Way back in October of 2010, I started to dabble with building micro-niche websites to make money as an Amazon affiliate. I made my first sale within 30 days and was pretty stoked, to say the least.
Over the next few months, I built about 30 micro-niche sites and my income continued to climb. Then in about June of 2011 I purchased my first authority site from a past business colleague and immediately set out to boost the sites performance as fast as I could.
Shortly after that, I sold most of my first round of Amazon micro-niche sites and set out to build more Adsense micro-niche sites. As of this writing, 77% of those 30 sites are on the first page of Google and earning me a nice passive income.
So, if all is well, why am I writing a post titled “The End of Micro-Niche Sites?”
The reason I’m writing this post is because I want to share with my readers what is going on in the world of niche sites and what I’m doing to adapt my business to this latest round of changes.
It all started about a month ago with the demise of BuildMyRank. Google, in one fell swoop, de-indexed their entire network of sites and in doing so, forced BMR to close up shop. You can read more about this in a prior post.
Around this same time, most of my micro-niche sites took, what turned out to be a temporary drop in the rankings and this kinda freaked me out. After all, I’m a guy who’s entire livelihood was build on micro-niche sites, and if that model was dead, so was I.
I Needed To Look at My Business Model
Not being one to sit around, I immediately started to have a very close look at what I was doing, as well as what I was teaching in my membership site so that I could determine what changes I needed to make in order to ensure that my business was going to be viable for years to come.
Disclosure: at the time of this post’s publication, the training material inside NSM is all new and geared towards authority sites, however, I’ve not yet had a chance to update the sales page, so it will still sound like I’m providing training for micro-niche sites when, in fact, that is not the case.
Here’s What I Concluded
After taking stock of my business, I drew a number of conclusions:
Micro-niche sites still make money…but for how long? (impossible to know)
Google is making it harder for webmasters to rank micro-niche sites
My authority sites are still doing incredibly well
Link building for authority sites is really easy if you provide great content
If my business is to last for years, I needed to be proactive and change now, rather than waiting until the last minute
Like I said earlier, 77% if my micro-niches sites remain on page one of Google and the best performer is making me $300 a month for doing nothing. I love making money for doing nothing…but I hate risk, so I needed to adjust my strategy to reduce my risk.
What risk am I talking about? Dependence on a single source of traffic and income; namely Google!
The very first thing I did was to remove the Adsense off the bottom 2/3 of my sites. If you understand the 80/20 rule, you’ll realize that the overall reduction in my income was not very much, but by significantly reducing the number of sites in my Adsense account, my hope is that I will stay off their radar.
If you think I’m being overly cautious, consider my friend Spencer Haws over at NichePursuits.com. On Friday, Spencer’s Adsense account was closed due to “invalid clicks”, which is Google’s catch all for “we closed your account because we felt like it”. Spencer has blogged about his misfortune, so you can read it yourself here if you like. Near as he could tell (and it was a guess), the large number of sites that he owns was what probably put him on Google’s radar for a manual review.
The reason Google doesn’t like micro-niche sites is because they don’t really create a fantastic user experience. Instead, these sites tend to exist solely for the purpose of getting Adsense clicks. Now, as a capitalist, I have zero issue with that, however, like I said above, as a business owner, my goal is to avoid risk, so if Google wants higher quality sites, I’m going to create them!
As a side note: I have quite a few sites in the $5-10/month neighborhood, so if you’d like to buy a few of them, get in touch.
Actions I’ve Taken to Adjust My Strategy
Before setting out to change the training in Niche Site Mastery, I had to ask myself if I was qualified to teach people about authority sites. Here’s how that process went in my head:
Do I own profitable authority sites? Yes.
Have I built profitable authority sites from scratch? Yes.
Have I built sites that got to page one of Google? Yes, many of them.
Do I plan to build more? Yes.
Will I learn more strategies and share those with my customers? Yes.
Is outsourcing still needed to build them and am I an expert at outsourcing? Yes.
Does my background as a CEO qualify me to teach people about building a real business with real customers? Yes.
Have I successfully built a mailing list? Yes.
Have I been successful in monetizing that list? Yes.
Do I earn a full-time living from my authority sites alone? Yes.
Now, in case you are wondering which authority sites I own, I’m going to share them both with you.
Case Study #1
The first one is my cleaning site. As I have already disclosed on numerous occasions, I did not build this site. Instead, I bought it and since buying it, I have approximately doubled the monthly income to $800 per month from just Adsense.
At this point, I do absolutely nothing to the site on a day-to-day basis. I don’t add content and I don’t add links. In fact, neither the prior owner nor myself has ever built a link to this site. Despite that, it has over 5000 links!
So, if I’ve never built any links, how come there are so many? Simple. The site has content that people actually want to link to. This is why this site is Google-proof and will be around for quite some time yet.
Case Study #2
My next authority site didn’t exist about a year ago. I built it from scratch and I chose arguably the most competitive niche on the planet. Why? Simple…I knew that it was also a very profitable niche to be in.
Here’s a quick look at the traffic. It has dropped a bit as of late because I haven’t published a post in a few weeks.
Since launching this site, I have used it to build a mailing list of just shy of 4,000 people and the site has earned a total of $37,679.24.
At this point in time, the site’s average monthly income is about $5,000 and I only need to put in about 2 hours a week to run it. Don’t have two hours? Then try this strategy and do it in as little as 15 minutes (assuming you have a virtual assistant to help you).
In terms of links, I have also never built a single link to this site, yet, as of now, there are 863 links that were built entirely by other people…and I never asked any of them to do it.
As you can now see, the site I’m talking about is this very blog.
Think about it for a moment. What is the Online Income Lab blog? Its an authority site in the make money online niche; which is just a niche like any other of hundreds of niches you could choose from.
Don’t think you could do this? Guess again. A year ago, I didn’t know anything about blogging or making money online. All I did was start a blog to chronicle my journey towards success. The byproduct of this was that I have become a (relatively) well known authority in the niche.
Could You Do This?
So, there you have it, my take on how to build a long-lasting online business with authority sites. You can either pick a topic where you can be totally invisible like my cleaning site, or you can pick a topic where you (or your pen name) is on center stage. Or, if you prefer, you could pick a topic somewhere in between.
My point is this: in order to build a real business that is going to last for years to come, my advice is that you build a business that adds real value to the lives of the people who come to your sites.
Do that and Google will love you forever.
How to Start
Building a niche authority site is no more complicated than building a micro-niche site. You need to:
Perform keyword research
Create content
Build a site
Drive traffic
Monetize
The only real difference between a micro-niche and a niche-authority site is that the latter one has more content than the former one. There are also some differences in keyword selection criteria, plus, you are going to be targeting hundreds of keywords instead of just one.
The other main difference is that you are going to have far more monetization options available to you with a niche-authority site, and that is a good thing!
In terms of how to do all this, there are a ton of free keyword research tutorials on the web. Same for how to install WordPress.
If you want to know exactly how I do it, just become a Niche Site Mastery member and you’ll see my exact process, plus, you’ll have access to our discussion forum and one-on-one coaching with me.
Regardless of which path you pick, you need to keep in mind one thing. It took me a year to get to where I am today with this blog, so you are not going to be able to just make a few mouse clicks, sit back, and watch the money roll in. Real businesses just don’t work that way.
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