Should you set up a niche site based on what you like?

Posted on March 11, 2008
Filed Under Niche Marketing |

 When I started out in the online business, especially niche marketing, I read every ebook I could get. I wanted to learn as much as possible about how other experts have done it so I could use that to develop my niche sites. I wanted to know the strategy to apply when setting up my niche site.In most of my readings I came across the same information when it came to setting up an Adsense empire or business. I was told to set up a website in a niche that I enjoyed. I even went through an exercise that was aimed at finding out what I love the most. The exercise worked and I found an idea I could set up an Adsense website around. It was my passion since I was a kid.

To cut a long story short, I struggled for 12 months to make money with my site. I was averaging US$2 per month on Google Adsense and nothing on my Amazon associate account. That is a joke compared to the averages I made as soon as I changed my internet marketing strategy a few months later. In fact my monthly  income increased by US$14900%! within 3 months of applying my new internet marketing strategy. It was no rocket scientist’s work but just simply fixing the errors I had made when I started out.

Here are some of these mistakes I made when setting up my adsense niche sites  (because I had been advised to focus on a single topic I love):

1. Because I was told to focus on what I love, I did not stop to check the competitiveness of the keyword I was targeting. There were in fact 100 million authoritative  pages I was up against. As a newbie I was on an obvious suicide mission. I almost killed my online career before it even started. Now I go for keywords that have at most 1 million competing pages or less. Of course it also depends on the authority of the pages I am up against.
2. I targeted a single keyword: my target keyword was just one word and not long tail. For example, it is crazy to target the keyword “car” but “find second hand cars” is a better keyword to target because it is long tail. Of course you still have to check your competition and traffic potential before you set up the niche site.
3. I targeted a single top level keyword for all my pages;. When you set up a site, the homepage can be about the top level keyword you are targeting but the inner pages must focus on the long tail variations of that keyword. Google and other search engines do not look at a site as one whole but consider single pages and ranks them independent of the whole site (generally speaking).
4. I focused too much on my on site optimization: on site optimization works but off site optimization is best and most effective. My passion for the subject made me to keep writing articles and posting them on my site. Uploading this and that, getting JavaScript RSS feeds for news, articles you name it. Do not get me wrong here, it is vital to make your site valuable to the users but who will ever visit if you do not market it well enough. Now I spend 10% of my time improving my niche sites and 80% marketing them in order to attract traffic.
5. I did all the work myself and did not outsource: any entrepreneur will tell you, it is hard to give up power when the time comes i.e. as a business grows it is important to delegate some of the routine work to employees while you focus on other businesses. I have an offline business and I know what I am talking about. Now because I loved this niche I was in, I did not see the need to hire someone to write some of my articles, to do some research for me etc. This slowed down my business growth. One of my mentors, Jon Leger, whose blog I follow religiously once said, “work ON your business and not IN it”. You can find many free lancers online waiting to do what you hate or have no time for but vital for your business.
6. I “sprayed” the niche site with Adsense: of course I did not breach the Google terms of service but I mean I have since learnt through experience that putting all the ad units allowed per page is not necessarily good. This is because of reasons such as smart pricing, having too much space for ads so even the lower bidders are able to get in (and then you get cheap clicks). Now I have as little as one ad unit on some of my sites and the clicks are far better than when I had 3 units. I also changed the formats and mostly use the big square 336 by 280. Of course you need to test what works for your niche. For example, for a few of my sites I had to revert back to the 250 by 250 formats because the click-through-rates (CTR) on the 336 x 280 went down simply because the ads were perceived as “ads” and therefore spammy by my visitors.
7. My linking structure was terrible: as much as I was focusing on onsite optimization - it was more on article writing than making sure search engine bots found all my pages and indexed them. Furthermore, my linking structure got me smart priced by Google.
8. I had only 1 “niche” site: I put the quotes on the “niche” because it was in no way a niche site. Anyway, I had one site on a highly competitive topic, which did not even appear on the top 1000 sites for my keyword on search engines. This means no traffic and no traffic means no money. Now I have set up niche sites on several topics and am my search engine rankings are something to smile about especially for my inner pages. Let me warn you here, do not go out and start building sites before you have developed a proper foundation. Solidify yourself by understanding the basic principles of niche marketing and developing your own internet marketing strategy. This way you will be saved from the stress of managing hundreds of sites and having to update them all once you discover an error you made e.g. wrong linking structure that gets you smart priced or limit the penetration on search engine bots to your site. My suggestion would be to set up about 5 to 10 niche sites (10 - 20 pages each) and use them as a learning curve for a couple of months before you go all out and building more.

I could go on and on with examples, but let me stop here for now. My point is, when I started out in this business, I was for the idea that if you set up niche sites on what you love, then you would make more money while having fun. I now have a couple of sites and 80% are on topics I had never thought of before and never even heard of. For example, I remember taking about 2 - 3 days reading up on a potential topic I had discovered during my keyword research but had never heard of it before. Today that site is making me loads of money. Basically, I am having fun growing my internet marketing business, especially my niche sites, because they ALL make me good money.

My advise to you is, apply the right internet marketing strategies and you will win. If your topic of interest is on a niche that is worth pursuing by all means go for it but if it is not, leave it and go for niche sites that will make you money. It took me 10 months (no joke) to make about US$100 with Adsense, but as soon as I changed my strategy i.e. did proper keyword research even on topics I had no interest in, set up niche sites around those topics and properly optimized -  I made that same US$100 in a week. That is within a space of 3 months after changing my strategy.

So what ever the gurus say about setting up niche site of personal interest, I know what I am talking about - I have experienced it and have seen it work. Good for those who have seen good results with this approach but I can bet it is only a handful and the rest are almost quitting because they are not making any money. Take my advise, if you want to grow you Adsense business (and are not simply doing it for fun), build sites that will attract targetedtraffic. That is all that matters not what YOU like. I subscribe to the principle of “outside in instead of inside out” i.e. do what the customer wants not what you can do. Find a niche that works, build a great site, market it well, monetize and watch the money flow in. If you hate the niche that much, do not over look it, just outsource the work and enjoy the income - Period!

Please leave your comment below.

Comments

• Subscribe to my feed

  Enter your email address:

  Delivered by FeedBurner

• Categories

  • Affiliate Marketing
  • Article Marketing
  • Blogging
  • General Marketing
  • General topics
  • Google Adsense
  • Internet marketing
  • Mailing lists
  • Make money online
  • Niche Marketing
  • Web hosting
  • Web traffic

• Recent Posts

  • The Hardest Part about Internet Marketing Is Decision Making
  • Understand Your Internet Marketing Strategy
  • I’m thinking about Internet Marketing Blogging Again
  • Easy Ways For Stay At Home Moms To Create Extra Income
  • The truth about top home business lists.

• 
  Top Stories

• 

• Your Host: Mfundo Mavimbela a.k.a Mavicks

  Mavicks is a qualified Marketer with a Bachelor of Commerce Degree (Marketing) from UNISWA. His greatest passion is helping Internet Marketing Beginners, especially those from emerging markets, make more money online.

• My Home country

  Meet beautiful people, enjoy beautiful scenery and have a Royal Experience in the beautiful Kingdom of swaziland .

• Archives

  • July 2010
  • August 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
•