Website: Niche specific or not niche specific?

This is not a small question buddy, i guess you should refer to what you are really posting as for now on your website, then try to know more on your audience needs, and try to post something that will be interesting for them. Personally, i think it will be better to promote in a single niche, so that you can focus more, and keep your audience tuned, before you start think expansion.

I would not niche down more than one level. This will give you enough room to come up with new content, without having to compete with the big boys.

So if your niche is Dog Training, you can niche down to Dog Training for Pitbulls. But Dog Training for Pitbulls with poor eyesight would be too deep.

Who do you want to visit your website? Where will you find them?

Without a target audience you can't build a business. And if your audience is too broad it's impossible to advertise to them and entice them to your site unless you have a huge budget. Even then, it's tough.

That is why finding a niche market is easier than a broad group.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but you'd better have a plan in place.

Rose

It will look not so professional if your website is too general. I suggest you use one niche per domain since the cost for a domain is not high.

The problem with not having a niche is not getting enough public attention. Something "general" could bore your clients. Whereas diving into something specific gets you the right group of people who are interested in what you are promoting and in turn will generate more clients if you are able to hold their attention and keep them there. Just make sure your topics are worthwhile, interesting and of value.

Hello and thank you all for your valuable comments.

What I have in mind is to host a small/medium business centric website and focus on how they can improve their sales online. The lead gen bait could be some kind of guide reg. online marketing.

Right now I am trying to figure out that what it would be for the general public/common user as they would not be interested in "increasing online sales".

Would be grateful if you share you thoughts on this and give me clue on how it could be attractive for the general public/common user.

Again, thank you all.

Regards,

Riz

Riz, there's an old saying: Try to please everybody, and you end up pleasing nobody.

If your "thing" is teaching how to increase online sales, why would you even want to attract people with no interest in increasing online sales.

Right now, the closest thing online to "everything for everybody" is Amazon. And even Amazon started out by selling real, dead-tree books and CDs/DVDs. Jeff Bezos lost money for four years before his little book business showed a profit.

Are you ready to do that?

I have done that mistake when I started. Don't make a general purpose website and hope to get all kind of traffic to that. Be very very specific...

Another problem with targeting everybody is that not everybody wants to buy. When you make an effort to market to everybody it will cost you time, money and effort. By targeting on people who are most likely to buy, can afford to buy or are already deciding to buy (you do this by looking into the characteristics in your and their online behavior) you get more returns on the amount of work you put into your affiliate marketing.

Yes your website needs to be niche specific. This will help you in targeting the right people to come to your website. It will be easier for SEO as well as ranking your website for that specific niche. Google will also think that you are an authority on the niche if only a specific audience access your website. Thus making it easier to divert the right traffic for your website.

General websites become really difficult to rank. In case you want to target multiple niches then you must first learn how to rank one website for one niche. Then after that website start attracting audience for that niche and then you start making money in that niche. Move on to another niche and build a brand new website using the same process from zero. That way you will have different website for different niches and all ranking well for those niches.

There are millions of ways of doing affiliate marketing. There are one or two page websites that sell affiliate products using Email Marketing. These websites use advertising and collect leads in their Autoresponder software and then send regular emails to market to these customers.

In Email Marketing the list belongs to you. So if you market them products from one Niche and later change your Niche with a closer Products that may be addition to the first niche then you can use the same list to Market to them later.

Email Marketing will give you an edge and that is the way most affiliate marketers operate.

Affiliate Marketing with Website is also one way to do Marketing but you will have to be patient. It takes time for Google to Scan your website and send traffic towards your site. If you are only thinking about free traffic then you have to master SEO and Website Ranking Skills. Even the best marketers will tell you that it takes anywhere between 3 months to 6 months for a decent website to start ranking and producing decent results.

Hope this helps.

Best of luck for your new venture.

I would suggest choosing a broader niche so that you can still have room to play before making a final decision on what you should focus on. I would say like the others mentioned you have to be patient. It is a lot harder to create a successful website than to explode on YouTube. Maybe incorporating social media and creating a YouTube channel will be helpful until you reach the desired level.

It's all preference, you can start with a common domain and if you find a specific offer/niche taking off, then you can get a domain specific for that

Having a specific niche should be favorable as it gives you a specific audience to deal with. If you will chose to be more general then the people who might be interested in what you want to sell will be significantly lesser.

I feel the world loves specialists. Generalists? Not so much. I'd go with a niched down, specific site, so you can develop expertise in one area and get known for that niche. Otherwise you may lose your target market by going too broad. I love niching down because it ensures my readers want what I have to offer.

My latest site is niche specific Wordpress themes, nothing else.

My advice, be known for one thing per site.

Be the go to site per sub-niche, the sub-niche that gets traffic but everyone else only has as a single category on their own sites.

This is how you dominate a niche/sub-niche.

When you start off, you should be focused on specific niche. Then when you have larger audience, then you can expand to some related topics.

Focusing on one niche is always better.

It really depends on how much traffic and demand your current niche is getting. If there isn't a lot of competition then there is no reason to niche down.

Generally speaking, you should niche down as far as you can as long as there is a demand for it. This is because there is less competition and its easier to develop an authority in that niche.

Once you have come to be an authority in that niche you can expand into a more general niche that consumes your sub niche.

The niche stores are able to focus in the right products much easier for every viewer and in most cases, almost all the products on your store can fit that potential buyer. This leaves us with higher cart order averages and better conversions overall.

Now, traffic is a little bit more complicated when focusing on a single niche whereas it's easy as hell to get traffic into the general store. So that's a difference that plays in this equation as well.

It really depends on what type of traffic you're using.

If you're paying for traffic, you could theoretically be as broad as you want and brand yourself as a general product review site. Sort of a "we try everything so you don't have to" site.

But paying for traffic to an affiliate site is not a great idea unless you're promoting high-ticket, high-commission stuff.


If you're relying on free traffic via social media, Youtube, or SEO, then some might argue that you should be more niche specific because you're more easily found.

That's sort of true... but sort of not.

A lot of people who look for reviews these days, search for the exact product name. So your specific blog post or page will rank for the product name and related keywords, and so, arguably, the overall site itself (which most people will not dig too deep into) doesn't need to be specific and can still be general.

For example, if you go do a search right now for Purina Review or Purina Dog Food Review, you'll see that yes some results are dog-niche sites, but some of the top page results are also general review sites like Influenster, Reviews.com, and consumer affairs.

I am not really particular about any niche topic.

I just look for ones that have a high demand right now.

If you are talking about physical products, one site you may want to check out is Trend Hunter.

If you are talking about digital products, you can do a search on Clickbank, JVZoo and Udemy

If you are talking about CPA offers, you can resesarch on Offervault.

Hey,

If you are on blogger you hardly notice any downtime and blog slow-downs but WordPress bloggers have one thing to worry about blog loading time.

The ads you serve may slow down your page speed eventually it affects your search rankings badly because, ad networks use javascripts to serve ads on publisher pages which is why you have to load ads asynchronously or after the document is completed loading.

I would say, that it's entirely up to you and what you want to achieve.

Do you want a more general webpage, which covers a few niches and you want to build a "brand".

Or do you want multiple laser focus niche websites, which each of them will be targeting specific visitors.

It's a tough questions actually, because both of these options have their pros and cons...

Specific niche' are a lot easier to market.

I'm currently building a site that is not only niche specific but includes only five specific products within the niche.

Tip: Market research is your best friend.

I wouldn't start out as a "generalist" if I was in your shoes . I would advise you to focus in on a topic that you have knowledge of. The reason being is that you could spread yourself thin and confuse people visiting your website . If you try to market to everybody you are pretty much marketing to no one in a sense . So yeah focus on 1 particular subject ,become a master at solving specific issues with in that niche .

It totally depends on your business requirement.
Niche specific sites aim for a smaller set of audience in a big market. The motto is to select the limited competition markets, but there must be sufficient amount of online people searching for your desired topic.
But if you want to target large audience then use non-niche sites.

Hi Riz,
To venture in any business, it is advisable to start small and grow
big especially internet business that is very wide and competitive.
Be niche specific to put all your resources and effort to study, learn
and acquire your share of the market. At start you need to choose a
product or service you are familiar with and have passion for to
promote.
Know your target audience and advertise to them to maximize your profit.
After you have instilled trust and confidence in your audience and
your product or service has become a brand; then you may dive into
another niche or broaden your product or service.
Am talking from experience. I wish you success in your business endeavor.

Take a good look at the products listed under each category. While there is some overlap, you'll see that there is still a wide range of products. Someone interested in learning to day trade currency probably isn't going to be interested in an email marketing course, for example.

Riz, are talking about selling a B2B service (helping small business owners make more affiliate sales)?

If so, Clickbank is not the place to do your research. Clickbank is a reseller of other vendors' products, not an affiliate site in its own right.

Even then, you want to specialize -- improving online sales for stockbrokers is not the same as improving online sales for pool cleaners. Online, improving online sales for someone selling a marketing course is not the same as someone selling dream catchers on Etsy.

It seems counterintuitive, but you will make more sales more easily if you niche it down and specialize rather than trying to cast too large a net.

Here you want to get into affiliate marketing and for affiliate marketing you need to be on top of the search result and google prefer to rank those website which are niche specific.

I hope you are clear now, still any doubt let me know.

Hello rizabbasi,

Your thread has already received quite a lot of good responses, but I thought I could add a little perspective to the topic.

No matter what product/service you are selling, your success with being able to actually sell it to somebody depends on only a few factors.

First, the product needs to provide the solution to the pain/problem that your customer is dealing with. The bigger or more painful the problem, the more desirable the product/service becomes in your customer's mind.

Second, the customer needs to be fully aware that this problem/pain exists. Knowing about the destructive effect of this problem as well as ever-growing costs of inaction can expand the perception of this problem/pain greatly.

Third, you or your company needs to be regarded as an expert in the field, capable of providing the necessary and long-lasting cure to the problem/pain.

Some of you may think that sales process is much more complicated than that and it is. There is a lot of nuances to it, but ultimately those nuances are just smaller cogs to this big machine. Start every sales project with those three points and dive in deeper once you get the foundations right.

Now, let's talk about your ideas from the perspective of those three essential points.

Increasing online sales is definitely a product/service that has a great potential to provide a solution to a problem/pain. In fact, if our prospects only knew what e-marketing can do for their business, guys like us would have no problem selling our services. Sadly, most business owners don't. That is why advertising how to increase online sales is extremely hard to sell. However, no more worrying whether a customer sells enough product online to pay bills on time sounds a little more convincing. It carries much more powerful message because it directly targets a painful problem that your customer may have.

In a lot of cases, your prospects may not be aware that they have a problem. They were either doing it in the same way for a long time or they believe what they do is just a part of the business they are in. However, this does not change the fact that they spend way more time on generating sales/customers then they would, for example, be able to spend with their family, they spend way more money than they need to, etc. A good example of this would be a private medical practice owner. Those doctors used to be generating new patients by taking other doctors and their staff for expensive dinners with hopes they would refer patients to them. A lot of doctors still do that and it often costs them a lot of time and money. The copy on your website is able to change people's perspectives on things so that they start to notice things like that and develop the desire to change.

Developing a copy for the general public will have a very small chance to really hone in on individual people's problems. You see, every niche has its own unique problems and pains. Therefore, if you want to greatly increase the effectiveness of your copy, focus your work on problems/pains of specific niches.

Last but not least, having credibility and authority in a particular niche can go a long way towards generating consistent sales. Having a website that covers many topics does not reflect any expertise in any particular field. However, having a website that provides detailed information to personal trainers on how to consistently sell their weight-loss products online make it seem like you know what you are doing in a weight-loss niche.

This is a little more text than I thought, but I think it covers all the important points I wanted to mention.

Best of luck and enjoy the process.

Just think over it. When you say a non-niche specific website, does it make any sense?

Any website on the internet is niche specific, be it even Yahoo or Google. They are offering services around internet surfing. Ads and other stuff are associated to it, but the centerpiece is internet surfing.

If you look at any blog, it has to be on a topic. If today you write about healthy eating, and tomorrow you write about Landing your space shuttle on Mars, people won't read it (until you are Elon Musk.. )

So, it is ESSENTIAL that you stick to a website that is niche specific. Choose your niche carefully. Follow the 4 steps of niche research if you like:

1. Are there always offers to promote?
2. Do people in this niche really buy?
3. Can I promote to the broader niche (or do I have to narrow down on a sub-niche)?
4. Do I like the niche?

I'm sure you'll get answers buddy!

All the Best!

Shubho

Yes, your site needs to be niche specific. Not only it's better for affiliate marketing, but also helps you establish your name as an expert WAY faster.

Although it is quite necessary to select a specific niche but if you select a broader niche, half of your problem would be resolved.

I do affiliate marketing and have a very simple website but the web site has a general topic were I can post links to the affiliate programs I am promoting. I send all my traffic to this website it works great.

All the best!

Sandy Murray

It is not necessary for the site to be niche specific. General sites can generate more revenue. But if you have a specific business then niche specific website would be more beneficial.

If you ask me..being niche specific would definitely help in bringing specific convertible audience to your site thereby increasing sales conversions.

I would say niche specific specially when you are starting out. Can bring you results in short time.