Johnny – Yes, it’s the advice I’d normally give too. However, as the question was “what would you do if YOU were starting out again” I felt I should say how I would approach it personally.

I did say in the answr I wasn’t at all sure Ben should charge in right at the start and do what I’d do as you really do need to have had a practise run / analyse.

“It could just be a recipe for a lot of time wasted if the effort is not correctly applied”

There are countless opportunities out there and it is tempting to get starry eyed and target every single one of them – but the sites that really succeed are the ones that get both a huge investement of time, and a fair bit of money spend on them for marketing purposes.

If you launch 15 ‘niche’ sites they are quite likely to be 15 crap sites, none of which will reach the potential you were aiming for. Plus the mistakes you make will be duplicated over every site. 2 or 3 perhaps is alright to get some feedback, then once they are doing well you may wish to start expanding, but not before.

I was quite worried about saying to Ben to definately try lots of sites as I know a lot of people can get mired in building lots but never completing any. However I can’t see any other way around testing lots of niches other than building thin affiliate sites and chucking some PPC at them (not wise at all for a beginner!)

From my experience I would definitely go down the lots of niche sites route. There are several reasons for this.

Firstly for almost every site I have, Google seems to stage indexing; it initially visits your site quite a few times, then it stabilises until about 6 months when, depending on the amount of content, it really ramps up the number of visits and the number of pages indexed – for example a site I started in September saw the number of pages indexed in March treble after no real growth for months. So get more sites up and running while waiting for Google to decide it “likes” your sites and put you somewhere you can gain traffic from the SERPS….which means if you want it to be ready for Xmas then get started now!

By the time 6 months rolls around you should have a few sites out there in the big bad world. The next step is to work out which to build out, so don’t get too attached to your sites – some sites will work, some will not. Do not be fooled into thinking more work will turn around your poor performers, it might, but the line of least resistance is to build out the ones that do work as you are more likely to be rewarded for your efforts there. The truth is that your initial effort is going into finding those profitable niches as much as it is making money really, so once you find them – make maximum use!

Also follow Kirsty’s advice from a previous post and when you find a niche that works build out not only your site but similar ones and really exploit it. For example if you are selling Manchester United stuff, start an Arsenal, Chelsea or Liverpool site, don’t go and start a designer furniture site! Doing this allows you to leverage the site(s) you already have to promote your new one with links from a respected source in a related niche (and one that your competitors cannot use!) and make further use of your hard earned knowledge of the niche.

Lastly if you find that you are getting traffic but not converting well, experiment with other ways to make money on your content. For example I found that on some sites that were not getting the conversions, when I ran Adsense alongside the affiliate offers it made a better overall return. This is particularly true for niches that show a high CPC on Google Adwords tool.

When I started I had sites covering all manner of niches. I have now got 3 main areas I cover (forgive me if I do not tell you what they are!!) and have plans to build out more in these areas, which means I can plan to buy domain names, commission content etc as I am now confident the investment will be worthwhile. When I started I had done research and went into areas I thought may be profitable but most of the ones at the top of my list proved to be red herrings, whereas others became mini-goldmines – you just do not know which will be good until you actually get some hard data.

Currently I do not draw a salary from any of this, all my profit goes back into building out the sites, promotion etc as I want to get a good level of safety before I rely on this as my sole source of income!

Oh and on a technical note, I use the ever wonderful WordPress with wp-hives so I can run several sites from one installation, which makes maintenance a lot easier and means you can run more sites.

Hope my experience of the last couple of years helps…

Ben says he has good writing skills and knows how to put websites together so to answer his question about collecting together a loads of articles before publishing I would say get them online NOW and spread the content across as many niche sites as you feel you can maintain and your content naturally covers – a handful at most for starters though.

While they’re online use your research to experiment with the sites you have made and see what happens.

You will learn a helluva lot more from what did and didn’t work by doing something – procrastination will get you nowhere.

One other point about going niche or developing a larger site which applies specifically to new affiliates is that they will find it hard to get approved for all the merchants needed to build a site promoting 100′s of merchants from scratch – so you’re pretty much forced to go niche. However, once you have a track record and the networks know who you are it gets easier. Good Luck!