Tips for Building Niche Websites

By Kevin Reid

The first step is to find a niche area. You could draw inspiration from your friends, media, books, yellow pages, or from top affiliate programs. Once found that, the next important thing is to market the website so as to attract a good traffic to the website everyday. In fact, this is the difficult most part in building a niche website. This article discusses few tips that could effectively help one to market his/her niche websites.

1) Write articles and submit to various popular directories. This is an efficient method to drive traffic to your websites. But, ensure that the articles have a link back to your website.

2) Participate actively in various discussion forums in your niche. Find few good and popular forums in the web and register for an account. Observe the activities in the forums for few days to get a feel of it and then have a go at it by answering few questions, all the while subtly promoting your website.

3) Use blogs to your advantage. Publishing your blog with RSS feeds and updating it regularly will ultimately increase the visibility of your website.

4) Link exchanges can increase a website's page ranking. Hence link to other relevant and high quality websites in your niche. However, it must be kept in mind that linking to low ranked websites could be counterproductive.

5) Posting comments in other blogs in your niche is also a good way to improve the visibility of your website. But, while doing so, never attempt anything unethical like abusing a particular entry or making hostile criticisms.

6) Another effective way to popularize your niche website is through periodic press releases, on something news worthy that is happening in your portal. Designing an affiliate program and recruiting hard working affiliates in exchange of a share of your profits is also a decent idea you can try out. Finally, if you are prepared to shell out few bucks, consider pay per click advertising - like MSN AdCenter and Google ad words - banner advertising or buying paid links to high PR websites.

7) All these aspects could increase the popularity of your niche website. But what purpose it serves if the website does not figure in the first few search results in a search engine? Therefore, some serious SEO while designing the website is also important. Sans SEO, it is next to impossible to remain visible in the web.