There are certain things you need for a niche site, sure you can use free hosting like wordpress, blogger and similar but you need to get started and here is what you need. Do not worry this isn’t too costly in the grand scheme of things
Domain name
There are several sites where you can buy domain names, it does not do any harm signing up multiple sites. You can watch out for special offers from these sites, quite often they will have sales and reduce their prices.
Here are some domain name sites I recommended
Namecheap : I use this site, you can bargains on some obscure tlds
iDotz : another site ith many offers
Godaddy : the huge godaddy, not everone’s cup of tea but a massive registrar, hosting site and other resources
123reg : This is a UK company where I live, I can get uk domains cheaper here
There are some tips I recommend, lets go
Try and keep the domain as short as possible.
No hyphens or numbers – I personally hate these especially hyphens. If I wanted a number I would spell it out like twodollarbooks rather than 2dollarbooks
You used to have to focus on an exact name for a niche site like paleodietrecipeforbeginners.com, now you could go for paleodiets.com or paleodietrecipes.com – if they were available.
It used to be that you would not be able to misspell a name but nowadays think fiverr and flickr and you will realise that is not exactly true
Do not tried and get hold of a brand name thinking you can make money from that, the courts will side with the big companies and businesses every time and you will lose the site.
Check out the history of the doman name, has it been registered before, did it host a dodgy site then that can destroy the niche site at the start as it will be more than likely be blacklisted.
Hosting
For your niche site you will need to purchase web hosting but it is a myth that at first you need some sort of top of the range dedicated server or managed server. You can quite easily get buy with standard shared hosting to begin with and if and when your site starts getting large traffic you can upgrade. To be honest at that stage you will be making money back as we would probably be talking around 30000 page views or more a month.
Also do not buy hosting from unreliable sources such as ebay – in my experience these will be individual people reselling. The issue is that the customer support can be terrible, they sell hosting packages but are not set up to deal with the inevitable questions that may occur. Its better to stick with established hosts.
Dont fall for unlimited everything claims – trust me you wont get unlimited webspace or bandwidth, it doesn’t exist. If your storage increases until it look slike your mega.nz or your bandwidth looks like twitters then you will quickly get a call from the hosting company. Unlimited is a sales term – the companies know that most users will not even approach high usage.
After all that there are several very good hosts out there that are recommended, here are a few to pick from
Hostgator : a huge hosting company, package start at under $3.99 per month
Glowhost : shared hosting but you can upgrade to premium servers if you need to
Wpengine : This is the premium host for wordpress sites, this is as good as it gets but a bit pricey
bluehost : another top notch host thats highly recommended
WordPress theme
Again the most common cms is wordpress, you can get buy with the free themes that are are present by default and if you trawl through the theme directory there are many respectable ones there but to stand out you should really invest in a decent theme. There are several reasons for this.
Support – usually the theme will come with support for a period of time
Testing – The theme will be tested with latest version of wordpress and various plugins.
Features – The theme will usually have extra features which are not available on free themes, these can include easily imported demo sites, page builders, complete customization and even some premium plugins to enhance the functionality
What I look for in a theme is one that can be easily customized and is able to create several different looking sites, I dont want cookie cutter type sites that all look the same.
Here are some top quality themes
studiopress : many themes here including the classic Genesis theme
Themeforest : X theme, Newspaper, Avada and many others. this site uses Newspaper
Thesis : the classic thesis theme which is used on many sites
The top selling items under wordpress themes on Themeforest is usually a good starting point for research. Once there look at all the themes, look at the features that they have and visit the demo site.
You can get a good theme for $60 or less, not a huge sum of money in the long run but its still yours. You dont want to get in the habit of buying random ones and spending a fortune.
Summary
A theme may cost $60, you can get a domain name for $12 and hosting for $50 or less. So the total outlay is about $120.
You can save money on this but this is a rough cost, I would recommend all of these for a niche site
If you plan to do several sites look at packages that will allow you to host multiple sites or reseller hosting,