Ideation: Journey of a Small Content Site to a Brand

Three things I will share in today’s email

1. Update on my AI content site
2. Nifty tool to get notified when your site is down.
3. The topmost reason why first-time niche site owners fail & how to avoid that.

Let’s start with the most significant factor that can kill your niche site if you are starting your content journey.

It is: Pick the wrong niche and domain name.

This is the most critical success factor that must be evaluated properly.

Most people stress about “finding” the right niche but fail to evaluate it. If you pick the wrong niche, there is no going back. You will have to abandon the website.

How do you evaluate it properly?

It is simple.

There are three things you need to ask yourself

1. How am I going to monetize the site?
2. How I am going to create the content?
3. How am I going to get backlinks?

Monetization: There are a few common ways to earn. Ads, affiliate sales, digital products, and physical products.

If it is ads, how much average CPC or cost per click does this niche provide? To earn profits from ads, how much traffic do I need?

If you need high traffic, are you equipped enough to generate that amount of traffic as a newbie? What do you need to learn and invest in to reach that level?

Affiliate income is always higher than income from ads in all niches but the competition is also huge. It is not easy to rank affiliate content and requires domain expertise and backlinks.

Digital products are a great way to monetize. Be it courses, ebooks, or even consultancy. Research the average price and average number of sales of your digital product you can get in a month.

Selling physical products is quite popular among social media influencers. Do you think you can convert your site into an eCommerce brand once your content site starts getting good traffic?

Or sell it to someone running an e-commerce store in your niche?

Monetization ideas are unlimited but make sure you do basic brainstorming to understand the potential.

Content Creation: You cannot run a successful content site without content. There are no shortcuts.

Understand how much content you will create every month. Who will create and edit that content? There is a cost and effort involved in creating that content.

Hiring writers for quality content is expensive, especially for domain experts. Think about a writer who is an expert in Bitcoin knowledge vs DIY home decor.

Backlinks: You cannot rank competitive queries without backlinks. It is a bitter truth!

Figure out your backlink strategy. How easy is it to get backlinks in your niche? How much are they going to cost if you have to buy them?

You can learn or hire an expert on your journey. But if you pick up a difficult niche, 9 out of 10 people lose motivation and abandon the project.

So consider these 3 factors before finalizing any niche.

Update on the AI project.

It has been almost two weeks since I launched this site and I am already getting impressions and a few clicks every day. I have done some internal linking over the last two weeks, but have not been able to work on the image creation part I mentioned in my last e-mail.

I have not made any social media profiles or links except Pinterest because I need to do some automation that requires their approval (more about it in the coming weeks).

So the growth you see is from picking the right keywords along with some on-page SEO.

UptimeRobot

This is a that alerts you if your website is down. And the interesting part is that you just need to add your URL to your UptimeRobot dashboard and it will start working. It has free and paid versions. Grab it for a free account.