have added it as a page. You will see it in the page menu in the sidebar.

I hope it helps you to understand how to design your niche web-site and have it optimized for SEO.

After setting up our keyword “Directory” folders, and creating 7 web-pages within each folder, we need to modify the menu, titles and headings for each page. We also need to add meta tags for SEO.

By the end of this lesson you should have 7 webpages (one index.html and six article.html pages) in each of the 5 Directory folders. That’s a total of 35 web pages added to your existing main index page and 5 product pages.

Each web page should have the keyword phrase for that page as the “Heading” <H1 Tag>; as the page Title <title> meta tag; and as anchor text in the sidebar menu as a link.

Create Index Pages For Keyword Directories

If you have not already done this in Lesson 4:
Use index.html already created in Lesson 3 as a template; copy and paste this index page into each of your keyword directory folders.

1. In each directory folder modify the “ index.html” page Heading and Title to keyword phrase for this page using NVU. (the keyword phrase is the same name as the directory folder)
2. On each index page create an article menu using the keyword phrases of the article pages you are going to create with this directory. (These phrases are the same as the notepad files created in Lesson 4)

Add Contextual Ads

If you haven’t already got Google Adsense installed onto the page, do this now, before you start copying the page. You can add up to 3 Google Adsense units on a page. Typically, one at the top in the header region, one at the side in the sidebar or content area and one at the bottom in the footer area. Use channel to identify which niche the adsense uniot is being added to.
If you don’t have a Google Adsense account, the easiest way to get one is to go to Blogger.com, start a blog and apply for Adsense.

Duplicate Directory Index Page For Article Pages

1. In each Directory folder, copy and paste modified index.html page 6 times to create pages for your six keyword phrase articles
2. Rename the pages to the keyword phrase you are using for this article page
3. Change heading and title to main keyword phrase for each article page and include keyword phrase as a menu item

Add Content To All Pages

Populate each keyword page with an article or “under construction” notice.

Write article using main keyword phrase for the page. Intersperse keywords singly throughout the article using synonyms and actual keywords but not  in the same order of the original keyword phrase.

Add Contextual Product Links

Link to cloaked product page wherever you use the keywords for that product page

Create Meta Tags for Each Page

Go to SEO Chat Meta Tag Generator Tool (link on instruction site) and create meta tags ( I prefer to use Adds.Me metatag generator)

Copy and paste the resulting code into the source code of your pages in the <head> area.

The easiest way to sell is NOT to sell. At first glance this may seem to be a contradiction.
Humans are perverse by nature and we don’t like feeling pushed to do anything. It goes a whole lot easier if we think it was all our own idea. This is the power of suggestion.

Bearing this in mind, when you want to earn money from your work-from-home site or blog, be mindful of leading your visitor to a sale instead of bashing them over the head with a “BUY ME NOW!” club.

An easy way to do this is put up 3-5 links using enticing and interesting anchor text that links to good quality ClickBank products.

Be sure to choose products apt for your niche topic. Trying to sell “how to lose weight” on a gardening blog for instance is not going to result in many sales. However, “How to Grow Your Own Vegetables Easily” will be more successful.

When inserting links onto your site use related keywords in your anchor text (the visible link description)
Place the links at the top of your sidebar as a list. This will make them appear as a menu so you may get more clicks on them.

Use link cloaking software to hide your affiliate ID. This isn’t being deceptive, it is to protect you from affiliate link hijackers. These are the people out there who remove your ID before they make the sale or worse use their own ID!
If you don’t have link cloaking software, I recommend Affiliate Link Cloaker
If you are a member of the Million Dollar Blueprint you will have access to link cloaking software as part of your membership.

The html code structure and method of inserting the code is the same as I have discussed before in this post

Another way to use click bank products is to link to them from links in your posts. You can do this manually as you write your posts or use the aLinks plug-in for WordPress to insert them automatically for you.

First you need to select the product and get the code from ClickBank, then setup the ClickBank module in aLinks with keywords that you want to point to the product. When this is done, whenever you use the keyword or keyword phrase aLinks automatically inserts a link to the product.

As a MDB member you have access to this plugin through the software downloads section of the membership site.

These instructions are on how to insert Amazon Product Widgets into your hosted website or Wordpress blog

Log into your Amazon Associates Account.

If you don’t have one you can sign up for free here at Amazon

• Under the tools menu click on “Build Links/Widgets”
  There are a number of widgets to chose from (19 at the time of this writing). For the beginner I would suggest using the “Omakase” widget as it automatically determines which products to show based on the content of your site.
• Click on “Add to your Web page” button

• Select Template Style

Here you can make a few choices of your widget settings. Experiment with differnet settings to see which ones are most effective (number of sales).
There are a number of banner sizes to chose from. For the side bar of a blog or site I would chose the 120×240 or 120×600. For the post or content area, depending of the width of it, I would chose either the 300×250 or 600×520. Whatever size you choose make sure it will fit within the width of the area you intend to insert it into. You may need to check your style sheet (CSS) to for sizing.

• Select Template Colors

Here is where you can change the look of the widget. You can get it to match the colors of your template by referring to the CSS stylesheet of your site template. If you are not sure what colors the hex code refers to, here’s a handy online color tool for you use.

• Preview of Sample Ad

Once you are happy with the preview you can go to the next step

• HTML Code for your Link Template

Click in the box and the code will high-light. Right-click and select copy. I suggest you paste the code into a notepad file.

Inserting the Code into Your Site

Wordpress Blog

Log into your wp-admin area
Go to “Presentation” tab then ‘Theme Editor” tab

• Sidebar: Select “sidebar’ and insert code into area where you want your ads to appear. You may need to open your blog before this to view where in the sidebar you want to put it. For example, if you wan the widget to appear before the links section look for links code then paste just above it. Click “update file” to save your changes.

If your blog comes “widget enabled” (which this blog is not) Under “Presentation” >> “Sidebar Widgets” you can paste the code into a text widget then move the text widget to the position you want.

• Footer: Select “footer’ and insert code into area where you want your ads to appear. Click “update file” to save your changes.

These two positions will have the wiget show on every page of your blog. If you want to paste in a special widget on a post page you need to insert the code when you write yu post in the write editor using the code tab.

Niche Site
Open the page you want to insert the codde into using NVU or whatever html editor you use.
Place your cursor where you want the widget to appear then select “insert… html” from insert menu.

And that’s all there is to it! You will be able to see my Amazon Widget in the sidebar to the right >>
You will notice that I use the template colours from this blog and I used H3 tags to give it a heading. You don’t have to do this.

In this lesson you will learn to create recommended product pages using ClickBank products for your Niche Site.

1. Create “recommends” folder in your Niche Site Folder
2. Clickbank.com: Go to Marketplace and search for products you can sell to this niche using niche topic keywords.
3. Choose 5 or more products. View sales page to get product site URL. Get product ClickBank hop-link.
4. In your Notepad files created for niche topic keywords in step 4, enter details for the following:
   Title: Keyword Phrase (name of file)
   Description: Using words and phrases from the 100 keyword phrases list, make a couple of sentences that make sense.
   Keywords: Select 5 or 6 keyword phrases from 100 keyword phrase list. You can also exchange main keyword with synonyms. Eg photography = photo/photos
   Browser Setting: enter “connecting to (product site name)”
   Product URL: website address of product
   Affiliate URL: Clickbank hop-link
5. Set up cloaked redirection pages using “My Affiliate Assistant” program and filling in the above details and save html pages created, using hyphenated-key-word-phrase as filename, into recommends folder.
6. Upload cloaked pages into recommends folder on your web server
7. Fill in RSS Spreadsheet with details of cloaked products and Page URL- the URL on your website

My Comments

As I have have said earlier you will be creating your niche-site on a sub-domain so the URL of your site will be:
http://your-niche-site.yourdomain/
If you want to append the recommends folder to your sub-domain you will have to create your niche sub-domain using cPanel of your web-server first, before creating the recommends folder directory and uploading the product pages. The sub-domain should be your main keyword phrase.

The recommends URL will looks like this: http://your-niche-site.yourdomain/recommends/

The Product URL will looks like this: http://your-niche-site.yourdomain/recommends/your-product.html

You can also create a “recommends” directory on your main domain

The Recommends URL will look like this: http://www.yourdomain/recommends/

The Product URL will look like this: http://www.yourdomain/recommends/your-product.html

If you choose to create a recommends directory on your main domain I suggest that you create either a recommends index.html page or recommends WordPress blog in the directory. Doing this will hide the directory and list of product files if anyone should go to the http://www.yourdomain/recommends/ URL.

Use the blog as a product review site. Whenever your create a product page and upload it, do a brief review of the product on this blog as a post. To give you some ideas, here is mine: http://wfh4l.com/recommends/

This lesson shows you how to organise folders for your site

1. Create folders for each of your 5 niche-topic-keywords
2. Trellian Keyword Research Tool: Go to Trellian and do research for your 5 keyword niche topics and copy top 100 keyword term results into into XL spreadsheet “RSS Worksheet” you will find this in the resources folder downloaded from the instruction site
3. Choose seven keyword phrases from each set of 100 results. These 7 terms will be used as pages for your niche site.
4. Create a notepad file for each of the 7 keyword page phrases and save in the topic keyword folder.
5. Using NVU: Open index.html template created from step 3, add Stat Counter Code and Hit Tail Code to page before copying.
6. Copy and save index.html template into each niche-topic-keywords folder

My Comments

A quick and easy way to create all the notepad files is to open one first, and got to File… save as.. and enter first page topic term and save in the first topic folder. Then select save as.. from file menu again and save as 2nd page topic term and so on until you have all 7 created in the first folder. To change folders when you use save as.. navigate to second topic folder to save file as first page topic in this folder.
At the end of this lesson you will have the following basic niche website configuration:

• A folder in your documents with the name of your Niche
• Within this folder you will have a folder with a copy of the website template you have chosen and the resources folder you downloaded from the instruction site.
  
• Within the template folder you will have an index.html file with all your changes, including Stat Counter and Hit Tail code; 5 folders labeled with each of the niche topics you have chosen; and whatever files and folders that were included in the template down-load. (images, CSS, etc)
  
• Within each of the 5 Niche Topic folders you will have a copied index.html page in each folder and 7 notepad files labeled with each of the page topic terms you chose for each niche topic
  

To create a web-site

We use the free html editor NVU, to create our website pages. Select website template to use for your niche site from OSWD (Open Source Web Desiign).

1. Download and unzip chosen template.
2. Copy all the files and folders of the website template into the folder labelled with your niche site name.
   All your changes will be done to this new copy of the template so the original files remain unchanged for when we want to use the template again for another site.

The first page you will create will be index.html. This is the first page the visitor will see when they visit your site.
How to create website template page

1. Open NVU web authoring Program
2. Open index.html in website template folder
3. Use main keyword phrase for the name of your site. “Your Niche Site”
4. Use topic keyword phrases selected in previous lessons for pages in your site.  “niche-keyword-topic-one.html”
5. Create a navigation menu using these phrases.
   >> Type “niche keyword topic one”
   >> Highlight words and click URL button
   >> Link to http://your-niche-site.yourdomain/niche-keyword-topic-one.html
   >> Repeat for “niche keyword topic two” etc. for all 5 topics
6. Setup  Google Adsense Ads and insert code into  navigation sidebar and content area if you wish
7. Change copyright details in footer area to reflect current year and the name of your site

My Comments
Once you have set up this index page it will become a template for all the pages you create for your site. There are a couple of ways to do this:

1. Use Windows Explorer: right click on index.html, select copy then navigate to folder where you want to create copy; right click in folder, select paste or depress  cntrl & v together.
2. Use NVU Program: Once you have made all the changes and saved the file; Go to file menu and select Save As..
   Navigate to the folder where you want to save it and click save.

You will be creating your niche-site on a sub-domain so the URL of your site will be:
http://your-niche-site.yourdomain/