Let’s talk about transitioning a niche site into something else.
At some point, you’re going to have a project where you think, “Should I make a niche site or should I take the idea and do something more with it?”
After reading this article, you won’t have to worry about this question. I’ll show you how to pick the right niche to start with and then show you how to take that niche site and transition it into something larger.
Pick The Right Niche To Start With
The more I succeed in online business, the clearer it gets to me that if you pick the right audience, everything becomes easy.
With niche sites, the danger you face is twofold: Either you pick a tiny niche site that doesn’t support an audience, (and you make no money) or you go too broad and then you have to compete with big lifestyle brands and major publishers.
That said the key to a successful niche site is basically picking a “cult” audience.
If you do this, then the process of growing becomes smooth.
I’ll demonstrate this (because it’s pretty vague) with an example I found the other day.
Niche Sites Don’t Have To Look Like Niche Sites
Check out this site:
This site is a “lifestyle magazine” for people who like living in campervans.
OK.
It’s got the Instagram, the Twitter account and all those things that make it look like a lifestyle magazine. If you take a quick glance at it, you’ll think, “Jamie… what the hell are you talking about? This isn’t a niche site!”
Check around the site for a few minutes though. Look at some of the articles and if you have access to a keyword competitor tool, then maybe put the site name into that and see what pops up.
I’ll wait while you find out that the big money-making articles on this site are exactly what you’re writing for a niche site.
“The Best Portable Shower For A Vandweller.”
“10 Camping Tools You NEED For Your Van.”
But we don’t have to stop there.
If you check out the archives on this site, then you’ll know that I’ve often written about ancillary material for niche sites. Stuff like how-tos or writing about the latest news.
Check out the Instagram section and the “Top Vans” section on the Van Club website. That’s a prize set of examples on how to fill a niche site with relevant content quickly.
The content isn’t duplicated, but they’re just reiterating press releases, uploading images and otherwise acting like a news source.
And the Instagram is examples of other people’s van conversions.
In other words – this site is a valuable resource for people who like touring and living in campervans – but the hard work of working out the content to create has been done for them. They’re curating content for the most part, and then using that (whether deliberately or not) to the affiliate offers in the product reviews section.
Moving On
The VanClub site is set up perfectly. It’s basically a niche site that doesn’t look like a niche site, and it’s got a community built around it.
If the owners of the site wanted to take things further – say they got a ton of money from affiliate sales and wanted to create a bigger project – then they could transition pretty seamlessly.
In fact, if you look at their “How to Be A Digital Nomad” article, you can see they’re taking those steps already. They have a £4.99 book and a little merchandise store on Shopify. It has T-shirts and stickers and stuff.
(In fact, it’s almost like these guys read my site in terms of the steps they’re taking. Weird.)
There’s nothing on this site you couldn’t do if you had enough interest in a subject and were willing to put the effort into a) writing content and b) curating content and reaching out to others in the niche.
In fact, this approach might actually make the niche site more successful, because you’re building social links.
I’ll have to think on that last piece of the puzzle and test it out with a new site, actually, because it’s only just occurred to me.
Final Thoughts
Alright… not a lot of new stuff in this article, but we’ve got a good example. If you looked at that site, then you’d probably think, “I’m not looking at a niche site” yet it’s exactly what I describe.
This is obviously a step above a “BestShoePolish.com” style niche site that you’d see for sale on Flippa and that most gurus will sell you on, but it is a niche site and it will generate you revenue… and on top of that, if you’ve read the archives of my site, then you can build something like this but better and more effective, to be honest.