One of the hardest parts of starting a niche website is to find something to start a niche website about. It’s easy to think of general topics such as insurance or travel but these are not niche topics and you have to drill a lot deeper to find a specific product or service to promote successfully. There are lots of ways to get the creative juices flowing and I encourage anyone to use as many methods as possible when trying to come up with ideas for a niche website. Some people get ideas just from watching TV or reading magazines, some gets their ideas from trying to find a solution to a problem they have and can’t find one. Ideas can come to you in all sorts of ways but the five methods below are the ways I have used so far to find ideas to start a niche website....

Buying your first domain name can be a little daunting. Not only are you taking the first big step in actually doing this – creating a website for yourself – is seems so technical at first and what do all those terms mean. DNS. Nameservers. cPanel. FTP. Once you get your head around the lingo, it’s actually a fairly simple system to master. I buy a mixture of .com and .com.au domains and there are a couple of difference between buying the two. Australia has a couple of conditions that you have to adhere by that you don’t have to when buying .com domains. In Australia, to purchase a .com.au (or .net.au) domain name you need to have an ABN. This doesn’t mean to need to have a business or be trading as a business. You can easily go get yourself an ABN at the Australian Business Register website. By doing...

A little background… I was first exposed to affiliate marketing back in 2006 while working for a major newspaper within their “digital” department. Our department looked after their website, which was brand new at the time. While still trying to book advertisers, they filled their ad spots with affiliate ads. I thought I had found my golden ticket. All I had to do was set up a couple of websites, pop on some of these ads and away I go to make my millions. Boy was I wrong. Firstly, I was wrong for thinking I could get the kind of traffic that site was getting. Secondly, I realise now, that I knew nothing back then and my idea that all I had to do was build a site and people would just miraculously find it, was wrong. So, I did a little research – mainly of what affiliate products I...

In my first couple of posts to this blog, I talked about how I was planning on eventually leaving my day job to be self employed full time, only to be made redundant. It was sort of a surprise and I just wasn’t ready for it. I say it was ‘sort of’ a surprise because the business wasn’t doing well and the work was running out but I definitely thought there would be others to be made redundant before I was. I had just returned from 5 weeks travelling around the U.S. so my plans were to continue working there for at least 6 months and save some money up. During this time I was also going to get some work freelancing in web and graphic design to keep some money coming in while I build up my “passive income”. Redundancy two weeks after returning from holiday with no money...