Deranged Penguin

Gracious, this took a while! I apologize for the distance between the posts. I wanted to be sure that I had something to actually show you, and to give you a sense of what it would look like as you populate your blog with affiliate clusters and whatnot. It’s important once you have a general notion of where you’re headed to just push the blog into existence. Go quickly and don’t ruminate overmuch on the grand plan – the less time you spend perfecting the idea, the more time you’ll be actually generating content and finding meaningful and relevant affiliate relationships.

So, without further ado, I give you Two Martini Dad.

You’ll notice that I’ve started to make steps to establish some advice pillars – fashion and domestic duties. These pages are static, and I need to review them for keyword density to ensure that they’re doing the job (but that’s step 4). I’m also going to add one for toys, and potentially one more for widowed/divorced dads. I’m going to work hard to make sure that that last one (if I do it) is hyper-respectful of the subject matter. That is an area where crap advice is really, really lame, and potentially harmful. There’s also the potential for a “Cool Dad” area, with little science experiments, music reviews, whatever else doesn’t quite fit but generally falls into the Gen-X “parenting need not be lame” motif.

I’ve also started to establish the categories – right now the default is “fatherhood,” but we’re also going to see recipes, co-parenting, expectant fathers, strong daughters and such. My rule for categories is really boring – if I can’t brainstorm five blog posts for a potential category, it’s probably a tag. So you may be wondering why I’ve listed Tattoos as a category already! First off, tattoos are awesome. Kids freaking love temporary tattoos. Second, this gives me a way to talk about the whole range of body modifications that our children will ask permission to do. I don’t know about you, this is actually the stuff that’s hard for me. So I want a venue to talk about the “harmless” version and then explore the nature of permanence for the “can I get a tattoo?” conversations that (I’m pretty sure) I’m going to be having in about nine years.

So for your niche concept, here are the tidbits to take away:

1) Prototype quickly with as little fuss as possible. Find a good theme and lean on it to do the heavy lifting for you (Arclite, the Two Martini Dad theme, does all that fancy drop-down stuff without any effort on my part)
2) “Go Live” even if it’s incomplete. People will understand.
3) Cluster affiliate links into like categories and start writing keyword-rich static content for each niche cluster.
4) Don’t forget to blog! This is an interest of yours, or something you’re passionate about. Get in there and write.

Sorry this one’s so short, but I felt we should catch up to where we are and forestall some of the heavy lifting. You should consider this article about all those annoying WordPress settings that you always have to toggle to maximize your blog as a cheap and dirty “Step 3.5″. Then we’ll move on to testing and revising in Step 4.