Unfortunately, the Webmaster’s Challenge I eluded to in this post has been canceled. However, I’m going to continue with my previous plans for building my niche site, walking you through every step of the process.

Even though there won’t be any official prize ($3,000 in cash total), the true prize will be building a profitable and self-sustaining niche website. I believe I can achieve this, and I’m going to lay everything out for you along the way.

I hope you’re excited about this as much as I am, and if you’re feeling overly zealous, you’re more than welcome to join along with me and start your own niche site. If you do, let us know by leaving a comment below.

I already have my domain name and hosting. For the Challenge, we had to sign up with a specific web hosting company, but now that the challenge isn’t happening, I decided to switch over to my regular hosting service, HostGator. Fortunately, I didn’t have a whole lot started, so it was just easier for me to start a fresh install of WordPress and import my FlexSqueeze settings once I have that installed.

Once my DNS settings change over to HostGator (should be no later than tomorrow), I’ll be able to move forward with the design and necessary pages that every website should have. More on that in a later post.

I’ll be making good use of the Nomad’s Guide to Make Money Online as I talked about in my how to find a niche market post. This guide is an excellent resource for anyone getting into niche marketing or wanting to make money online in general.

I was thinking about the best way to keep my niche site updates and “regular” posts separate from each other, or rather, make it so that you all know the difference and not get them confused.

What I came up with is creating a “Niche Site” category and adding all of my posts that have to do with the niche site to that category. Make sense? If you’re not sure which posts pertain to me building my new niche site or not, simply click on the Niche Site category, and only the posts dealing with that topic will show up. Easy enough, right? Great.

Just a heads-up, the next post dealing with the niche site will deal with choosing a domain name and setting up your web hosting account. In this post I will also reveal the niche I have chosen and the corresponding domain name I bought.

I think that’s all for now. Any questions? Leave them in the comments below…

I’m all for getting more traffic to my blog. Traffic is a good thing, especially when you’re trying to sell products online as an affiliate. You won’t make sales if you don’t bring in any traffic.

I’ve been a subscriber of Jeff Johnson’s for quite some time now, and he provides some top notch tactics on getting more traffic and sales. And believe me, I don’t use the phrase “top notch” lightly at all.

Jeff knows his stuff and tests everything he does. It also helps to have a team working for you, which of course, Jeff does. He had his team put together new software that could get more traffic to his blogs by optimizing them for search engines and utilizing various plugins.

Jeff provides a lot of awesome content on his Underground Training Lab blog, and for free. He’s really a down to earth guy that enjoys sharing what he’s learned with others. I’ve learned a lot just from his videos. If you’ve never seen any of Jeff’s videos before, you can check them out on YouTube.

Jeff decided to give away his SEO blog software for free. I’ve already downloaded my copy and plan to install it here on this blog shortly. I wanted to make all of my readers aware of this software and how it can really benefit your blog by bringing in more traffic, and hopefully more sales.

You can grab your copy of Jeff’s Free Traffic-Getting SEO blog software here. All you have to do is simply enter your email address… no name required. You’ll also get full instructions on installing the simple plugin and setting everything up.

If you don’t yet have a WordPress blog setup and want to take advantage of this software, simply sign up for a hosting account through HostGator, and I’ll help you set up your new blog and software. HostGator is my recommended web hosting company as they provide the best support, and their prices are very hard to beat.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this software is bringing in more traffic for you. Did you find it easy to install and setup? How much more traffic are you getting from it?

Once I get it up and running on here, I’ll be back with an update.