Let’s talk about paying for your own apprenticeship in whatever subject you want to learn using niche sites.
To be honest, I’m thinking of making niche sites a less regular topic on the site from now on. The reason for that is that the well is running a little dry.
Here is my current approach to building niche sites, what I use them for and where to take them as part of your overall business strategy online.
Niche Sites For Learning
Whatever you decide you are interested in, there will be a learning period before your skill is either usable, or if you’re doing it for money, profitable.
So you might want to learn how to be a blacksmith. You might see an incredible video online of some guy making iron work staircases or something.
The last thing you should be doing at that point is putting your staircase out in anticipation of you getting forward and being able to create your own staircase.
But at this point you are enthusiastic and you might as well make something useful as you’re going along.
With making money online, people tend to want to skip straight from the newbie enthusiasm to making a ton of money. This isn’t realistic.
You can’t just read a book about SEO and then start charging people thousands of pounds a month. But that’s while people try to do because they want to make money from their learning.
That’s where niche sites come in.
Niche Sites For Learning
Whenever I get interested in a new subject or hobby, I tend to throw myself in at the deep end.
I will read books on the subject, I will buy products, I will sit and binge watch YouTube tutorials until I know what I’m doing as far as building a syllabus for my learning is concerned.
Then I learn the basics. And then I start with personal experiments that form the basis of both my actual learning and are probably the reason I’m learning in the first place.
In doing this process, I create a ton of material, naturally review the products I use, want to use, and don’t want to use. I also have a ton of questions and I have to answer them.
This is the part of the equation that a lot of people want to skip. They want a montage when it comes to learning a new skill, where they fast-forward the hard bit and skip to being a subject matter expert.
They obviously don’t build niche sites like I do.
Understand that the approach I just outlined is the perfect approach to take if you want to create a good niche site.
You answer newbie questions. You reveal the best products. To make it stand out amongst all the fake review sites in the world, you also run your own experiments and post about the results. This is all there is to it outside of the more technical SEO stuff and general website building housekeeping.
Crafting The Offer
The more times you go through this process, the more you firstly learn about your audience, but secondly the more you learn about yourself.
Be under no illusion; if you follow the above approach for creating a niche site, then it by the end of say 50 articles, you will understand your target market. You know what they want, and you will know what is lacking in the market.
That’s when it’s time to craft an offer. This can be as simple as an e-book or as complicated as providing high-level freelance services and consultations to your readers.
But you also learned a lot more write itself. Despite what people might have you believe, if you choose this low intensity approach to making money online, you will be able to pick and choose your projects to an extent.
So the humble niche site becomes an exercise in picking what you want to do what you want to offer the world.
There are hundreds of different hobbies and subjects you can immerse yourself in. If you follow the above approach, most of them can be profitable in some way.
You have to decide who it is you want to help and what it is you want to do.
And then you’ll probably want to take the approach of making your niche sites part of your wider strategy.
Niche Sites As Assets, Lead Gen And Traffic Sources
I know that everyone in the niche site series, I talked about how niche sites should be a way to create money. I still believe that there are a great way to make passive income on the side and also to sharpen your online soft selling copywriting skills.
But they can also be a lot more.
There’s a false dichotomy when it comes to a lot of online business.
People think that you can either make money or do something else.
Whether that is make money versus generate leads, or make money versus give people good information, both of those things are false dichotomies.
You can make money whilst giving people information. Just because you have to pay for information, doesn’t mean the person is trying to scam you and should be giving everything they know away for free. That isn’t how the world works.
Similarly, you can create a website that provides you with traffic to your major offers and also makes you money.
Too often people think that lead generation websites and blog networks must lose money. That is not true.
I recommend you build niche sites first and foremost make money, but also to serve to send traffic to your authority sites, service sites or other business interests.
In this way, you turn a niche site which is a reasonably high effort to low reward asset (in terms of the effort you put in-you have to write a lot and spend a lot of time going a niche site working,) into something that makes a return on investment, but also compounding return because it feeds into your wider business strategy.
This requires a slightly more complex approach than simply creating website and throwing up a few reviews, but in the long term that is what you want to move towards.
So that’s where I am at with niche sites. Over time, recommend you do the same.
That said, if you are a newbie reading this and you are new to niche websites, then start with the niche site challenge articles and go from there.