Repeating is a fundamental aspect of a any business.
Sure, you can create Facebook, Twitter or Angry Birds, but for every one-hit wonder that rocks the world, there are millions of business that make money through the basic idea of repeating a process.
Think about it, McDonalds sells 1 burger, over and over again. Real estate agents get commissions for their sales, and they are already looking for the next property.
Even Facebook success relies a great deal on selling their ad space over and over again.

The same is true for online businesses. Niche sites, affiliate marketing, ebook selling, CPA advertising. You need to be able to repeat whatever it is that brings money to your pocket.

And this fact sounds so obvious, so irrefutable, that is truly amazing how often and how easy we lost focus and forget about it.

It has happen to me so many times that I have already lost track.

Let’s take niche site creation as a good example.
It easy to realize that an article that you order is badly written, but for some amazing reason is not that obvious that your writer selection process is not working.
You notice right away that there’s high competition for a selected keyword, but it’s a lot harder to find the holes in your market and keyword research strategy.

Start Asking The Right Questions

Let’s stick to the niche sites example.

If you know that you can build 1 niche site, then the next questions should be:

• Could I make 100 ?
• What to I need to build 1000 ?
• Is there a time limitation ? Or is it money that prevents you from going faster ?

Even when the idea of building 1000 sites might seem extreme to most of us, thinking about it is a good exercise to realize what is your business missing to go to the next step.

The Process Behind The Process

The model that somebody uses to create a product, service or site is surely different from someone else’s. But let’s dig a little deeper on the niche site building example.
Let’s say that these are the steps usually followed by someone building a niche site:

• General idea, finding some “seed” keywords
• Market and Keyword Research
• Domain Acquisition
• Hosting Setup
• Content Creation
• Content Upload
• Promotion

Of course there could be some extra iterations, like measuring performance, and creating new content, etc. Some people also make a thoughtful analysis to determine the proper monetization method for the site. But I think the list is a good overall guide.

Now, there is one more or less simple way for a person to perform those steps, and build 1 site.
But what will allow you, given the right conditions, to create not 1 but 1000 sites following that path ?

I think that each of the previous steps provides a great opportunity to ask yourself a lot of questions that will lead you to better define your process.

General Idea, Finding Some “Seed” Keywords

Having a brilliant idea because you saw and add on the side of a bus is great, but it hardly qualifies as a method. Always go back to the 1000 sites premise, where can you find ideas to create that many sites ? You don’t want to be on the bus stop for the next 6 months.
You could decide to sweep the categories of several online markets, get some offline catalogs, hire someone to do it for you, etc.
The important thing is that if you are going to build 1000 sites, you need a repeatable mechanism to produce seed keywords.

Market and Keyword Research

Entering one keyword in the Google Keyword Tool or in your Keyword Research Tool is a fantastic option. But if you are going to go big, you need some procedure to expand your keywords, analyze the competition, check for commercial intent of the candidate keywords, and make a final decision on whether there’s something to be said about the keyword or not (you can check our approach here).

Domain Acquisition

This might seem as a trivial item. But actually you can save a lot of money if you purchase a premium pack like the one offered by GoDaddy. You pay a fixed amount a year, and from there you get a discount in every single domain you register. You can find more about it here.

Hosting Set-up

You should really find a way to have your hosting ready in a quick and cheap way. Some providers offers what is usually called 1-click installation. It can be a good option if you are not a technical person.
If you have a VA you can have him/her do this for you.
You don’t want to have the domain, the hosting, the content, and not being able to upload it just because you are having problems with the set-up.

Content Creation

I can not put enough emphasis on this. Content creation is (along with keyword research) the part of the process where most niche site projects fail.
First of all, refrain yourself from start writing the content as soon as you have your keywords selected. Think once more about the 1000 sites premise. You are not likely to be able to generate content for a significant amount of sites.
You need to find a way to outsource this step.
Fail to accomplish this, and you will not be successful in the niche site business. I will make an entire post about how to outsource this in the next few days.
Forget about PLR articles, and don’t even think about using duplicate content. Not if you want your site to actually rank.
If you have already made the mental leap to outsource content creation, then the most important thing that you can do to improve your business is to evaluate writers all the time. Keep the good ones, fire the bad ones.
This is 30 % of the business. Don’t underestimate it.

Content Upload

It seems trivial, but it is not. You have to upload the content, that’s easy, but you also need to:

• Select images
• Name them, assign a title, and an alt text, with SEO in mind
• Adjust internal SEO
• Highlight keywords
• If you are going to provide affiliate offers, find the best way to set them up
• If you are not going to promote affiliate offers in the niche site itself, you should at least keep a record of all the products that you are mentioning or referring thru images, because you are likely to get questions about them at some point
• Select and embed videos

Promotion

How are you going to let the world (and the search engines) know that your site exists ? Which of the following strategies are you going to pursue, and how exactly will you act ?

• Article marketing
• Video marketing
• Social media
• Social bookmarking
• Comments in other sites
• RSS syndication

All of these strategies can take a lot of time if you don’t have a way to perform them at a certain scale.

Conclusion

As you can see, there’s is a lot to think about that goes way deeper than the simple task of writing an article.
This preparation for “scaling” your business is specially important in disciplines like Niches Sites Building, mainly because while 1 single site can have a pretty good return of investment in relative terms, you are probably not getting more than a few dollars each month. So if you want to earn a respectable amount of money, you need to build a lot of sites.
Save yourself a lot of time and do some “business planning” ahead. You will thank yourself that you did.

We will be publishing a guide about several key points of the process.
Feel free to sign up to our list to be notified as soon as we have news on the subject.
Stay tuned and let me know what you think.