How Many Posts Does a Niche Site Need?

How Many Posts Does a Niche Site Need?

A quick update on my niche sites so that you know what I’m talking about: It’s my plan to launch 28 niche sites this year. I have launched four. I have eleven months to launch the other 24. Obviously, this is a ludicrous plan but I’m going to do it anyway.

Some people probably wonder when they can “finish” a niche site. The answer, in my opinion, is never. There’ll always be something new to write about and there’ll always be new products for you to write about.

On the other hand, most niche sites have a ceiling in terms of effort to reward. You’re not going to write daily posts for a site that’ll only ever make you ten dollars a month.

How many posts does a niche site need then? Is it ten, twenty, fifty or five hundred? Is there a better way to think about how many articles should go on a niche site? Let’s find out.

How Many Posts Does A Niche Website Need?

At the moment, I’m not really browsing the internet because I’ve got other stuff to do. But a few days ago, I was reading a site where the writer lived off a handful of niche sites. He said that you needed around ten posts and you should only review one product for it to be a niche site.

My first reaction was “That’s a tiny site.” It is. When I talk about a niche site, I am not talking about a ten article website with a single product review.

However, that’s when the question, “How many posts does a niche site need?” first entered my mind.

I like to run through different scenarios in my head and then test them out to see if they work. This guy’s idea, a ten page niche website with a single product and a handful of posts is something I could do in a day… and maybe my next niche site will follow this structure for comparison purposes.

Here’s a look at the structure in a crude drawing:

Structuring A Niche Site As Opposed To A Set Amount Of Posts

The above drawing is crude, but the budding strategists will be able to use it. Here are a few of my thoughts:

• You can scale that. Sure, you’ve got 9 posts total on the graph… and in the above guy’s example, that’s all a niche site was. But this system would work with 90 posts instead.
• One product review to 8 non-product articles is
• With the above in mind, that’s a lot of work for one sale. Whereas 9 product reviews gives a potential nine different product sales.
• If you limited your site to that size… it’s not going to get any love from the world.

With those things in mind, I don’t think that this is a great structure for a niche website, but it’s something to work with.

In fact, it’s actually a pretty good place to start. If you’re feeling overwhelmed at the idea of creating your first niche site, then you could use a structure like this. Ten posts in total means that you’re really not worrying about your niche site as a long term project.

One article review and nine other posts (or eight in my terrible drawing) targeting a single keyword is something you could write in a weekend. Then you can see whether or not you get any visitors or whether you’re bored stiff of writing about the topic.

Here’s a better crude system though for getting you started:

There we have three product reviews, with three how-to’s pointing to each one. You could do more or less of each… and you should probably experiment with the ratio for each new site you create.

The ratio of how-to to product review is a better thing to question than trying to work out how many posts does a niche site need because then you can scale.

Jamie, you haven’t answered the How Many Posts question though?

In theory, if you could build a niche site with a single article that was perfect, then that’s all it would take. After all, we want our readers to read one article, click and buy so we get the commission, and it only takes one article to do that.

In reality, you need to build more pages solely because a ten page site won’t have any visibility and won’t get any through traffic. This means no social shares, no people who are looking for info but could be tempted, no search engine love.

To get those things, you need more content. That’s why you write the how-to’s and point them to your sales pages. The how-to articles will get shared more than product reviews.

But I don’t want to constantly write a million articles for a niche site?

This brings me back to the introductory paragraph. You don’t want to have to produce constant content. How do you reconcile not wanting to write more content with having a successful niche site?

Here’s how:

• Use a structure like I’ve suggested above. It’ll mean you can add to your site in a time-easy manner whenever a new product comes out or a new idea crosses your mind.
• Use social sharing. If you have thirty posts or so, you can link to one a day from various social media profiles and you’ll get traffic. It looks like you’re posting regularly because you’re building a little network of links.
• Write good, timeless articles. It should go without saying, but if your sales page is filled with time-sensitive information, then it’ll need constant updating.
• Add everything in the first time. I’m currently having to go through an old site of mine to add images, links and such like I talked about the other day. I wish I’d have done this ages ago.
• Test multiple sites against each other. If one website is getting traction with ten articles, great. If you’ve got another website that has a hundred articles and no sales, then what’s the difference between the two?

Final Thoughts

This has been a bit of a ramble of an article. For those who are confused, I started by pondering “How many articles does a niche site need?” I decided that a better way to approach the question would be to break down the construction of a niche site into smaller particles so that constructing your niche site would be more modular in nature.

If you build a niche site with one product review and a couple of how to articles, you’ve created a little silo of relevant information, sales material and useful information. If you build a handful of these little silos, you’re creating a lot of content in a non-time-consuming way.

Providing you’ve picked a decent niche, it’ll only take a couple of these silos being built before you start to see traffic and sales. Then you can decide whether or not to build more silos or move on to a different site.