Evaluating your niche
I recently discovered a great tool for simple evaluation of a business idea. No question, Google is the search power house. If something is moving on Google, generally it’s moving everywhere. I know this is a very simplistic evaluation and there are many other factors to consider but this is at least better than the gut feeling evaluation method we see so many people use.
You can check the trends on Google by going to Google.com/trends
If you trend neck ties verses bow ties… you can see that over the last few years, interest in bow ties is on the rise and interest in neck ties is on the decline. Then if I go to the Google Adwords keyword tool, I can see that bow ties is currently getting 600,000 monthly searches whereas neck ties is only getting 246,000 monthly searches.
So if you were thinking of starting a bow tie boutique, then you may have a good niche market to attack.
Growing a WordPress Website – Bringing It To Life!
A good blog or any site for that matter should have quality content that makes the site worth visiting. I hate websites that waste my time telling me nothing but use my visit to attract advertisers. We want FamilyCow.com to be one of those treasured sites that you can’t imagine what life would have been like if you hadn’t found us and that you can’t wait to refer to a friend to. To make our site irresistible, we need to start with usable and relevant content.
Important: I believe that for most of us to be successful online, we need to focus on a niche. The more specialized the better. A niche store may not be sustainable on main street because of the lack of prospects…but on the web, niches thrive. Our niche is WordPress.
Tom and I have been working together coding things in one form or another for 20+ years. I tend to be more the visionary and Tom is an amazing tech guy. I honestly can’t think of something I’ve asked to happen on a site that he didn’t make happen. In our writing, I focus on the revenue and growth side of growing a WordPress websites and Tom focuses on the technical side of setting up the site, plugin & theme reviews, and tips & tricks.
We have WordPress installed. We have chosen a simple and sustainable WordPress theme. We are choosing the plugins for our website that will help us customize WordPress for what we need it to do. We have started adding content and we each have a focus to write about. Now we need to focus on traffic.
We are starting from zero traffic and a brand new blog. I plan to post on what we are doing promote the site and the follow what works and what doesn’t. Hopefully we will all learn something together.
Growing a WordPress Website – Our Business Idea
So what’s it take to grow a WordPress website? I guess that’s something we are going to find out together over the next couple of months.
FamilyCow.com is a domain we purchased from a friendly competitor of our first web business. Our main interest in the site was that it had already been well indexed in the engines. The site has been around since 1999. I had heard that Google looked favorably upon longevity so we thought it would be good for linking to our site an what not. When we sold our web business, we kept familycow.com…because we liked the name and felt it would be usable in the future.
After a few months of “retirement” from the web..we were brainstorming one day with our techy friend, Tom and started talking about all that we had learned over eight years of running an e commerce website and that we would love to be able to help others do what we had done. After a few weeks of tossing ideas around we decided to turn FamilyCow.com into a blog promoting WordPress hosting and related services. As we work to duplicate our success online, we share our story with others and hopefully learn a few things along the way.
See we’re the guys people come up to in social settings and say…”boy I’d love to have a website…can you help?” Officially, now we can point them to FamilyCow.com and say just sign up for the hosting for $9.95/mo and tell us what domain name you want and we’ll take care of setting it up for you along with an email address…you just add content. We’ll even include the domain costs and set-up in the $9.95/mo.
Over the years we’ve learned that the hardest part of getting and staying online is the assumption that everyone will figure out the techie stuff. The reality is after a couple of weeks of wrestling with crashed sites, screwed up themes, out dated plugins and improperly configured email…people lose interest. So we want to provide a solution where someone can start immediately with the “easily doable” stuff like adding content and bypass all the the “pull-out-your-hair” stuff.
So we have a business plan and the skills to back it up. We have a great domain name and we obviously know WordPress is the best software to build our website/blog with. Now what?