Niche Blogs Tutorial 2 – Site Set Up & Content Creation

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Thank you for your great feedback on our first tutorial – Niche Blogs Tutorial 1 – Choosing the Right Keywords I am glad that you find the step-by-step tutorial is very simple to follow and implement.

Just like mastering any other skill, you need to commit to 3 to 4 hours everyday to sharpen your keyword research skill. Researching keywords can be very frustrating but it gets easier with more practice. The reward is big once you find a low competition and high CPC keyword. =)

In this second tutorial, we are going to talk about how to set up a system for setting up your sites and creating your content. Remember, you are a business owner now. In order to make more money and work less, you need to work smarter.

The only way to achieve this is to set up a system which can even run without you and your only role is to manage it.

If you are planning to churn out a minumom of 100 blogs per month, I DO NOT recommend that you do everything by yourself. Even if you are new to blogging, you should try to set up a maximum of two to three blogs to have a feel how to go about doing it. This is to facilitate your training of your Virtual Assistants – your staff who are going to hire to do your work and you just manage them while oiling your system at times.

 

First, you need to know where to find your virtual assistants. They need to be reliable, efficient and honest.

I use Odesk.com to find my virtual staff. According to Wikipedia, oDesk is a company with a global job marketplace and a series of tools targeted at businesses that intend to hire and manage remote workers.

Another great resource site is VirtualStaffFinder.com

For written content, I use iWriter.com The writers provide fast and good service. You can choose not to accept articles which do not fit your criteria.

 

Now, you are the business owner cum manager and it is important that you train your workers well. It is important to train them well too so that they follow specifically what you tell them to and they give you exactly what you want. Alot of times the whole system collapsed simply because clear instructions and proper training are not given to the workers. So it is very important to clearly communicate across what you need.

The first training should be a 1.5 hour Skype call.

Briefly tell your freelancer

– what her role is,

– what is expected is her and

– her tasks.

Then, you can go into the details, explaining the “whys” and the “hows”.

By clearly documenting every step, including screenshots, in a training document and sending it to the freelancer before the training can make the training more effective.

 

Likewise for working with your writers, clear instructions must be given. You need to tell them exactly what you want and how your articles should be written. Here is the email template which I sent to my writers. Feel free to use it and add in other points you need.

Hi [[name of writer]],

Here are the set of keywords.

Please write one article for one keyword.

keyword 1 – Primary article (800 words)
keyword 2 – Secondary article (500 words)
keyword 3 – Secondary article (500 words)
keyword 4 – Secondary article (500 words)
keyword 5 – Secondary article (500 words)

Proof read and spell check for grammar and spelling ;

5 very important pointers to note:

– Do write an engaging title
– Keep each paragraph to no more than 4 lines.
– Make sure the keyword to be used in the first sentence of first paragraph and last sentence of last paragraph of the article
– To have at least 2 to 3 sub-titles for easier reading
– Write the way as if you are talking to the reader
– Do submit any article once you have completed it

We will improve along the way.

Thanks,
John

 

Here is a great post on hiring and outsourcing niche site content.

 

You can get some ideas for your secondary keywords by scrolling down to the bottom of the Google search results. Pick a few which you like and add them as tags too.

 

Provide an online storage platform for your writers to drop their articles into. One free resource is Dropbox. Create a sharing folder for your writers and check the folder regularly. This is to ensure all your writers submit their work on time. As each site will have at least 5 articles written for it, it is important to be organised from the start.

Name sub-folders according the domain names and instruct your writers to drop all the articles meant for the domains.

Your VA who is responsible for putting up the content will have access to the articles in the Dropbox folder. So everything bypassess you and all you need to do is to manage it and make sure work is submitted on time.

 

The best system is always the one you are going to create.

Always improve your system by:
– asking for feedback (are your instructions clear? what are the feedbacks from your VA regarding your training? what difficulties do they face? what suggestions do they have to make the process better?)
– track the work of your staff (identify backlogs and patterns which may indicate potential problems. Your job is to find the cause of those problems and solve them as soon and fast as possible.)

 You can click here to download our record sheet.

You can get your VA and writers to record all the work done using Google Doc Add their gmail addresses and they will be able to access it.

You also need a record sheet for your expenses.

Make sure you have the following columns:
– MM/ YYYY
– Currency (Your country currency or USD)
– Item (what did you buy?)
– Mode (PayPal, Credit Card, Cash?)
– Paid by (Who in your team paid?)
– Total spent this month

 

Remember to pay your staff on time. If pay day has been set on the last day of the month, make sure you pay them on that day. Employees like to be paid on time and they will be happy. Employees who are happy will most likely continue to work for you.

At the beginning stage, you may be testing some of the new VAs and writers out and you can opt for payment per assignment. Once your system is oiled and is functioning better and you are very certain you like the VA/ writer’s work, negotiate with your VA and workers for a monthly payout. This helps to cut down your expenses.

Ask for their PayPal email addresses so that your expenses can be kept track in PayPal records.

 

The greatest challenge you will face is to  have your mindset completely changed – from an employee’s mindset to an entreprenuer’s mindset. There will be many times (I guarantee!) that you will want to physically do the tasks just because you feel you can do it much better than your VAs.

The other common problem you face comes from working with your staff.

There will be:
– late submission of articles / work
– poor work delivered
– not being to hit your quota

 

Mindset change – Always remember that you are setting up your system which MUST run without you. So the only way to do it is to hire other people, to use other people’s time to manage it and to use other people’s money.

You must not be afraid to spend money and invest in your business. It is when you overcome this fear, then you can move forward to think of different creative ways to scale your business and make more money.

Let’s do a recap of the other problems and we will discuss how we attempted to solve them:

– late submission of articles

Hire at least 3 writers and spread the work out. Eventually fire the one who fails to deliver on time.

– poor work delivered

Provide proper training for your staff.

For the webmaster, provide her with proper training and comprehensive training document to follow and refer to.
You will need to schedule weekly Skype meeting.

– not being to hit your quota

This may result from poor planning and lack of resources. If building 100 blogs per month is too overwhelming for you at first, start off with 10 or 20 blogs.

 

Here is a list of the resources we used
– Odesk
– Virtual Staff Finder
– iWriter
– Dropbox
– Google Doc
– PayPal

As always, we love to hear your feedback about this process. Do leave your comment in the comment box below.