Need Advice In My Niche

Hello Sam

Time for some tough love I think.

You say: "I Need Some Advice in My Niche". But what niche? The anything and everything niche? Truly, you are not in any niche as far as I am concerned. You can not target everyone for anything, you have to target for specific interest. It is like you are shooting a shotgun into a field, hoping you will hit something. That is not the way to hunt!

Then your domain name: "bestplace2.com" ??? That tells me nothing of what your site is about, but OK, I'm interested in learning how to build a hydrogen bomb so I go to your site, because surely it would be the bestplace2 learn how to do that. But nothing! Now I'm really disappointed!

Then your website: Sorry but it looks as old as the hills. You have obviously put a lot of time and effort into it but it doesn't attract or inspire me at all. On a scale of 1 to 100 I would be hard pressed to give you the 1. You have less than 3 seconds to make an impression on someone. In that time they have to decide to leave or stay. In that time you have to show them they are in the right place to find what they are searching for. My first impression on opening your site was that it was about real estate or houses. But NO. What is it about? I still don't know!

Please take my advice in a positive way Sam. I'v been there too, my first year in IM I made US$408 for my whole first year. I just didn't know what I was doing. Now I am CEO of one of the largest privately owned Agencies in the world and I sure as hell know how IM works. So don't give up, if you have the ambition and passion for what you are doing you will succeed. You have to graduate IM Kindergarten before you can graduate IM University.

Cheers
Lindy

IMO it's not the appearance that's such a big issue...these two sites look incredibly old school...

https://news.ycombinator.com/news

The Space Review: essays and commentary about the final frontier

(I've seen serious business owners tweet articles from these sites)

...it's about WHO is visiting them.

Scientists and academics like the "no frills" journalistic appearance.

But who is coming to your site, Sam?

What traffic sources and methods to bring them over are you using?

Or have you been simply hoping for organic traffic and "the right people" to come along on their own?

Hello Jason

Your examples are certainly old school. I think "news.ycombinator/news" might have been designed before computers were invented

But you still get a fairly good idea of what those two sites are about from their domain names.

And those sites are not commercial sites, they are not competing against the other 100 million sites out there that are trying to sell you something.

If I compare your site to Sam's:

Your domain name tells me exactly what your site is about. Your Header attracts my immediate attention and tells me even more: Sales Tactics > Unorthodox Business Development Expertise

Sam's domain doesn't tell me anything re what the site is about. Then it tells me: Best Place 2 Find Just About Anything.

Well, there are a lot of "anything's" out there. I'v already done searches on How To Make a Hydrogen Bomb and Bunny Rabbits. Maybe he's adding those next but for now I'm disappointed so I'm going elsewhere!

Sam needs to niche down. Just on his header he is trying to stuff 5 different niches into one site, then he has even more when you look through the site.

Then his domain name should be more specific to each niche. That helps gain organic traffic too.

I think site appearance does matter, most of us have been brought up in a very graphical age with magazines, movies, music clips, video games and so on. The better the WOW factor the more it attracts and holds our attention.

Anyway, that's my thinking.

Cheers
Lindy

Wowzz!

You definitely drifted alright...

It's like you want to go for a short trip for a few hours on a boat just around your local beach to catch some fish for fun...

... and ended up lost at sea for several months, having to survive by catching wild birds that landed on your boat, eating any fish you could get so as not to starve, and killing turtles and drinking their blood to stay hydrated.

But:

NO MATTER!

This is an issue easily solved.

There are a few ways you can go about it.

Having a look at your site, it looks pretty good.

Lots of comments. Looks like you're getting decent amounts of traffic.

Problem seems to be that you wondered too far off.

Based on the domain name, I'm guessing you started out wanting to do something more closely related to travel (since you were all about places)...

... but in the end the word places became synonymous with businesses, websites.

1st thing:

I would stick to just doing blog posts about places.

Choose something to focus on. Travel or Geolocation seems to stand out the most in my mind.

- Best Places to Honeymoon Without Spending A Fortune
- Best Places To Ski If You Want To Catch A Yeti
- Best Places to Start A Business Without Any Income Tax
- And so on and so forth...

Seems like it would make a nice site. Global travel and location exploration.

And you would be able to make a decent income using advertising and affiliate marketing.

How to deal with the older, out of topic, out of focus posts, you ask?

Simple.

Just tie it back to travel.

Talking about making money?

Change up the post and add some talk about making money FOR TRAVEL.

Talking about fashion?

What to wear when you travel.

Etc.

Just choose a niche, and just touch up all your posts to tie back to the main topic in some way.

It doesn't have to be travel.

Your new focus could be on the best places to find BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES.

Since it looks like you have a lot of popular posts about making money.

Just tie back all the irrelevant posts to talk about making money somehow.

Talking about fashion? Tie it back to wearing the right clothes for success. Or fashion trends you can make money from.

Talking about travel? Then talk about how you can spend the affiliate income you made to travel farther while using up less coin.

No real niche, design is really lacking (hero image is terrible).

How are you going to monetize it? Ads?

Why don't you do a money management / wealth building advice / money saving website like mrmoneymustache or hustlermoneyblog.com

Absolutely loving the feedback!!

Learning a lot already from the great feedback so far. Not worried about any critics as it is helping me understand how other people are viewing my website.

Please keep the great ideas coming. This is exactly the kind of information I was hoping to hear. I am still fairly new at this and learning each day.

Love you all.
Sam Frederiksen

My first impression when I read "bestplace2" would be geared more towards travel. I think if you are sticking to a travel niche then this is a great idea but as others have mentioned you have gotten off track, which is easy enough to do.

If I'm ever searching starting with "best place to..." i would be phrasing a travel question as opposed to "best place to learn how to fix a watch", "best place to find bedding sets", "best place dog leash" if I'm searching for anything specific product or service I wouldn't be phrasing it with the subject of your website UNLESS it's travel. Hope this helps you with a different perspective