Is making and marketing multiple niche sites "unethical"?

How in the world would it be unethical?

Anyone who owns a ton of niche websites has them operating pretty much on autopilot. Once they are setup, there is not a lot of work to be done.

I create a site. Create the content. Build an autoresponder series if appropriate. Setup its traffic sources (PPC, SEO, etc.), and move on. Other than monitoring the results, you don't have to be involved with each site all that much.

Mostly, marketers do that for creating a good PBN. They eventually link back to their own main site to get conversions from that.

As a person, do you have many interests...or just one? I don't agree that multiple niches would likely be a PBN but why shouldn't someone work in various areas of interest?

What could possibly be unethical about it? You build sites that don't need daily maintenance or constant posts added - you have a schedule of site maintenance, etc.

Most of us have various hobbies and interests which are different than our job required skills/interests which are different from our parenting/marriage related skills/interests.

I don't see any problem, ethically or otherwise, with writing about all of them.

However, I do see a problem with people that claim to be experts when they aren't and promising things they really can't promise. Most of us are not expert in more than a thing or two. Claiming otherwise would be wrong, in my opinion.

Mark

You concentrate on these:

1. Passive traffic.
2. Staff/ VAs (outsourcing).
3. Legit automation.
4. User-submitted media.

What you should know, though, is many business models require very little active management. You setup your money site and, in some cases, you drive traffic through either totally hands-off means or you schedule work to drive traffic throughout the month. As an example, perhaps you have a type of money site that literally requires no updates. You can grow around that entity your social empire and schedule updates through HootSuite. In fact, sometimes you don't need an empire (such a grand word). You put together your money site, you grow a social, you schedule updates. And even all of that can be outsourced or put into the hands of your personal VA.

At this stage, though, forget about those questions. Seriously. Forget them. Think instead about getting 1 business working for you, and for goodness sakes, keep it simple. There is no shame in having a simple operation. I have them myself. Yes, expand into more advanced ventures as you evolve in this career, but stick to simple for now. I got started over 2 decades ago and simple business models still arrive in my portfolio (and they're often my favourite - they're a chance to try out something new and fun that excites me). What you do is work out two main things. First, your niche and what type of money site you're going to use. Second, how you intend to drive traffic. There are other considerations but those are your main go-tos at this stage (when keeping things simple).

You mention wilderness survival. Love that one. The survivalist niche has so many strong monetizations. But keep in mind, what is a monetization? It's just another way of saying: this is something of value. Think, then, not in terms of how to earn from your audience; think how you can give them value, and while you're doing that, turn a buck. Always put the audience first. Now, with that in mind, just let me explain a pretty simple model that highlights everything I said above.

You spread your business across 2 platforms. 1. Your website. 2. A facebook page. That, really, is all you need. Yes, other things would be great, and they will be great when you evolve the business, but FB + money site is a solid little setup. You grow your FB. You feed it with value (usually in the form of articles, images, videos). And you concentrate on learning what makes your audience tick in terms of value. And value isn't just about monetization. Your audience will value non-monetized media. In your particular audience, for instance, they're very receptive to the idea of making a statement to others. A simple way to acheive that is by sharing captioned images wherein they can share it with friends and family and basically say, "I believe in this statement."

Some quick thoughts. Upshot: take one step at a time. Setup your business. Get it earning. But engineer that business so that the emphasis is away from the hands-on. Look at those first 4 bullets. Feature those into your development. You can do 1 and 3 right away, and then grow towards 2 and 4 when the business will support it.

- Tom

No. its not "unethical" you are basically becoming an "internet-businessman".

Here's the truth about passion and business...loving to play golf is a lot different that loving to write about golf, although it probably does help to write about it if you like it.

Then, no matter whether you have a passion for golf or not, you're going to have to promote your site and get traffic to it. If you do get traffic, you'll have to then deal with competitors. You'll also need thin skin to deal with trolls and angry customers. Your site may be hacked, etc.

While passion for a niche probably does help, there's many other factors to having a successful niche site. IMO, your "passion" should be more for success than for a specific topic.

When you're passionate about a niche, you are your own audience. This gives you the type of valuable insights necessary to connect with that audience, but also to know the subject well enough to develop that business for the audience.

I have, for instance, a passion for comics. That means I know the market, in this case, inside and out. I know values, I know what people want at the moment, how to speak to them, how they think (as an audience) and, in general, I know what I need to know in order to operate a business about comics. On the other hand, I have no passion for golf, and I expect I'd make an utterly lousy business about golf.

Upshot: do what you love. You'll be happier and likely richer.

It's the people who only have a passion for success that rarely get success. They have to harness something marketable, not just their dreams.

- Tom

Not unethical at all.

But inhuman/impossible endeavor because no human knows enough about more than a handful of disciplines to create something useful. I prefer to focus on 1 niche. Specialize. Be a Go-To guy. Master 1 trade. Versus being a Jack of many.

Delegation and leverage. Where does it say that internet marketing has to be a solo activity?

If you want multiple sites, you just need to find a formula that's scalable.

As long as your contributing valuable content to the users, you're not crossing any ethical lines. There are numerous companies and organizations that successfully run multiple sites for various niches.

Though much like traffic, it always boils down to quality over quality. Especially with niches, it's better to have 10 sites that has quality and engaging content rather than 50 sites with dry and stagnant content. You want to build a community within your sites and grow it organically.

I don't understand how this would be unethical at all.

As long as you keep making money why not keep going.

It never becomes unethical. Do you think if you promote 2 different products in
the make money niche that one product is somehow cheating on the other?
Niche marketers generally don't start out in a hundred different niches at once.
They start with one niche, then get it up and going. Once it becomes profitable,
they add on niche #2, then #3, and so on until they have a ton of niche sites,
delivering passive income.

Can't see how that would be unethical... I think when you become good at building niche sites it can become like a new challenge for you to try build and rank new ones.