My Coffee Niche Site – I’ll Show You EXACTLY How I Made My WordPress Niche Site – Part 1

How To Use WordPress To Create A Niche Site

I’m going to share how I created my WordPress-based niche site for my chosen niche – a coffee pot related site, for starters, I’ll show you how to set up the back end to get your domain, hosting, and monetization accounts going.

Pre-Requisites For Creating a Self-Hosted, WordPress-Based Niche Site:

• Domain Name
• Hosting Account
• Database & WordPress Installation
• Amazon Affiliate Account
• Google Adsense Account

My ‘skills’ in terms of creating websites are limited, but I’m not totally foreign to HTML, particularly WordPress – though I’m no expert nor advance user in any of these tools and platform. Much of the tasks can be completed as long as you carefully follow each application/websites’ instructions, but customization and graphics may require additional skills that you may require outside assistance.

Also, I’m making the assumption that you want to have your own custom domain name for your niche site, as well as having the website hosted on a paid webhost (not on a free site like Blogger.com, WordPress.com, Squidoo.com, etc.).

Domain Name

As I’ve mention in my Coffee Niche Site! post, my prefer to purchase my domain names at Namecheap.com (affiliate link) for their excellent service and reasonable domain prices.

I simply checked if my preferred domain name is available in the .com format, then I proceeded to pay for the domain using their secure ordering page.

Hosting Account

Next, you’ll need a web host to put all your website files in, as well as giving your domain name a ‘home’ to stay in.

I’m currently using Hostgator.com (affiliate link) for all my websites because they’re reasonably priced, allows me to host multiple domains in one hosting account, offers me unlimited bandwidth and storage, and most important of all, excellent live customer service that has yet to disappoint me since I signed up with them 3 years ago.

After going through a standard check-out procedure, I can now access the site’s control panel, also known as cPanel. Here you can do everything from setting up your emails, transferring files, backing up files, assign domain names, creating your database, etc.

We have three important things to do right now:

• Tell our new domain name where to link so it can access our website.
• Setup a database for our WordPress Site
• Setup and Install our WordPress Site

Step One: Redirecting the Domain DNS Settings

First, the domain. This step is pretty straight-forward. You just go to your domain name registrar, in my case, Namecheap.com to complete all the steps below:

In our case, since Hostgator hosts our website, we’ll need to change the DNS entries to nsxxxx.hostgator.COM and nsxxxx.hostgator.COM the two ‘xxxx’ are often sequential numbers.

It may take up to an hour or so for the DNS entries to populate, so be patient.

Installing Database and WordPress

Installing WordPress on Bluehost is a snap. Literally takes less than 5 minutes to complete, so just watch this video.

Easy, right?

You can now log into WordPress and start creating your website!

Google Adsense Account

If we want to monetize our site using Google Adsense, we must first setup an account to do so. If you already have a standard Google account from your Gmail, for example, you can use the same log in credentials to create an Adsense account. Just fill up your particulars such as address, payment info, etc.

Once you have an account, follow these steps to create an Ad Unit

Copy the generated code (never modify the code!) and simply insert it where you want your ads to appear when you create your posts. Make sure you’re pasting the Adsense code in the HTML tab of your WordPress post box.

The ad should appear in about 5-10 minutes.

Amazon Associates Account

If you want to monetize your site by being an Amazon Associates (affiliate), you’ll need an account from Amazon Associates.

What this affiliate program gives you is a commission for every sale that your site generated.

The purchase does NOT have to be an exact item you listed or advertised on your website, you will receive commission on ANY ITEM BOUGHT AND SHIPPED from Amazon as long as the buyer entered Amazon through your site.

Amazon actually keeps a cookie in your visitor’s browser for 24-hours. That means, any purchases made in Amazon within 24-hours of your referral will count as a sale to your credit as a referrer.

Granted, 24-hours is a short time compared to most other affiliate programs (most have a 15-30 day cookie), but Amazon has a much larger product base than niche affiliates. You have to determine if it’s an appropriate program for your niche site.

Watch these videos for more info about creating an Amazon Associate account and putting it in your WordPress blog post:

That’s basically all you need to get started. The last two monetizing tips are purely optional depending on your business strategy. I used both Adsense and Amazon Associate for my coffee pot site right now and I’ll monitor which can make me more money and adjust accordingly.

In the next article, I’ll show you how I created my WordPress site as well as some basic SEO, Adsense, and Amazon strategies in How I Made My WordPress Niche Site – Part 2.