Building A Niche Site Part Two – Setting Up WordPress

If you want to read my first post on this topic, just go here.

This is the second post in a series in which I will document building an Amazon products review site.  In my first installment, I talked about finding the products, checking keywords and the competition for those keywords, buying a domain name, and ordering content.

While I waited for that first article for the first product review on the site, I started building my WordPress site.  Now to be honest, I’m kind of annoying when it comes to themes.  I end up spending way too much time finding one, when in the end I will likely change it at least once or twice as the site progresses.  This is a lesson to everyone out there in internet marketing:  just get it done and perfect it later! 

As much as I always say this to not only myself but other IM’ers I talk to, I still fall victim!  So anyways…I spent way too much time on deciding on a theme, but I finally did.

>>>>>>>>>> Here are the themes I liked:

• Medena – free
• Flexibility – free
• Rapid Review Theme – paid
• FlexSqueeze – paid
• WordPress Review Theme – paid

I have all of these.  They are all great themes.  You don’t even need to use any of these, but I just wanted to show you the 5 I pretty much chose from.  For this site I am using Flexsqueeze.  It is not your traditional product review theme, but you can customize so much of it and do it so easily, that I went for this one.  It’s a great theme, and can be used for just about anything.

OK once I installed FlexSqueeze I messed around with the settings a bit.  I didn’t really do too much right now.  I don’t care about getting everything perfect (as I talked about above), my main goal at this point is to get the site up and get the content dripped out to it.  By dripped out, I mean I will post an article every 3-5 days.  I won’t put them all up at once, even though I will get alot of the content from my writer at once.  When I get the site ranked on the first page of the GOOOOG and start getting traffic, then I will work more on the site and polish it up.

All of the plugin I started with are free except for ClickBump SEO.  If you are interested in seeing why I use it, I previously wrote a blog post with some videos about it.

>>>>>>>>>> Here are the plugins I installed:

• BackWPUp
• Clicky by Yoast
• Contact Form 7
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Platinum SEO Pack
• SEO Ultimate
• W3 Total Cache
• WP Minify
• ClickBump SEO

Those are all the plugins that I started with.  I am sure I will add more later, and when I do I will let you know.

After I got this stuff installed and configured the theme a bit, I uploaded the first article I ordered.  So as of right now I only have the site up with one article and that is it.  Let me review all the steps up until this point:

1.  I found a product to promote on Amazon and checked the keywords for it

2.  The main keyword for the product has alot of searches

3.  I checked competition for this keyword, and I think I can rank it top 3 of da GOOOOOG

4.  I found a suitable domain and bought it

5.  I ordered the first article on for the first product review

6.  I installed my WordPress theme and plugins

7.  I uploaded the first article I ordered

Next up:  research other products and keywords for more reviews, and order some more articles.  In the next post I will talk about the research I did to find those other products, the keywords for those products, and the competition.

OK that’s it for now.  If you have any questions or you have any themes and/or plugins you especially like I would love to hear about it!  See ya next time kiddies…