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

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.

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.

Download the FTP Client of your choice and install the program

• FTP Surfer (used in instruction video)
• Filezilla
• SmartFTP (my personal favorite)
• CoffeeCup
• Free FTP Manager
• GoFTP
• Cute FTP
• GoldenFTP

Some are free-ware and others are free limited trials. All do basic FTP upload and download and the full paid versions have a few more options.
Everyone has their favorite so there is no right or wrong one to choose. Personally I like using SmartFTP. Try them all if you wish then settle on the one you like using. You can generally use the free version indefinitely and this version has everything you need. However for the trial versions you will be asked to upgrade every time you use it after your trial has run out. Only do this if you really like the program and have the spare cash to do so.

Setup Web-server Profile
Go to the email you received from your webhost and find the following information:
Your FTP Address: either ftp.yourdomain or ftp.yourserverIP
Your Username:
Your Password:
If you don’t have these details contact your webhost support
If you have a number of domains you can use the same FTPClient for all of them and set up a profile for each.

Connect to Server
click on connect button or go to file… connect… to log into your webserver and connect to it.

Understanding Server Layout and Directories
Your webserver is just another computer. It has a file and directory structure just like your PC. A little understanding of the file structure will help you to determine where you need to upload your website to.
A folder is a directory and a html file is a web-page. You can have folders and files within other folders (sub-directories and pages witin directories)

At the root directory of your server (ftp.yourdomain) you will find a number of folders:
.cpanel (if your webhosting uses cPanel)
public_ftp
public_html

(You may have others depending on your webhost)

The folder or directory we are interested in is public_html and this is the folder where you will be uploading your websites into.
In the MDB we will create our niche sites on sub-domains and will be using our main domain as a portal or gateway to our niche-sites. We set up the portal later on. For now you need to create a sub-domain using cPanel (you have already done this to create your work-from-home blog) and upload your niche site folders and pages into that folder (public_html/sub-domain)

Uploading your Website
It sometimes helps for you to think of your web-server as an extension of your PC when moving files, pages and folders from your PC to your server. So if you think of your FTP Client as Windows Explorer, the principles of moving files is the same. You drag the files you want to move or upload from the PC side of your FTP Client and drop then into the folder on your webserver where you want them to be. The only difference is the the FTP Client moves a copy of the files and the originals stay on your PC. Anytime you wish to make changes to your pages you edit them in your web-authoring program, save the changes and upload them again. The FTP Client will ask for you to overwrite the existing file to which you say yes and your web-page is updated.

If you have set up your website folder directories using the correct Silo structure (briefly covered in Lesson 4) you can just upload all the folders and pages as they are into the sub-domain directory for this niche site.

Not sure how to structure your niche-site silo?

Keep your eyes peeled for a future article about this.

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.

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.