THE niche website strategy that works – Useful Niche Websites

Useful Niche Websites – an alternative to “thin” sites and how you can turn Googles recent updates into a very big opportunity.

What a roller coaster couple of years for Internet Marketers!

I really feel for you if you were wiped out (as many were) in last weeks EMD (Exact Match Domain) update Google rolled out. I am not an SEO expert by any means but it is very clear that Google is waging an all out war on what it considers to be “thin” and spammy websites. And trying to stay ahead of Google is a waste of time, because they continue to find new ways to target “thin” sites (first Panda, then Penguin and now EMDs) and wipe even legitimate business off the search map. It could seem like a constant battle, but in this post I want to explain how I think we got to this point of no return and how we can actually profit from it.

First, some very brief history on me – I got hammered by Google too. Since Panda hit about 18 months ago I estimate I personally have lost at least $150k from affiliate revenue as a direct result of Panda and Penguin. If you want to see what happened to my income just have a look at my August income report. Unfortunately there were also a lot of legitimate websites caught up in these machine changes too. I believe I was one of them. I have never engaged in anything remotely spammy – sure I swapped links about five years ago and I put lots of keywords into my copy but back then that was practically considered best practice.

However, as is so often the case, opportunity comes from adversity.

After the Penguin update, I decided I wouldn’t spend any more time trying to stay one step ahead of Google. In my quest to earn good money online again, I looked at lots of people who are making money and I found one common thread to follow.

Back to Basics

For me being an entrepreneur online was always all about creating value so that I could leverage the power of working online and be cubicle free. So back to basics – build Useful Niche Websites (click to tweet). So this is exactly what I am doing.

Take a look at anyone making really good money online: Pat Flynn for example, is he worried about about Google? Well maybe a little, for his security guard training site, but his concern is more about owning the niche for his blog. (Actually based on my research, Pat has nothing to worry about with the security site either because he has many quality links from people using the security guard training site an example of a site that makes the majority of it income from Adsense)

So what do I mean when I say “useful” website exactly?

Useful Niche Websites v “Thin”

I am being overly simplistic with this comparison because it is the plainest way I can show that if you are focused on being an entrepreneur rather than trying to stay ahead of Google, not only are you are far more likely to do well, but it just makes more sense. The next most obvious question is: So how do I create a “useful” niche website? This is what I am doing to get there:

1) Identify a problem that people are having online,

2) in a niche where people are willing to spend money.

3) Develop a solution to this problem.

4) Build a website that provides the solution to people, and

5) work at becoming a good online marketer. (Staying within the bounds of Google’s newly defined parameters is helpful!) This is enough to make money while you sleep.

If you want to earn more than you need:

6) Create systems for what you do and outsource (hello Manilla).

Let’s look at #1 above more closely – people often have a difficult time identifying a problem and developing a solution. Here lies the massive opportunity in today’s Google landscape… In the past, “thin” websites worked, and some continue to work, but they are fairly rapidly getting wiped out. But those keywords still exist and this is leaving a very big hole – a hole that needs to be filled by useful niche websites (click to tweet).

This brings me to the website I am currently building. It is not yet a month old and on Thursday it has had only 90 unique visitors. From these 90 visitors it has made two affiliate sales already! $20 in income. Now this is no guarantee of success but it does mean that if I can get more traffic to the site, more conversions will follow. Based on what I can see so far, it should be easy to get good traffic because the the top ranked websites in my niche have all used spammy techniques to get traffic.

Following on from my post last week I got a great comment from Dan:

….. I am also very interested in Micro Niches. I am excited to go through the whole process of getting a site live and generating traffic. My main focus with my micro site is to gain the experience that will help me with the bigger site.

My response was:

….. the main problem I personally have with this approach is that the only way to get traffic for these sites is through techniques that Google is clearly trying really hard to detect. As we have seen your site can go from hero to zero very quickly. For me personally, my living comes from my online efforts and I just can’t afford to spend any time on things that may not work two years, one year or even three months down the road. As an idea, why not build a useful micro niche site?

I feel like my response was worth repeating. Thank you so much for reading.

If you want to start creating useful niche websites right now, join my mailing list and I will send you an email that explains a method I have used many times over to create massive value and make my sites useful. I would also love to hear what you think works best online these days. Please leave your comments below.