Niche Site Saturday: Week Sixteen
Howdi.
It’s been a busy week for me. Niche sites still ticking along, but not much action to report once again.
Remember; building niche sites is a marathon and not a sprint.
I’ve also not really had all that much time to answer comments on the blog. I will get to them, but I figured I’d use this space to answer the niche site related questions. There’ve been some good comments this week. Let’s get started with some quick questions from Rene.
Topics of the Day: Reader Questions and Comments
Rene asked some pretty great questions on the last niche site challenge update. You can check out the full questions at that link, but I’m just going to paraphrase here:
- How important is the name of your site, and how do you pick a good one?
- How wide should a niche be? Narrow vs. Wide
- Could you create a review site without it being niche?
Let’s delve into them a little further.
What And How To Name A Niche Site
Firstly, I wouldn’t spend too much time thinking of a name for your niche site. It doesn’t really matter all that much, because you’re not trying to build a brand or captivate a regular audience.
That said, there are some pointers I’d give a person:
- Have a niche related keyword in your title. If you’re selling bricks, you might have “thebrickreview.com” or something. It’ll help because the domain will related to the content in an obvious way.
- I’d stay away from spammy-looking domain names. “Best bricks cheap .com” isn’t as good as “brickreview.com” It’s not a big deal and won’t affect the SEO or anything, but you don’t want people to think “this is a scam” and not click it.
- On reflection, omit the reviews thing. “Brickstuff.com” would be better than both. There’s obviously a trade-off though because buying keywords will do well for SEO where a general term won’t.
How Wide Should a Niche Site Be?
Good question, and the answer is “it depends.” You could do a very narrow site. “Best skeleton watches.” Or you could do very wide. “Watch reviews.”
Which is better? It depends. Both have their pros and their cons. The key issues are going to be based around these questions:
- Is there enough material to write about?
- Are there enough products to feasibly create a site around?
- Are you going to be able to write material on a semi-regular basis or at least have enough material for your site to look like a site?
- What do the traffic numbers from your keywords look like?
Those are reasons for why you’d go wider. Narrower questions might be something like:
- Is this niche really two niches?
- Do customers in this niche buy all the products you’re interested in reviewing?
- Are the customers going to get annoyed if you hawk products that aren’t of interest to them?
- Is this site likely to spiral out of control and into authority site territory?
Ultimately, a niche site should be “as big as it takes.” It’s a bit of a common sense type thing – you’ll know whether there’s enough material for a niche site, usually.
However, if you’re completely new to niche site building, then you should probably split test this. You could create two niche sites:
“Best tech products for men.”
“Computer motherboard reviews for men.”
(Obviously not with those ridiculous examples… you get the idea.)
You’ll soon find out what works and build an intuitive sense.
Could You Write a Review Site Without It Being Niche?
Rene’s final question was whether you should scrap the niche site idea entirely and create something like awesomeproducts.com
I’ve seen a few guys do this and I think that it’s great for a couple of reasons and not-so-great for some more. Here are the plus points:
- Your site will have more content.
- You’ll get a better grip of copywriting if you’re writing product reviews and sales letters for different products in different niches.
- In the process of doing this, you might hit on gold which you can take further.
Here are some minus points:
- No cross-over sales. If you have a site that reviews pens and hiking boots, chances are you won’t get people idly browsing your site willing to buy both.
- More work – when you create a niche site on a single topic, you learn that topic inside out and provide relevant info. Every sales letter you research gives you more knowledge for the next one. This isn’t true if you write on different subjects. More work overall.
- Easier to lose track of anything resembling a point, and you might end up with untargeted, random articles.
Again, there’s no straight answer here. It’s about weighing things up. Again, you should test these things and see what happens.
Final Thoughts
Here’s the regular disclaimer: you’ll learn more about niche sites from doing than reading. Hopefully I’ve given some answers to the questions as I’m happy to do.
I’m also interested in hearing how other niche site challengers are getting on. Let me know in the comments.
This has been a different niche site challenge article to the usual updates, but hopefully it’ll help some guys. Let me know if you’ve got any other ideas for future topics.
Also, I haven’t had time to look around at other sites this week: Let me know if there’s any new niche site material that I should be linking to.
Until next week, keep building your niche sites!