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Making Niche Sites, is it Still Worth the Effort?

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Affiliate marketing and SEO is an arms race more or less. Of course, Google obviously has no problem with people making money online or through marketing. It’s just that once people figured out that there was big money in getting your site ranked for lucrative search terms, people started looking for ways to get their sites placed highly with minimal investment of effort or a very high return on investment (ROI).

Traditionally, Google tried to keep a hands off approach to search results, opting to let the algorithm do all the heavy lifting and filtering out or penalizing spam sites. With a multi-billion dollar advertising business at stake, naturally you get an arms race. In recent years Google has stepped up its efforts for more frequent indexing and smarter algorithms along with human oversight.

One recent example was the EMD update. This change hit so-called mini-sites that target really specific niches really hard. A lot of people were targeting low traffic words by creating a mini site with 5-20 pages of unique target that would bring in anywhere from several to several hundred dollars a month. Even with little traffic and little revenue, the process could be repeated and scaled for substantial income.

Unfortunately, the EMD update raised the bar, making it hard for really content poor sites or sites that used bad SEO strategies to make any money. In fact, there was a lot of noise about many people suddenly losing traffic to these mini-sites to the point that many either pulled out of the field altogether or scaled back their efforts. Of course, there are still people making niche sites and profiting nicely. In short, there’s only one way to find out.

Common Strategies for Making Money Online: Blogging

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There are lots of strategies for making money online. The barriers of entry to make money online is lower than ever but there’s always some competition. Obviously, the big money comes with the ability to scale or innovate but the ability to specialize and find a unique niche is always good too. Here’s a list of making money online (using a broad definition of that word as you’ll see).

 

Blogging

This is probably the most easiest way to enter. You just go to WordPress, register a blog and start typing away. If you have the expertise or drive to get your own domain you can be up and running in less than an hour too. Many blogging platforms have come and gone but WordPress is definitely here to stay. They’ve out done the competition while staying open-source and free. However, it’s backed by a profitable company with solid venture capital backing, Automattic, so you can be sure that they are here to stay. What’s more WordPress is such a monster content management system (CMS) that it’s been mangled to fit every use case possible. It’s also written in php, one of the most popular programming languages for websites (Facebook runs on php for example, even though they’re doing some strange things with it to scale now). No matter what hosting company you choose, you can almost guarantee that they support php, otherwise they’re not worth even considering. It’s a great language to be familiar with before you graduate to other stuff as well.

Even with a billion blogs out there, blogs are still the best gateway drug for doing anything online. Platforms like WordPress are highly optimized for SEO. It will give you an insight into what kind of content sells or brings in traffic. You will learn how to run a website, if you choose self-hosting, at the most basic level (it’s not scary at all, most hosting companies make it easy as clicking install on the control panel they provide, just make sure they give you shell access so you can peek under the hood).

Many large online media empires started off as blogs. TechCrunch, Huffington Post and Mashable just to name a few. In fact Mashable was started by Peter Cashmore, in his bedroom in Aberdeen, Scotland when he was 19 long after TechCrunch became the market leader in tech news. Now Mashable is a multimillion dollar enterprise that is completely bootstrapped. That’s the power of blogging, you can run a world class blog with millions of pageviews for handful of dollars. There are just as many minor success stories of people becoming financially independent. You just need to find a topic you are passionate about and can provide value over others. The best way is to find your niche.

Because the barrier of entry is low and costs minimal, even if you decide to make money in other ways, blogging is a must. You can even document how you plan to make money, what you’re doing to make money, or what information you’re consuming to make money.

The beauty of blogging is that it can be both a private outlet but visible to the public. You get to organize the information floating around in your head while giving yourself an incentive to stay accountable to what you say, even if it is to yourself.

Also, having a blog gives you additional opportunities to network and reach out to others online, especially people you’d like to learn from. Even if you remain anonymous, when you have a body of writing and a domain or URL associated with you, people will be less reluctant to communicate with you if they can get a feel for who you are.

In short, there’s nothing to lose from blogging. It can also lead to opportunities to branch out into other sources of revenue. Take a look at Nerd Fitness for example. This blog started off as one engineer’s record of how he got fit. Soon he was helping others like him and building a community of others like him, “so-called nerds who wanted to get fit”. The act of blogging held him accountable to his own goals, enabled him to quit his day job and pursue fitness full-time while traveling the world. Now he sells ebooks by him and others and even merchandise.

Another quick example is how a British lady named Poppey Dinsey made a blog posting pics of what she wore that day that became so popular, she turned it into a proper startup. The thing is you never know until you try.

 

In the future I’ll be covering these topics in no particular order (I’ll turn them into links as they go):

 

  • Videos
  • Forums 
  • Affiliate Marketing
  • Smartphone Apps
  • Website
  • Web Service
  • E-commerce
  • Business with Online Component
  • Digital publishing
  • Digital music

Nothing’s Changed But My Change: The ShoeMoney Story

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If you’ve tried to make money online, you’ve probably heard of Jeremy Shoemaker aka Shoemoney. If you’ve been on the internet long enough you’ve probably seen the famous Google AdSense check picture. I’ve been reading his blog for some time now in fits and bursts. It’s full of great content and written by someone with actual experience making money.

If you want some practical advice you should definitely check out the blog and some of the Shoemoney products like the Shoemoney System. Shoemoney’s book, Nothing’s Changed But My Change: The ShoeMoney Story is more about the journey. He basically went from overweight and unemployed to rich, skinny, and in love. I’m sure we can all appreciate the underdog, in this case a fat kid who got ridiculed and never made it through college. But then again, this one’s a bit different.

Jeremy was always:

  • hustling (looking for angles and pushing the grey area if there was money)
  • fighting back
  • quick to take action (if he sees a shot, he’ll take it)
  • good at figuring stuff out
  • had some kind of ADHD and tunnel vision like focus
  • good with technical stuff (he used to install car stereos professionally)
So you won’t get a 10 point plan on how to turn your blog into a million dollar enterprise but you’ll see how one successful internet marketer evolved as an entrepreneur and person. You might get turned off by the language and all the random tangents that are thrown in (they serve a purpose) but if you can peel back the surface, you’ll get a good read.
 
You don’t read about people like Shoemoney too much in the mainstream press, they don’t get the adulation of people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, but these are the people overcame odds to find financial success in their own niche.
 
I’m not going to spoil the book for you but it’s definitely worth the read.  I especially liked how Jeremy redefined his relationship with God to hold himself accountable for everything. Sometimes we don’t realize how our belief systems or upbringing may hold us back.
 

The Beginning

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Blogging seems like a dying art. People just can’t be bothered to write a blog any more. Our attention spans are getting shorter. Even posting to Twitter feels like a chore.

In this blog I plan to explore the idea of startups. The final goal is to run a good startup of my own and gain financial independence.  I also plan to share all the administrative details within this site as well. It’s more of a record for myself as well as a brain dump to keep me honest and working toward my goal.