Anyone here still doing niche sites and doing well? Just looking for some motivation I guess.

I still have one micro niche site. It makes like $100 a month at the most because it markets only one single product. I haven't updated it in over a year. I think if I put more effort into it it'd make more but I'm fine with that profit.

Your plan is worth it..Happy writing.

It's not as easy as it once was but if you have the SEO skills you can pull it off.

I recommend taking a look at Niche Pursuits | Find Business Ideas, Niche Websites, and Much More! and checking out the Niche Site Projects posts there's a full overview of exactly what you need to do to rank small niche sites based around single product types.

2 articles written, each around 600 words. Page 1 looks like a lot of authority sites. 2 of them are YouTube videos. PR of the top 10 pages averages at 2 or 3, with only one having a PR of 0.

I'm worried here, so could really use more motivation... and advice, of course.

Affiliate programs tend to pay more than adsense so look into that.

It's still viable to rank small niche sites for sure if you do your keyword research properly upfront and have the SEO skills.

Micro niches were the internet craze for a while, not so much anymore. There were a few expensive courses and coaching programs on this a few years ago.

My personal opinion is that the money on this topic was almost exclusively made in selling the course to internet marketers.

You can still make a little from these sites but not nearly as much as those selling the idea made.

Kate

There is a big difference though between niche site and micro niche sites. The OP is asking about micro niche sites.

In order to answer your question I would need to search my database with some advanced filters
Find websites (domains) that match the following criteria:
Indexed pages < 25
Domain authority (OSE) < 25
Registeration date > 2012
Top 10 results > 10

I believe there are thousands of websites that match this criteria. Would this information be useful to spy on micro niche competitors? What filters would you use?

Larry are you referring to Sniper types sites or something else?

I think we are actually talking about 2 different things.

Websites that have good content and are built up the right way will also have a chance to do well.

I do believe that Google Sniper sites have nearly the same chance for success.

In fact my college thesis was on comparing the 2. Out of 40 Google Sniper sites we made almost no money for the entire 6 months.

When we built up niche sites with valuable content and kept building it up we did well.

Kate

I did a quick search and noticed that there are tens of thousands 'thin' websites (less than 10 indexed pages) that rank for at least one keyword on the 1st page of Google SERPs.

These are not exactly niche sites, but I can use filters to find domains that have certain keywords in domain.



And some 10 page sites hosted at cctld's

I'm going to expand upon this further because I was involved in a business coop with the brightest students in my university on the topic of internet products that work.

It was a coop between the journalist majors(me) and the business majors. Our goal was to make money online, as well as trying out current products on the market.

We had over 50 people assigned to make this project work.

The Google Sniper sites made almost nothing and that is based on hard work from everyone in the coop.

Creating niche sites with good content did extremely well. One of our websites was making $8.000 per month within the 6 months time frame. About 20% of our niche websites made nothing at all. Our income was made through adsense and Clickbank products.

When the course ended we sold our websites on Flippa and we all got to share in the revenue. It was a great experience.

I hope that helps.

Kate

Larry we had some of the best minds in the nation putting these together. Our business school is among the tops in the nation.

Kate

Larry again we are talking about different things. You created a website and worked on getting backlinks and built it up. It may be a matter of semantics but in my mind that is a perfect example of a niche website.

Kate

I do need to add 1 thing in here to be fair when we did the Sniper sites we did not do any backlinking to those websites at all.

We simply followed the instructions for creating the websites.

Kate

In my humble opinion, to make money from websites the most important thing you can do is spend time 'living as the site'.

What do I mean?
Well I sell mostly physical products, so it's really important for traffic that my sites show up in the 'conversation' as it were.
For me that means plenty of associated online properties, like FB pages, Google listings, PInterest and Twitter accounts etc.

In my experience (and I've been selling online since 2007) diving into a site and building up all the social stuff, then viewing, commenting, pinning, tweeting, etc etc as the 'voice of your site' is a vital part of my marketing.

It's not hard, but it does take time, and for me that means running fewer sites.

Once was a time when I ran thin, niche afiliate sites, but let's be honest, unless you're promoting very high ticket items, it usually pays less than minimum wage.

So I completely changed my strategy with these niche affiliate sites, pulling back from the classic review and single product angle, to just add video content about the product category in very general terms, with just a couple of ads. (Much softer. Not as productive, but much less effort)

Granted these sites rarely make me the same kind of money that they once did, but now they require virtually no maintenance, which is great as I find it almost impossible to ever 'ditch a domain', even when it's not performing.

I digress.
What I wanted to say, is that to make a site really successful nowadays, you need to invest not just time and effort, but also a little bit of your soul.

For me that no longer means a set and forget, rinse and repeat strategy.
Instead it means find my best performing sites, and concentrate on making them perform even better.

In my case that means 'living as the site' for at least a couple of hours 2 or 3 times a week.

Chasing keywords is a time-consuming and maddening process, my advice would be to avoid it if you can.
Focus, Focus, Focus

About your articles. What is your native tongue? I don't care much about articles in English, but I could use content written in Hindi. Do you happen to know Sanskrit by any chance? I could use some help with the Vedas as well as any help building my language teaching software.
And finally, are you interested in producing content for my Indian (*.in) domains/websites?

i think you are going to get many opinions on this.
but remember you have to go very-ultra low competition keywords.
main keyword 1000 searhes /month
and build posts around it with very low competition keywords
and keeping adding content...

Loving the what do tadpoles eat site. Micro niche indeed.

I put up a load of micro niche` sites a couple of years ago and they were showing up well in Google and making a few bob here and there. Since Google did it's revamps they disappeared completely
They still get visits on a daily basis, but I suspect that's just the Spam-bots doing their rounds.

Hope you have better luck -

I have close to 400.

Some tips:

- 1 Product per site;
- EMD;
- White BG;
- Clean Layout;
- Minimum 15 articles (15 pages) and drip feed thereafter;
- If you do adsense, make ads stand out, 1 per page, and use my other tips to avoid bounce rate and increase CTR;
- Use mixture of text, images, and video;
- Make site engaging (lowers bounce rate);
- Pay for or write high-quality articles;
- Ensure design is clean but not too pro - personal sites convert best (think of someone upkeeping a site where they're a fanatic about the product);
- Contact, TOS, privacy policy, xml site map, site map;
- Update weekly;
- Social media integration.

As far as SEO goes, that's actually very easy if you choose the right keyword. Think natural. 5 years ago, I used to rank these puppies in 48 hours like there was no tomorrow. Nowadays, due to all the algo changes, it takes longer and you have to optimize in a realistic manner. My best advice here is social signals. Why? Because you can actually go mad here and it still looks natural due to the fact that sites often go viral.

You'd also do well to privacy block your domains, use different registrars, different hosting and IPs.