The Niche Website Challenge Is On

Today is the first day of February.  Not only does this mean it’s the day before one of my favorite holidays of the year (Groundhog’s Day, seriously, will Phil see his shadow?), but it also means it’s the start of the Niche Website Challenge, and that gets me excited.

What is the Niche Website Challenge you ask?  Well let me explain.

The majority of the marketing I do involves buying traffic and I haven’t focused a whole lot on the SEO side of affiliate marketing.  At Affiliate Summit West in January, Chris Guthrie and I were sitting around late one night and bounced around the idea of competing at building niche sites from the ground up.

We figured we could make it a competition so the two of us would quit being lazy, learn SEO in the process, and get motivated.

A few days later we figured we’d ask a few other Washington state affiliates, Joe Sousa and James Seligman and make the competition a little more fierce.

So starting today, February 1st we will be begin the competition.

The winner will be the first to generate $1000 in commissions in 1 calendar month (yeah, not a whole lot of money, but this will come from 100% organic traffic which makes it a little tougher for an SEO hack like me).

Here are the rules we set out:

1. We have to build a minimum of 10 niche sites. It can be more, but we have to earn commissions from at least 10 sites.  This keeps the playing field level so we don’t just build 1 site and win off getting lucky.
2. Can’t leverage on our current sites. This means no links from sites, Tweets from current Twitter accounts, etc. We want to be able to build these sites from complete scratch.
3. No paid traffic. All traffic will come organically and we can’t spend any money on traffic (otherwise this would be over in a day).
4. First person to hit $1000 commission in a calendar month wins.
5. Sites couldn’t be worked on before February 1st. Domains could have been registered from the time we decided on the contest about 2 weeks ago, but we also can’t buy aged domains.

The main reason for me doing this was to keep myself motivated and my brain sharp. I’ve built quite a few niche sites in the past, but didn’t focus a whole lot on SEO, so this should be a fun skill to start mastering.

The Washington boys and I will be posting regularly with updates on our process on each of our blogs, as well as on a new site that is being created which we will launch this week.

If you are an affiliate manager, OPM, or merchant and have a niche site idea that you’d like to see someone build, hit me up.  I have a lot of sites to build so let me know your ideas.

Oh, by the way, what does the winner get? Well, the winner gets the satisfaction of winning and the gloating that comes with it.  The losers have to wear a shirt at Affiliate Summit East in New York with the words “I got owned by” and a picture of the winner.

Well, I got work to do and sites to launch.  Good luck to the other 3 guys (they will need it).