How I Built a Fragrance Website With Hundreds of Posts
If you want to turn a hobby into a website, a working example helps. I run Fragranceswithlove.com, a site about fragrance, candles and skincare with more than 250 published posts. This article uses that site to show how a hobby becomes a website, and it is written for someone with little web experience. The short version is in my earlier post, How I Created Fragrances with Love.
Why a Hobby Makes a Good Website Topic
A website with hundreds of posts needs hundreds of topics. A hobby supplies them. You already know the vocabulary, you know the questions beginners ask, and you keep running into new things to cover.
Enthusiasm also shows in the writing. A reader can tell whether the person behind a post cares about the subject or is filling space, and a hobby you enjoy makes the first kind much easier to write.
Choosing a Niche, and What To Leave Out
Fragranceswithlove.com covers three topics: fragrance, candles and skincare. They sit next to each other, so a reader who arrives for a perfume post can move on to a candle post. A niche works best when its parts share a reader.
Two checks will tell you whether your topic is the right size:
- Wide enough: you can list 30 post titles in one sitting without repeating yourself.
- Narrow enough: a stranger can say what the site is about after reading the homepage.
Leave out anything you would not want to write about for a year. A topic that interests you for a month will not carry a site.
Where I Began: Building the Site On Wealthy Affiliate
Fragranceswithlove.com is built on the Wealthy Affiliate platform. You can set up a website there without knowing how to code, so the technical side won’t stop you before you have written anything.
Read my article Wealthy Affiliate Review to see how the platform works and whether it’s a fit for you.
Your First Ten Posts
Your first ten posts set the pattern for the rest, so give them a clear job. Each one should answer a single question a real person might type into a search box. Use that question, or a close version of it, as the title.
A few habits help from the start:
- Write about what you already know well before researching unfamiliar corners of the topic.
- Cover one question per post. If a draft starts answering three, split it.
- Publish before it feels perfect. A published post can be edited later, and a draft cannot be read by anyone.
Once you have ten posts, read them in order. You will see which ones are thin and which ones belong together, and that tells you what to write next.
Read my first post: Life without Perfume
How To Keep Publishing Without Burning Out
A site with 250+ posts exists because I have added posts one at a time over a long period. Volume comes from a schedule you can keep, not from bursts of effort. We all need to fit building a website into our current work schedules. Wealthy Affiliate makes this possible.
Pick several posts per week that you can sustain even in a busy week, and keep to it. Keep a running list of post ideas so you never sit down to write without a topic. When an idea comes up while you are using or reading about your hobby, add it to the list at once. Writing several posts in one session, on the same area, is often faster than switching topics each time, because the research carries over.
What a Site With Hundreds of Posts Gives You
A larger site behaves differently from a small one. Older posts can link to newer ones, and related posts can point to each other, which keeps readers moving through the site. Topics also group naturally: several posts on candles make the site more useful to someone interested in candles than any one post could.
You cannot plan all of this at the start, and you do not need to. You need a topic with enough depth that you keep finding new questions to answer.
If You Are Starting From Zero: Your First Week, In Order
- Day 1: Choose your topic and write 30 possible post titles. If you run out at ten, narrow or widen the topic.
- Day 2: Create your site. Start on Wealthy Affiliate through my referral link and set up the basics.
- Day 3: Write and publish your first post, answering one specific question.
- Days 4 and 5: Write and publish two more, picked from your list of titles.
- Day 6: Read all three from a visitor’s perspective. Fix unclear sentences and cut anything repeated.
- Day 7: Choose the next 20 titles from your list and decide how many posts you will publish each week.
Pick the one topic you would happily write about for a year, then build your own site on Wealthy Affiliate the way I built Fragranceswithlove.com, using my referral link.
