Creating your own niche website

If you’ve reached this page, then you’re probably looking at creating your own niche website like gameroominfo.com.  I started this website in October 2016 as a way to inform people about pinball, bubble hockey, foosball, game room decor, home theater, and more.  I started out by making my godaddy.com account a multisite web host and buying the gameroominfo.com domain name.  After I got those things setup, I installed WordPress and picked up a theme off themeforest.net.

Once I got that stuff started, I started writing some posts about bubble hockey, pinball, and other game room decor stuff.  Some of the articles are pretty good, some of them are not good at all.  I was trying to discover to some degree what Google would rank high and what it wouldn’t rank high.  What I discovered over the past year is:

  • Very long articles with lot of good information pull in consistent traffic.
  • Small little articles less than 300 words only pull in sporadic traffic for the most part, and some hardly ever get visited
  • Small little articles can actually pull in a decent number of people if they’re done on keywords where the competition is light and the number of people looking for that information is high.
  • Some of my longer articles like on how to build a game room never really got many visits

After I wrote quite a few articles, I started trying social media to see if that influences numbers at all.  I first made a Facebook page and start cross posting my articles there, didn’t make any difference at all.  I’d have to look back, but I think over the first 8 months I had a Facebook page I probably only got 1 or 2 visitors total from there, kind of a waste of time.  I then started linking my stuff on Pinterest.  That got me some traffic occasionally (maybe 1 a week) but I think part of that is that I don’t know how to correctly market there plus Pinterest is mainly women (whereas my website is probably visited more by men).  So those things together didn’t add up to much success unfortunately.

I also tried Instagram.  Evidently, I’m too old to get it, lol.  I don’t really understand how that can drive traffic to your website.  I must be missing something, someone much younger than me will have to fill me in.  🙂

In October 2017 after listening to a bunch of podcasts talking about monetizing your niche website, I decided to try it myself.  I was a little skeptical, but I decided to take the leap and try it out to see how it goes.  I figured at worst I could probably make enough to cover website expenses.

First thing I decided to do was to get enrolled in the Amazon Affiliate program here:

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/

It’s a pretty easy process, and the main thing is that I have to sell three things (or maybe it’s to three different people, I can’t remember) in 180 days or my account could get closed.  After I got that going, I had to go through and change all of my Amazon links from normal links to affiliate links.  There is some confusion about affiliate links I think sometimes, basically all that means is that if you refer somebody to a product they buy, you get a small percentage of the sale.  It doesn’t cost the buyer anything extra, so it’s really a win-win for everyone involved.  In fact, you don’t even have to buy the product in the link, for the next 24 hours if that user buys anything the affiliate will get credit for it.

Converting the links is a pretty easy process but it is a little time consuming.  In fact I’m still not sure if I got all mine converted, lol.  Oh well, not a big deal in any case, not like this is supposed to be an income source or anything.

Next thing I got signed up for was google adsense here:

https://www.google.com/adsense/start/

It pays you some small amount per 1000 views and some amount per click.  I set it up to be a banner ad at the top of my page although there are a bunch of other ways to do it.  I just wanted to see how the two would do against each other, Amazon vs Google for niche site revenue.  I think you do have to make $100 before Google will pay you anything, so if your site is small it might take a while to get to that level.

After those two, I went and got signed up for one more affiliate, ICE, the maker of Super Chexx Pro.  This took a while longer than the other two with a multistage approval process.  The process is basically getting approved by ShareASale first, and after that you have to apply to get on their ICE account for bubble hockey.  Unfortunately, there is only a reward for referring a buyer of a new machine and not parts, which is a bummer because I think you could make a decent amount off parts (new game sales are probably pretty limited, they’ve said they’ve sold 40,000 over 35 years, so only a little over 1,000 per year).  The referral is either $100 or $150 per machine, so it’s not very likely that you’d make any amount of consequence, but worth a try.  🙂

Niche Monetization so far

So I know the question you’re all wondering is, how well has it worked so far?  Well, you’re probably going to find the results hilarious.  Here are the Amazon results so far:

  • 71 clicks
  • 3 items bought (one order)
  • $1.45 commision
  • length (20 days so far)

So you can see, 71 clicks, 3 sales for $1.35 over the past 30 days.  That’s actually amazingly bad, evidently I’ve found the only way to stop Amazon sales, going through my link gives everyone extremely cold feet.  Maybe it will pick up closer to Black Friday and Christmas but I kind of doubt it.  Disappointing to say the least.

The last one is the ICE affiliate revenue.  Here are the results from that:

  • Nothing

As expected, nothing so far.  I’m not expecting that to go anywhere, if I get one sale this year I’ll be amazed.  There aren’t nearly as many stats for ShareASale, so even if people are clicking the link and not ordering, pretty sure I won’t know it.

So far, the total is $1.55, pretty amazing.  🙂  At that rate, in 5 years I might make $100.  If you read all the niche site creation guides, they all talk about making $60 to $100 a month with their niche site.  I don’t know what kind of niches they’re in, but it’s obvious the riches aren’t in my niches, lol.

Next steps?  I’m not 100% sure.  I’ll probably wait a couple months before doing anything too major.  Probably the one thing I probably should try is becoming an ebay affiliate, I see a lot of sites with ebay ads on them so there’s probably a reason why.  A lot of the stuff I write about is bigger type items so ebay might be more effective than Google or Amazon.  There might be a better banner ad network than Google but at this point I don’t think I have the traffic to quality for them.  Here’s my traffic over the last month:

As you can see, it’s climbing, but part of that was due to running some experimental Facebook ads to get likes and visits.  In fact, I’ll just share that now as well.  I spent $30 on Facebook ads in an effort to boost my likes and give my site more ‘social proof’.  Running that in the US, on people who liked pinball, were male, and were the ages between 25 and 40 resulted in a like costing about 17 cents.  I then switched it to women and ended up with the cost around 20 cents.  I had heard that advertising overseas is much cheaper, so I tried India and Brazil for advertising as well.  I think both of them ran about 5 cents per like.  In total I ended up with 300+ additional likes for $30, which isn’t too bad.  Does it really matter?  Probably not, but at least now when people visit my Facebook page it at least looks like I have some social presence.

I then tried some ads that merely tried to drive traffic to my website, about $10 worth.  These ads ended up costing me about 33 cents per visit, not too bad of a cost but they didn’t really accomplish anything.  About the only thing noteworthy about the visitors is that they interacted with the site at about the same level as a person who came from Google, so it wasn’t a total loss to find that out.  Maybe in the future if I really needed traffic for some reason it would be worth it.

Udemy Class Experiment

So after the Amazon and Google results were so poor, I decided to make a course on Udemy.  If you’ve never been there before, it’s basically an online course website where people make courses that they sell to other people.  Most aren’t very successful, but occasionally someone will hit it out of the park with a course.  I thought I would try making a course to see how it goes.

My first course I made was on flag football, definitely a limited appeal course but hopefully one I thought might have a niche audience.  I put up the course here:

https://www.udemy.com/coaching-youth-flag-football/

On the slim chance you’re interested, if you use the coupon code FLAGFOOTBALL it’ll take the price down to $10.  Too early to say how it’s going to do, I think the course actually has some pretty good information but will people find it?  And are people willing to spend money on it?  I did set it to free initially to get some ‘social proof’ but didn’t get any reviews unfortunately (or earnings) so don’t be fooled by the large number of students, they’re not really real earnings (I didn’t make $5000 on my course, in fact I didn’t make a dollar so far).

Conclusion

Well hopefully all of this information will help you out if you’re thinking about making a niche website.  Luckily I wasn’t doing it to make money but to have fun and try an experiment.  If you feel like supporting my website, you can see all the links around, just click one of the Amazon ones the next time you feel like buying something and then order something else, I’ll get credit for it.  Then you’ll show up on the earnings report next month when I update this, probably get a good laugh as well.

I’ll try and update this page with new earnings reports and information that I obtain along the way, maybe I’ll discover some secret that magically causes my traffic and earnings to skyrocket (well to be honest, just one good order on Amazon would cause it to skyrocket currently, lol).  Things I’m thinking about for next month or two:

  • ebay affiliate?
  • drop shipping?
  • amazon fulfillment?

The last two though are a lot more involved and require a lot more capital and planning than I’ve currently dedicated to this project.  Of course, the upside is much higher but with the success I’ve currently had I’m a little gun-shy on the whole thing (basically, podcasts and websites rave about niche website earnings and amazon fulfillment, well if the website earns so poorly am I going to get suckered on the Amazon fulfillment thing too?).  Just need to do a little more research on the whole thing.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll update this again next month.  By the way, the podcasts I like to listen to are:

  • Pat Flynn “Smart Passive Income”
  • The Side Hustle Show
  • Online Course Masters
  • Late Night Internet Marketing
  • eCommerceFuel