Niche Sites As A Weapon
Let’s talk about something a bit beyond the scope of what we’d normally use niche sites for.
Outside of the Niche Site Challenge, which has a specific set of rules, there are a ton of things you can do with niche sites.
I’ll go into how to do these things in a different place and time, but you don’t have to limit yourself to just writing affiliate articles with your niche sites.
A niche site is just a small, single-interest site where you don’t treat it like a more time-intensive, brand-intensive authority project.
Now, if you’re a beginner, this probably isn’t the topic for you.
Learn how to build a site, learn how to write some affiliate articles and worry about the new and shiny objects once you’ve got some success. You’ll thank me.
Always Look For Easy Monetisation Methods
I think about niche sites as a tool in the arsenal. If you can rank a new site for keywords, get traffic to it and even see monetary compensation for doing so, then that’s a valuable skill.
It can be worth a few hundred a month, like most niche sites are.
But it can also be a part of a wider strategy that you use in internet marketing pursuits and other business opportunities.
After the Niche Site Challenge ended, I started expanding the rules I’d set myself. Firstly, I started compiling the more informative articles I’d written for my niche sites and put them into little ebooks.
I’d sell them for $5 to $10 depending on how long they were.
Then I put a link in the sidebar and at the end of posts.
This doesn’t light the world on fire for your income, but let’s say – and this matches my experience broadly – that you get 500 visitors a month to your niche site. You have 1% of people grab your book per month.
That’s five sales, or an extra $25-$50 a month.
This isn’t bad for material you’ve already written, and for me at least, it’s made a couple of sites that were duds (the affiliate stuff just wasn’t getting sales) into relative winners. (As in, I won’t take them down.)
Even if a niche website sells a book and sells a single copy a month (which even books just stuck on Amazon with no brand or anything can sell that) you’re still looking at $60-$120 a year.
Easily worth the cost of the domain and you don’t need to even add anything else to the site.
Anyway, so that’s my experience.
But let’s push it further.
How To Use Your Niche Sites As A Weapon
Weapon is a little dramatic of a word, maybe, but who cares?
Let’s say you’re trying to push traffic to anything online. Niche sites will send traffic to whatever you want them to just as easy as they will to an affiliate program.
For instance, let’s talk about the obvious one.
Let’s say you run an authority site. You could be a muppet like I am and create niche sites with no relevance to your main project whatsoever.
Or, you could be smart and create a subject-specific niche site that’s relevant to your main business offering. Other people do this and do it to great effect.
In fact, for a good example let me use friend of the blog Kyle Trouble.
Kyle runs a website or two now about dating for expats. His main site is ThisIsTrouble.com and his main offer at the moment seems to be a premium podcast subscription.
But Kyle also runs a couple of niche websites. Sites like Ukraine Living and Eastern European Travel are niche sites because they work on affiliate income and also cover a narrower subject more deeply.
Note how they link to his main site and offerings. Someone interested in dating Ukrainians as an expat is probably going to be interested in the podcast and dating in other areas.
So it adds up.
Essentially, Kyle has created a natural private blog network without being a scammer.
E-Commerce
Let’s talk about e-commerce.
I’m trying out niche sites to help with e-commerce sales. Results aren’t in yet but I expect they’ll be good.
I saw this a few months back when I was searching Flippa auctions for good ideas.
Some guy was selling a niche site. The site linked to his ecommerce store.
This is absolutely mind-blowingly genius for reasons that are too good to mention on the public blog, but the basic idea I’m getting across is this:
You can use niche sites to drive free traffic to your ecommerce store.
Other Stuff
I’ve written before about building a credible online profile.
Niche sites are an easy and effective way to do this. Worried about people Googling your name? You can put your author tag on a few websites and control the SERPs.
Want to be recognised in your local area? You could create a local news niche site, and put whatever you wanted about you saving puppies and stuff.
Want to get advertising payments for a very specific area? You can do this and sell the space – this is a lot better than using Adsense, where you’re competing with the whole world.
Anyway, I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.
Remember, the key skills you’re building have many uses. So do the properties you build, potentially.