My niche site approach has been getting complicated lately and I’m planning on creating a few new online properties (that’s a professional term I guess) in the next few months.
So let me just explain what I’m talking about with some new stuff, because I get the (unconfirmed) sense that I might be losing the trees for the forest with some of the later niche site posts.
So I’ll go through the approach I’m taking with the niche sites I’ll be building shortly.
First Off, The Niche Sites Themselves
Here is where I worry that I’ll get lost in the shuffle in terms of meaning with describing my new niche approach.
People have asked me, “why are you abandoning the niche site as sales letter idea?”
And the answer is that I am not.
Don’t get me wrong; most of the work on a niche site is exactly the same now with more complex structure and goals as it was when I was just writing the sales letters and putting them on the site as described in the niche site challenge.
With niche sites, you are creating a relatively low time investment web property and using it to drive traffic to affiliate offers in order to make money.
The two expansions in my thinking along these lines have been to 1) create my own offers in the form of short e-books and 2) to direct traffic from niche site articles to my websites as well as to affiliate offers.
You can do both of these things whilst still following the same general plan in terms of monetization. So no big change there.
The other stuff is window dressing. I include social media stuff and email lists because it’s easy. More on that in a while.
But I’ve also decided to stop using a scattergun approach to building websites and try and create more related sites so I can build a network.
Here is why.
Linking Them To Bigger Projects: Two Approaches
I noticed I a while back that my friend Kyle was doing the niche site an authority site thing better than I was. He has a website about living in Ukraine(UkraineLiving.com) and a wide a website about dating abroad (ThisIsTrouble.com) as well as a Podcast now. (DatingAbroad.net.)
This was in contrast to me. I had more web properties, but none of them were related. So I can’t do cross promotion. This is stupid seeing as this website generates tens of thousands of views a month and my other websites generate hundreds or thousands of views a month.
If I could connect them all up, then I’d be doing better.
So I thought about that and looked into it and that’s what I’m going to do. There are two approaches that I am taking.
ONE: As PBN Stuff
When you have an existing authority project, you should look into building niche websites. These work as networks for more specific audiences that you can then direct to your authority site.
So, you might have a general travel website as your personal brand. If you spent a few months in Madrid, you could create a niche website about specific things in Madrid. The majority of your work for the site will be about Madrid and the offers that you can promote to people who are traveling to Madrid, but you can also use the site to promote your more general travel offers.
This means your audience is exposed to more of your work, and you can grow your audience. It also provides SEO benefits and other good stuff.
TWO: Niche Feelers
For my next plan project, (which is on the back burner until I get everything else done,) I am going to create a new authority site. But I’m going to do it backwards. I’m going to create a niche site first, or maybe a couple of niche sites.
This will make it easier to write about topics people care about because I’ll have the data. It will hopefully bring in income and before start putting more time and effort into the market. And later it will bring benefits when I start releasing products and other more ambitious projects in the niche.
So this is how to scale using niche sites. But what about scaling the effort on your niche sites in general?
Social Media And Marketing Your Niche Sites
Using social media for your niche site is not necessary. Using email marketing on your niche sites is not necessary.
You can make money with just SEO and writing sales letters for your websites. You don’t have to worry about retargeting or retaining customers or readers.
But you can.
You can use IFTTT to send messages to all the various platforms whenever you post a new article. This takes about five minutes to set up, and then you don’t have to worry about it.
I also just signed up for a program that allows you to create Evergreen content campaigns that’ll send your articles out on a recurring basis automatically. So I’ll probably saw my new site up to them to test it out for use it on my more pressing projects.
For email marketing, I just send the articles out to people on the email address. Sometimes I will create an offer that is, “our 10 best posts in PDF format,” and used as an opt in offer. Then I’ll send the articles to people’s inboxes and if I release an e-book for the niche site, then I will send information about that too.
So nothing particularly time-consuming. It’s mostly just copy and paste stuff.
But this can improve conversions by a few percent, and its relatively low effort for that extra money.
Unnecessary Yet Additive
With all of these things, you can add them incrementally at whatever rate you choose.
Finally, your niche sites can act as testing grounds for these things. For instance, I bought a new subscription to a marketing site that I mentioned above, and I’ll test that on my niche sites before potentially messing up my main sites with it.
And it all adds up to more online assets and a bigger network, which is what we are all aiming for.