Gamify Niche Sites Building
A lot of guys get stressed out about building niche sites. They’ll ask questions like:
- Is making money with niche sites unrealistic?
- How Many Posts Do Your Niche Sites Need?
- How Much Money Do Niche Sites Make?
- How do I do keyword research?
- How do I find a good affiliate program?
- What if nobody buys anything?
- What if nobody reads my site?
No judgement here: I’ve asked myself those questions before. It’s only natural to want to avoid risk and not waste your time and money on stuff that won’t net you a return.
However, at some point you’re going to have to take the plunge. Thinking of your niche site adventure as a bit of a game (or a set of games) will help you to mitigate the stress, anxiety and expectations that come with building a site.
This article will give you some ideas for doing that.
Building Niche Sites Isn’t Always Inspiring
If you read my latest niche site challenge update, you’ll know that I was feeling a bit unmotivated last week.
The thing that practically nobody tells you about niche sites: the more boring your site, the better it’ll probably be.
Want to create a niche site about the latest iPhone? Good luck with the competition.
Want to create a niche site about your favourite movie star? Good luck getting a buying audience.
Want to create a niche site about replacement air conditioning parts?
Of course you don’t… but if the analytics were there, you could make a ton of money on that one. (Possibly… I don’t really know.)
Successful niche sites aren’t always about the most interesting subjects. They can be boring.
Added to that, whilst you’re probably creating niche sites for money, you’re probably not going to make enough money to have you glued to your computer screen 16 hours a day from them.
All in all, this adds up to times when you’re not going to be hugely inspired to make your niche site work.
You Have To Gamify Niche Sites
Gamification is where you turn boring or difficult processes into games. People love computer games. The score count going up is addictive. The puzzle-solving aspects are addictive. The competition aspect is addictive.
Computer games are perfect examples of how to get people to spend hours doing an activity that isn’t very productive (in real world terms) and enjoy it. Hell… Pokémon Go has done more to get kids enjoying the outdoor world than countless educational programs and after-school clubs have spent years trying to do.
Ultimately, if you’re bored with niche site building or any other routine task, you have to make it a game. By that I mean you have to create little scorecards and objectives so that you can achieve them and get that little jolt of dopamine from each success.
I’ve written about this before about writing in general. Check that out here.
How To Gamify Your Niche Site Stuff
As I wrote above, gamification is basically about breaking down your productive (but uninspiring) objective into tiny (and possibly meaningless) mini-goals.
With niche sites, you have a lot of processes:
- Keyword research
- Finding suitable products
- Finding a suitable affiliate program
- Building the site
- Writing the sales letters
- Any other supporting stuff
- Gaining traffic
- Gaining sales
- Getting better products and sales
Each of these can be broken down into games.
We all hate keyword research. Unless you make it a game.
Get a keyword research tool. Put in your keywords. It’ll find thousands of results that are useless. Turn finding that one keyword or one niche into a game. If you can find that one niche that’s perfect, then give yourself a reward.
A key aspect of gamification is rewarding yourself. Buy yourself a box of cookies or something you like. Every time you do something that’ll help you towards your goal, have a cookie. (Obviously don’t do this if you’re trying to lose weight.)
The reward doesn’t have to be for anything big. It doesn’t have to be related to your project. All we’re doing with gamification is cheating our body into giving us a dopamine high when we want it to versus when we’d naturally respond.
Essentially, we’re doing the opposite of what television trains us to do.
If you’re watching Game of Thrones, then you’re going through a dopamine process. The bad guy and good guy are in a fight to the death. You feel the adrenaline, you feel the stress, and you feel a rising tension. The good guy wins, and you’re suddenly relieved from anxiety and you get a little hit of dopamine.
You feel like you’ve survived a fight to the death, all while sat on your sofa. That’s why TV is addictive.
To successfully gamify something is to create this process consciously.
The Game That Website Building Most Resembles
I wrote yesterday about a niche site I’ve been building. It was a failure. Now it’s a success. This has changed my mind completely about the niche site and niche sites in general.
One payment reinvigorated my desire to work on this site.
Niche sites, and websites in general, aren’t guaranteed income at a particular point. They’re long term assets that may or may not give you money at a specific time, but over time they’ll gain value.
Building online assets is like playing Monopoly.
Think of a Monopoly board. You spend money buying these properties. You might run out of money doing so. Yet you keep putting more and more money in, and your properties command a higher price.
Every time you invest, the chances of you making more money rise.
Sometimes, people will avoid all of your properties. You won’t make any money.
However, if you keep building, the “real” value of your property goes up. When someone lands on your property, you’ll make money. The more you’ve spent on it, the more you make. The better the property, the more you make. The weaker your competition, the more you make.
You get the picture. It directly corresponds with building niche sites:
You put time and energy into writing your articles.
Sometimes people come to your site, and you get money. Sometimes they don’t.
Over time, your site gains in value, and there are more and more chances that you’ll make money.
Over time, you build more properties.
The better the niche, the more money you’ll make.
So on and so forth.
Seed Money: Another Aspect To The Game
James commented on an article the other day. He said that he was going to use his niche site money to play around with learning other skills – like paid advertising.
If niche sites and online earning don’t put a fire in your belly themselves, then think of them as an opportunity to fund other ventures.
At times, I’ve wanted to get into a hobby. I’ve spent ages learning about how to do a certain thing. I write all of that stuff down, and create articles about it. I then use those articles to create a niche site. I then use that niche site money to fund the hobby. In this instance, your niche site is a means to an end: Money for a hobby.
Maybe you want to create an extra $500 a month to fund getting a car or a student loan payment. You could set niche sites up with that goal in mind.
In fact, you could count up all your expenses. Think of each one as a stretch goal.
Let’s say you create a niche site. It makes $5 a month when you start. Good job – you’ve achieved the first goal: It pays for its own domain and hosting.
When you get to $10 a month, then think; you might have paid for the hosting + getting a jar of coffee to last the month.
At $50 a month, you might have your phone bill paid for or your gym membership or something.
At higher levels, there are bigger expenses that you can think of.
The same is true if you’ve got an affiliate program that pays you a one-time fee. You might make $100 a sale. If that’s true, then think of every sale as a free meal out at your favourite restaurant or something.
Final Thoughts
It’s easy to give examples, but the power of gamifying things is that you can create your own rewards that’ll work for you.
For instance, I love drinking different types of tea. I could build a niche site, and the minute it makes £10 I could order a new blend of tea to try. That’s a tiny goal on the scale of things and most people won’t care, but it works for me. If I created ten niche sites that made that much money in a month, then I’d be trying a lot of new tea.
Lots of little dopamine rushes are what you want. Gamification is for little goals. Big goals require greater discipline and longer-term thinking. Gamifying a project is what you do to get you through the day-to-day aspect and the mundane objectives.