If you want a great source of joy in your life, a real life, effective nootropic and a way to potentially increase your value as a human being both financially and otherwise in the future, get a new hobby.
If the benefits above aren’t enough, I don’t know what to tell you. But here’s one more: hobbies are great for building niche sites around. Why? You know that there’s enough information to write about, enough stuff to buy (unless your new hobby is meditation… and god only knows people make that difficult so they can sell stuff) and a real and earnest target market.
Also… as you learn, you’re naturally building the material for your site anyway. If you take up cricket, you’re going to spend money on equipment but you’re also going to spend hours learning about what equipment to buy, how to swing the cricket bat and why each game takes so bloody long. All of those things are potential articles for your niche site.
Now, if you want a good idea for a niche site, read on.
Are Niche Sites Difficult To Build?
In terms of the technical components, niche sites are not difficult to build. You get your hosting and your web domain, and then you upload WordPress, throw a theme on your site and away you go. With a little twisting and tweaking, you can have a simple website up and running and looking decent within a few minutes.
But that’s the easy part of building a niche website.
The real struggle with niche sites is writing the content and making sure it’s profitable. This is where everyone fails. You, me and everyone else.
Here’s what nobody will tell you about building a niche site and writing a niche site’s content; you’re actually pulling off a difficult job.
After all, people go through stages when it comes to purchasing. They’re uninterested in the product until you convince them it’s a solution. They’re searching for a solution and you give them the knowledge of the product. Sometimes they’re interested and knowledgeable and you’re pushing them to buy.
With a niche site article, you’re doing potentially all of that on a single page. That’s a tall order and it’s a great reason why niche sites are great projects for learning the dark skill of copywriting.
Now, if that sounds complicated I’m going to give you an idea for niches to explore that’ll relieve some of the burden.
DIY and Maker Niches
Here’s why you should consider getting yourself a hobby that involves building things and writing about it.
Firstly… all of the benefits I mentioned in the intro paragraph. It’s all good for your brain.
Secondly, it makes the process of writing for your niche site easier.
Here’s how.
Let’s say you get into electronics like I’m trying to do right now. (I haven’t done any research on this so I don’t know whether it’s a good niche to explore.) You know what’s amazing about this niche? You can type in everything from “How to create a simple circuit” to “How do I build a missile-firing drone to kill my next door neighbour’s cat” and you’ll get some nerdy guy on YouTube or Reddit who has done exactly what you want to do. It’s like learning programming but with physical stuff. Totally fascinating in its own right, but here’s the reason why it’s great for niche sites.
If you look up those articles, you’ll find that they all follow a simple format. (That’s good thing #1.) You can easily replicate this formula. They all involve no hard selling and you’d be hard pressed to find much selling at all. Most of these guys aren’t professional bloggers and neither are their readers. (Good point #2: always stay away from the entrepreneur niches if you can.)
Thirdly, they inadvertently load every single article with a ton of potential links to affiliate products in an easy, matter of fact way.
Result
I’ve read so many articles, bookmarked them and then gone and bought every single item on the list without checking around for prices and what not… because the above nerdy guy has already done it for me and presented me with a list of components that I’ll need to do the project.
That is what you dream of having as a niche site builder. Readers finding your content so valuable they bookmark it, share it and legitimise it… not to mention buy everything on the list without giving it a thought because you’ve basically presented it as an “ingredients list” for the project you’re working on.
Here’s a basic format:
- Title (How to build X and [BENEFIT])
- Intro: I did this project because I was a weakling and blah blah blah
- Lead In: then I spent three years building this power rack in my back garden
- Result: I now weightlift and beat up the guys who used to pick on me… all because I made this weightlifting rack in my garden
- Here are the tools you need: Power drill, Saw, Loads of wood, some weights, etc…
- Here’s how to build it
- More regaling of absurd benefits, tales of things you did wrong and general stuff
- Outro and a P.S. (If you don’t want to build your own, here’s one on Amazon… or whatever)
You can do this with any niche from baking to motorcycle repair to home automation. The formula is the same, everyone has laid the blueprint and as long as you’re creating content regularly, you’re building a niche site that’s more than a niche site.
Also, you’re making the world a better and more interesting place, and fixing your mind. What else do you want?