Niche Site Case Study 2: Writing the Home Page

If you have been building a niche site alongside me you will be happy to know that we are on the final step. After this update, you will have completed your niche site!

Of course, the fun is not over yet. My next updates will be all about link building as having a great keyword and a good site is just one part of building a successful niche site.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First of all, we need to complete our home page!

If you haven’t read my other niche site case study updates, you can find them all here. They will help you build your own niche site and follow the progress of my own, new niche sites.

Step 7: Write the home page

Click Here for ALL the Steps for Building a Successful Niche Site!

A home page is a very important part of a site. Many people click on the home page when they visit a website. It is often the most visited page on a site.

For our niche sites, it probably won’t be. We will be guiding most traffic to our buying guide. However, it still plays an important part and many people will still click on it.

There are two things you need to take into account when designing and writing your home page:

1. It needs to look somewhat professional and definitely trustworthy. You want people to trust your advice.
2. It needs to be designed to best past around link juice.

Link juice is an expression that is often used when talking about how links benefit a site and I think it’s a good way to describe it. You can think of every external link coming in to your website as juice.

Now, most of this juice will go to your buying guide but a lot will go to your home page. It’s important to think about how to best spread around this juice for maximum benefit. Basically, you want this juice to flow through your entire site so that every external link to your site has maximum benefit to every article on your niche site.

The way link juice flows through your site is via internal links, that is links between the pages on your site. Your home page should be designed and written to include internal links to spread your link juice around in the best way possible.

Now the best links are links in text.

This means I do not suggest you have a standard blog like home page which has a list of posts. The best way to spread around the link juice is to have a static home page which is text. You then put links to your important pages in the text.

I suggest you follow a formula similar to this for your home page:

1. Start with an introduction to the site. Who you are, what your site is about, why you love your niche.
2. Have different sections where each section introduces your main buying guide.
3. Introduce other articles/reviews on your site where you would especially like to pass on some link juice.

Now at this point, you probably only have one buying guide. This is fine. You can edit the home page to have more sections when you have more buying guides.

For now, I suggest writing some short product reviews to fill in the space. For example:

• Introduction to site
• Section about your main product which links to your buying guide
• “Top 3 Juicer Reviews” or whatever your product is with a short review of each product which then links to your full review (that you wrote in the last update).

You can also consider adding elements like a YouTube video about your product – just don’t include one from a competitor!

Social Media

There is just one more thing you might want to consider at this point – setting up social media accounts.

Now, I would never bother having active social media accounts for a niche site, but it is easy to set up some accounts that look active. Why do this?

Well for one reason, each account will have at least one link to your site. This is an easy way to get some links.

It also makes your niche site look more legitimate and does supply some social signals for your site which is a ranking factor in Google.

The good news is that it is very easy to set up some social media accounts which look active. This is what we do:

• Set up Facebook and Twitter accounts. Theme them to be similar to your niche site. Fill in about information, upload profile and cover images and link to your site.
• Use Fiverr to get some followers for your account. It’s easy to find jobs that will give you 500 or 1000 followers or likes. They are not likely to be quality ones and I would never do this for a site where you want active social media followers but it works well for this purpose.
• Set up plugins (a free example is “Next Scripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster” but there are plenty more) to auto tweet and post new posts to Facebook.

Once you have done this, you are done! YOU HAVE COMPLETED YOUR FIRST NICHE SITE!

Congratulations! Do something to celebrate and let me know in the comments below 🙂

Our niche sites

Since I wrote this update at the same time as my last one, there is nothing new to report!

Time and money spent on step 7

Time Spent: 1 hour per site

This step is easy and costs nothing.

Find all niche site case study 2 updates here.

I am going away for 6 weeks over the Australian summer. This means that there will be no new updates until I return to Melbourne. Sign up for the newsletter so you hear as soon as they are published! I look forward to sharing all my link building tips with you next year.

You can read step 8, all about link building and more posts on my case studies and niche sites here.

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