Alright, call this a Dear Diary post.
It’s Saturday which is usually my Niche Site Posts day. And I’ll talk a little about niche sites, but that’s not what this is all about.
If You Don’t Like Rants, Skip This Section…
See, I’ve had to migrate my sites to a new web host. My old one was less than helpful regarding GDPR and email stuff, and while the details are boring, what should have been an easy to switch thing for me wasn’t.
Now, I try to be compliant with rules and regulations and not annoy anyone. So I was ready and done for GDPR – everyone on my list had to be there, subscribe, confirm subscription, “Hello, yes, I will be selling you things and dropping awesome stuff in your inbox as well” and the clear If you don’t like it, please hit the unsubscribe button because I don’t need non-buyers thing.
So I thought there’d be no problems. And on my end, there weren’t.
And yet something to do with my web hosts got them banned from sending to Microsoft, Gmail and Yahoo addresses.
And that meant every site they were hosting could no longer send to anyone from those providers.
Now, Jamie’s self-hosted email marketing software is hosted on the server I pay them for, and I can now not send a bloody email to anyone.
Which… if you’re wondering why my email list has gone quiet, that’s why. That and all my other email lists. And a lot of clients.
Any email address to the big providers – out of luck through no fault of my own.
As you can imagine, upon realising this (which was quickly because I woke up one morning to about 100 messages saying, delivery failed!) I put in a support ticket.
“Please use a mailing software,” they said.
And I told them a) I am, and b) it’s not their fault, not mine.
And after a little back and forth confirms that I am correct, “We’re working on it.”
Well, after two months of them “working on it” I still can’t send emails out to the majority of the internet population.
And so I’m moving everything.
This is – if you haven’t done it – a major pain in the arse. Hence my mind isn’t on niche sites today.
Rant over, let’s get some insight.
INSIGHT: Niche Sites Are Low Maintenance
So as I go through all the sites that are hosted on this server, I realise that I haven’t touched a lot of these sites for months. I haven’t touched a couple of them for years.
And while I’m not a big believer in passive income as a concept, it’s cool that niche sites can go for long periods and have relatively little input required.
That said, I should update some of these sites. Not only do your sites slip in rankings if they’re not updated, but there’s new stuff available and it’s generally like having a rental property where you don’t change the curtains once every ten years – it’s ok for cheap student tenants but the rest of the world thinks you’re a slob landlord.
And there’s another reason to update…
Your Skills Greatly Jump If You Keep Working
My niche sites don’t really look like niche sites anymore.
They look like fully-functioning authority projects. They work like fully functioning authority sites.
They have the widgets and the gizmos – the sign-up for our list – stuff.
Now, I’ve not been holding back on you, because it’s all here in the archives.
But when I look at some of these old sites, I’m holding back on myself.
A simple “sign up for the email list” and a quick auto-responder filled with 400 word emails that goes on for six months isn’t a hard addition to any site. In fact, it’s what a lot of personal branding gurus use as their major business interest. Really, Ben Settle is an extreme version of this. His site is two pages (that you can see.) Both are sign up for the site and then it’s an email sequence.
You can add this to a niche site or if you have parked domains (shame on you) you can do the same thing.
But that’s an aside really, the point is that if you keep experimenting with new stuff, you get better.
Reader Ari asked the other day whether he should take a break from niche sites, and the answer can be yes. To be honest, you might do better for taking a break and doing something else, because let’s say you say, “Right, no niche sites… I will start emailing people and running FB ads instead,” you’re going to come back in six months having learned a ton of new stuff that’ll help your niche sites.
And that’s just a quick example. Your skills level up and so your assets can level up later.
Final Thoughts
Alright, so no real penetrating methodology in this article. Hopefully there’s some small sliver of helpful insight.
I’m going back to doing this stupid migration stuff. I would say “I’ll see you in the next one” but if the site disappears overnight, I won’t.
Needless to say, if something does go wrong, I’ll be back at some point in the near future. Everything is backed up and fingers-crossed the migration will go without a hitch.
A couple of my niche sites have been migrated successfully already, so I think I know what I’m doing.
But let’s hope now we’re moving on to the bigger sites we don’t have a problem.
See you soon folks.