Niches Are Nice, but Micro-Niches Create Nicer KaChings
Let’s say that you’re excited about gardening. Every weekend you take a trip to the garden center, load up on plants, and spend your spare time digging around trees, laying down irrigation pipes, pruning branches, pulling up weeds, creating mulch, and doing all of the other things that green-thumb types do to keep their gardens looking pretty.
That’s not me, but let’s say it’s you.
You sign up at Blogger.com and write a few articles about gardening. You also join Google’s AdSense program, receive your AdSense code, and place it on your pages, optimizing the units so that they blend into the page. You leave comments on a few other gardening blogs and join forum discussions to let people know you’re there.
There’s a good chance that before the week is out, you’ll have received your first KaChing. One morning, you’ll look at your AdSense stats and find that instead of the total earnings column saying 0.00, it now says 0.10.
KaChing!
Okay, that’s not a very loud KaChing. You might think that dime isn’t going to change your life, but if you let it, it will. Forget the amount. Think of the principle. You’ve written about a topic you love and picked up money by doing it online. It’s small money now, but if you continue, those amounts are going to grow, and that KaChing is going to get louder.
So you continue writing articles. You pay attention to search engine optimization, and you use link exchanges to build up traffic. As your traffic increases, so does your income.
You also keep track of the performance of your articles. AdSense provides Channels, which are tracking tools that allow you to follow the performance of individual ad units. So you create separate channels for articles about fruit trees, flowers, lawn care, and bonsai management, and when you compare those channels, what you find is that articles about bonsai trees do particularly well. Traffic spikes every time you write about bonsai trees; your click-through rate (the percentage of users who click on an ad) is 3.5 percent instead of your usual 2.5 percent, and the average price per click on these ads is a dollar instead of the 60 cents you tend to pick up on other topics.
Fantastic. Now you have a blog about gardening that’s making money, and you know of a specific gardening topic that’s particularly valuable. That’s a real KaChing.
You could continue as usual, making sure that you include plenty of regular posts about bonsai trees. But you could also be a little clever. You know that bonsai might be a small part of gardening, but it’s still a broad enough topic to stand on its own. So you create a second free blog on Blogger dedicated to bonsai trees. You talk about it on the first blog to help build up the audience and keep posting content, keep including the AdSense code, and keep tracking the results.
Because this site is about only bonsai, you can be sure that everyone who reads it has a strong interest in that topic. More of them then will click the ads that are now from bonsai growers and suppliers of bonsai pots and training wires. The keywords will be more relevant and more concentrated, and as the site grows, it will appear higher in search engine results. And because it’s focused, other sites on the topic will talk about it, giving you even more traffic and even higher earnings.
That’s usually the way the Web works. The more specific the topic of a web site, the more dedicated the audience, the easier it is to market, and the more the site’s users are worth to companies active in that niche.
Your first choice then will be to decide whether you want to create a niche site based on knowledge from your profession or knowledge from your passion.
The second choice, which you’ll make once you’ve been online for a while, is which micro-niche you’ll write about next. Sure, you’ll then have to write two blogs, but because those two topics interest you anyway, writing about them should be fun—and the revenues will make it all worthwhile.
Best of all, because you have one site that’s already successful, you should find that the second one is able to get off to a flying start. When Darren Rowse started Twitip.com, a blog about Twitter, he had 1,000 RSS subscribers within a week of launch. Those people were signing up because they already knew his ProBlogger site and trusted Darren to deliver interesting information on his new blog as well.
As you expand the topics of your Internet business, you should find that easy growth happens for you, too.
You’re Not That Unique—Building Your Community
The goal of this chapter is to show how the things that interest you have value. Whether you work as a builder or a lawyer, you have professional knowledge that can bring you money online. Whether you’re interested in gardening or photography, you have passions that can bring you money online.
Everyone has a unique set of interests, a unique degree of interest in those topics, a unique collection of information about them, and a unique way of describing them.
But the interests themselves aren’t unique. If you’re the only person in the world interested in the sewing patterns on the sails of ancient Greek triremes, then you’re going to struggle to make money online. You won’t have any users, and the AdSense code will look at your content, shrug, and serve up something vaguely related.
But because other people are interested in the subject of your web site, you have an audience. Your advertisers have a market. And you have a community.
A community is more than just a collection of people. It’s a group with a shared interest and
