Niche Site Q and A Part II: Size Matters
Following on from last week’s post, we have a question about niche site sizes from reader Al. Here is the portion in question:
What are your thoughts of having one massive niche site that pitches many different products as opposed to making many sites for one or two products per site? The second option is all I see, but I believe the bloggers/site owners who have the most amount of content on one site tend to make the most amount money. Maybe I’d be crazy for trying, but I’d rather have one site with 1,000 reviews than 1,000 sites with one review each.
Alright.
I’ll keep this as concise as possible, because I know we’ve already discussed the problem before on this site (somewhere.)
So let’s quickly discuss the size of niche site you should be aiming for, and the other background thoughts that go into why I’m saying what I’m saying.
Size Does Matter
Firstly, let’s address micro-niche sites. These were popular a few years back but were a minor-trick of a weak search algorithm.
Essentially, you’d have a website with maybe five articles on it at maximum, and the whole thing centred around a) getting an exact match domain and b) picking terms with basically no results.
So, let’s say you were writing fitness stuff. You might find that 500 people a month were searching for “MaxiMuscle Protein Powder Reviews.”
So you’d buy Maximuscleproteinpowdereviews.com and then write five articles on your website. Because there were few competitors and the algorithms ranked exact-match domains highly, this would work.
It doesn’t work now.
Or, your chances of getting a micro-niche site to bring you any success rely on a lot of factors that are unlikely.
The algorithms are better at predicting the relevancy of a site as a whole, which means more content.
But…
Can You Write A Site About One Or Two Products?
Yes. You can do this, providing there’s enough content for you to write a number of articles, this might even be very successful.
For instance, something like a piece of software might have tons of potential content ideas to work from.
Take Microsoft Excel for instance. At its base level, it’s a simple piece of software that allows you to create spreadsheets. Yet it’s used for pretty much everything under the sun.
This is true of any product that has multiple uses. You can follow a time-honoured formula of “Master[X].com” and write about how you use the product, and make it the de-facto place for people to discuss the product online.
The more content you build, the better.
So Why Not Do Away With The Niche Site Concept And Just Have A Massive Site?
This brings me to Al’s final point. He’d rather have one massive site than a few small ones.
In general this is a good idea, providing you follow a simple concept:
Think about the audience first.
Nowadays, I try to create niche sites that I can scale up if they’re a hit. By that I mean, “Can I create a product, write more expansively and turn this into an authority project?”
The issue you have with writing everything under one roof is that you have to have a concrete vision and audience in mind, otherwise you’ll write stuff that people aren’t interested in.
For instance, this site has about eight hundred articles. Most of them involve business. So I get a very business-minded audience. Sometimes I’ll write about new stuff and a lot of people will view it. Sometimes I’ll get a total miss and the article gets ten views ever, and that’s usually because the people who read this site just aren’t interested in whatever I’ve written about.
When it comes to niche sites, you’ve also got the goal of having people click through to your affiliate links. Someone who buys, say, a computer game is probably not someone who’ll click through and buy a mitre saw, for instance.
You could write a niche site called “WoodworkAndComputerGames.com” and target the crossover audience… but it’d be better to have two sites thematically.
As a final aside, the bigger the site, the less manageable it is. This site is massive and there are multiple categories and I can thus never find anything. Some of that is my organisation skills (or lack thereof) but a lot of it is that there’s simply a lot of material and it’s hard to navigate.
Summary
Let’s quickly summarise things.
You don’t want a micro-niche site because it’s too small to gain traction. If someone loves your material and you’ve only got four articles, then they’ll read them and then there’s nothing more.
You also won’t get much traction in the search engines because there’s simply not much to index.
On the other side of the equation, you can make a site as big as you want. But you have to target a “niche” or audience and deliver relevant information to them. If you try and create a site that doesn’t cater to any one audience or interest, then you’re trying to out-compete much bigger general information sites that have thousands if not millions of pages indexed.
So you want to be somewhere in the middle and corner a specific interest, basically.
As always, I recommend picking something that is open-ended. By that, I mean:
WomensFashionLoves.com
Is much better than
WeLoveHighHeels.com
With the former, you can write about anything to do with women’s fashion. It’s a built-in audience that spends money and you can go wherever the trends or your interests take you.
With the latter, you’re writing about high heels. This makes things tougher.
Again, think of the audience and what they love, and then slip the affiliate reviews into that. Don’t think about the affiliate reviews and then try to create enough of those to fill a site.