Other Uses For Niche Sites
Friend of the blog Jakub sent me an email a while back. He’d been browsing Flippa and come across an interesting opportunity.
Now, this isn’t for beginners. If you’re just starting with niche sites, then work on the basics: Getting them up and running, learning how to write articles and getting them to convert. This will teach you all kinds of skills. Then think about coming back to this article and thinking about other ways to use your niche sites.
Anyway, Jakub sent me a niche site listing. It was earning money in the usual way; affiliate links to e-commerce products. Except there was one key difference…
… the guy who owned the niche site also earned the e-commerce store.
This got me to thinking about widening the uses of a niche site.
Using Niche Sites As Funnels
The idea of niche sites proposed in the niche site challenge was pretty limiting; no products, no trickery and just articles converting sales cold. In reality, there are many things you can do with a niche site.
For instance, you can grab emails and use them for lead generation. Essentially, with a niche site you’ve got a somewhat captivated target market. It’s much easier to grab anyone’s details, put them on a list and warm them up over time than it is to get a direct sale.
Using emails also means that you can promote other offers later on, which you might not have the opportunity to with a strict niche site.
Pushing Visitors Down YOUR Funnel
Alright, so in the example Jakub sent me, the guy was using his niche sites to send traffic to his own e-commerce stores. There’s no reason you can’t do this; start an e-commerce store with products in a niche, and then write sales letters on a separate review site. This will help you dominate the rankings for a term because search engines will see all the sites as having relevance and being connected.
Now, there are a couple of issues here. Firstly, if you do this you need to be open and honest; don’t write reviews that say, “I just happen to totally find this product randomly and it just so happens to be the best product ever.”
That’s fraudulent and whilst you’ll probably never run into legal trouble doing this, you don’t really want to become that 1% in the statistics that gets sued into oblivion.
Otherwise though, there’s no point in building informational sites and pimping your products too.
The second issue with this is that your niche sites need to be high quality. You don’t want them to get flagged for being simply promotional material, and you want them to rank visibly. So make the sites good and useful.
If you do the above, you’ll get more readers, crossover markets and you’ll also get a nice and efficient method for natural SEO that’ll help you rank and you won’t be breaking any rules. It’s ethical and effective.
Advertising, Domain Squatting and Other Stuff
Here’s another method I used niche sites for: pure advertising. Set up a banner or two, and you’ll probably get a couple of clicks a day. If you’re getting paid per click, you might earn $0.2 a day. It’s not brilliant but it pays for the domain and then some left over.
Of course… there’s nothing to stop you writing straight up how-to articles and then adding a “banner” that’s not really a banner at all but instead an image with your affiliate link. Then you go from being paid per click to per sale… and if you convert at 1% then every month or so you’ll get an extra affiliate fee. If you make $50 per sale then that adds up over a year.
Now, you can also do the above with links to your own products… and then those little clicks add up to a lot more money.
Now, this is all well and good, and even if you earn a few dollars a month from a site, you can sleep easy. You know who can’t sleep easy? Domain squatters. Dante didn’t tell anyone, but there’s a deeper circle of hell reserved for domain squatters.
You don’t want to be a domain squatter, because you’ll get damned for eternity. But building a little niche site that makes a couple of dollars a month on all of your unused domains will save your soul and it’s worth it financially speaking.
Final Thoughts
This article has been a jumble of notes because I’m just collecting ideas I’ve been putting to the test since the official end of the Niche Site Challenge a month ago.
I’ll come back to these ideas should they be fruitful in any real capacity. The point though is that niche sites are like any other online property; there’s more than one way to skin a cat and make a return on your investment.
Above all, niche sites provide you the opportunity to test, research and learn. You don’t have to put much effort into a site; a couple of hours a week is fine really. Over time, you’ll start to learn new things, test new things and succeed at new things.
Good luck and let me know how you get on… and if you have any other ideas for working with niche sites outside the norm, let me know in the comments!