Let’s say you start two blogs at the same time and put an equal amount of effort into them. One is all American jocks, the other femmy cross-dressing twinks (to pick something pretty obscure). In other words one is in a big niche with lots of potential customers but also lots of competition, the other has a much smaller customer base but there’s less competition. Which do you think will be making more money in 6 months to a year? How about in 3 to 5 years?
There are a lot of variables… First is traffic. I’m not sure which will build traffic more quickly. In one case there’s tons of competition which could keep you down initially. But in 3 to 5 years I could see traffic on the jock blog being much higher than the femmy twinks blog. Agree? I mean there’s a ceiling you hit on small niches 'cause you’ve reached market saturation.
Once you have the traffic there’s the issue of conversion ratios. I would imagine the conversion ratios for big niches with lots of content are a lot worse than for very tight niches that don’t have much content. Is that correct? I mean the harder it is to find the content the more likely the person will be to pull out their wallet when they find what they’re looking for.
But even if you have “bad” conversion ratios on the popular niche, does it even matter? If you’re 1:100 on femmy twinks and 1:2000 on jocks, wouldn’t the jock blog get more than 20 times more traffic (in time) since it’s a much bigger audience?
So what are your thoughts on profitability vs the size of the niche?
The key thing imho missing is if you are attracted to both niches. (In your example, this would be mildly disturbing and probably somewhere in the DSM). Adopting the perspective ‘jocks are an easy niche’ I would argue doesn’t work if you can’t look at whatever sample content you’re posting and be like ‘wow, he’s cute as fuck’ – enthusiasm is key.
The more obscure niche I think in the end analysis may mean a lot more work (gaining trust of customers for example by keeping it on point) but unless your sponsors for it are only PPS you will gain a lot more profitability. If you have a thing for femmy cross-dressing twinks and manage to find a sponsor capable of providing just that, consistently, and do the same yourself, not only will people subscribe to your blog more and longer but I would argue they’d stay with the sponsor longer, hence you make quite a bit more off of rebills.
The more generic the niche the more it’s a throwaway game. I remember years back when even ‘gay’ was considered a niche. You have eighty sites doing more or less the same thing with their VS upsell indoors, the same models popping up on all of them, it’s just not going to keep people around. Contrast that with niche where the content really has no option but to be exclusive (I don’t think you’re likely to see these photosets on any mainstream twink site!), and by nature of the content the models that would agree to do it and be convincing are subject to less crossover…
So PPS sure you’ll see more I think in the general niche than in the specific one. But that’s just aiming at doing average well enough to get by. A niche is a lot more work but executed properly with understanding I’d say the end result is way more profitable…not to mention it’s more enjoyable, I’ve found this with my emo blogs.
I think its all about what you like. I’ve promoted everything from college girls, old women, indian women, twinks, hairy guys, uncut guys, ebony guys, etc etc.
it all makes money, but for longevity I say you need to promote something you like. otherwise you get burned out on what youre doing and then go look for a new niche to promote. i think its best to stick with 1 thing then promote the fuck out of it
i disagree. most of my best selling niches are things that don’t appeal to me on any level. uncut cocks, hairy pussies, older (over 50) hairy pussies, men over 55 - these are just a few of my longest term best sellers. they never let me down, and they never turn me on.
you don’t have to love something to write well about it. sometimes it’s an advantage not to, as i’ve seen a lot of webmasters who tend to use their own trigger words and phrases within their favorite niches, but those don’t turn out to be surfers’ favorites. i always use accurate descriptive terms if a niche doesn’t grab me, and that works out better for me than trying to use a bunch of “in the know” sexual terms.
Ironically, I’ve been discussing exactly the same things Rawtop has with other webmasters. I find a range of answers, and some are absolutely strict. One is go niche specific, find that unique market and stick with it. But that is not the only opinion.
For me all of this is particularly important because I’m planning my second blog. My first is muscle, brand new, bringing in some little sales too already so they say that is good. Who knows. But I’m beginning to resent being cooped in a niche. I’d rather have a much more open site. So that is one factor of doing something you like - what if you like variety in a site? I do sometimes. (Unlike Patti, I can’t do a site on something that at least is slightly fascinating to me.)
The other is get a general niche that brings in a lot of traffic, and then you can use it to send to your more specific niche sites. So what do you think of that? So far it is where I am leaning for my second site.
Guess I’m lucky. I started a niche blog because I liked it and there were only 3 other ones out there. I thought that I’d do it for fun on the side then was amazed at how much and how fast the traffic came in and how many sales it makes. By far, it is the best thing I have going and even though it only updates a few times a month due to limited content there are a lot of surfers that have bookmarked and come back.
there is gold in good small niches with websites to support it, just make sure you go with RevShare - lower sales will be made up by long and healthy rebilling.
so true! for years, i promoted 3 amateur tv sites. sales were great, but rebills were amazing - they went on forever. my average sale was worth $125 to me, which means average of $250 per sale. i was very surprised years later when i got a chance to see the member areas, which were small and updated only once a month with either pics or a video. but for their niches - tv foot fetish, tv bdsm and swinger tv’s - they were the only game in town.
[QUOTE=basschick;72590]so true! for years, i promoted 3 amateur tv sites. sales were great, but rebills were amazing - they went on forever. my average sale was worth $125 to me, which means average of $250 per sale. i was very surprised years later when i got a chance to see the member areas, which were small and updated only once a month with either pics or a video. but for their niches - tv foot fetish, tv bdsm and swinger tv’s - they were the only game in town.
i love underpromoted niches :)[/QUOTE]
But how much effort are you talking about putting into a blog like that? It’s not something where you’d try to do a blog post a day, is it? Seems small niches would warrant an update every 2 or 3 weeks - right? I was thinking more on the scale of 3-7 posts a week when I asked my original question. I guess my niche blog was a little too niche - you’d never put the same level of work into that that you put into a jocks blog.
So I guess my question would be if you put the same effort into i guess a group of small niche blogs that you put into something like a jock blog, which is a better use of time? which will make more money? i get the fact that the niche blogs are good, steady income that you can almost set and forget, but can’t working on a big category exceed that if you do it right?
why not? i put up a new gallery every day with a full paragraph of text, and the results were great. people were bookmarking my hub, lots and lots of google traffic.
[QUOTE=rawTOP;72609]But how much effort are you talking about putting into a blog like that? It’s not something where you’d try to do a blog post a day, is it? Seems small niches would warrant an update every 2 or 3 weeks - right? I was thinking more on the scale of 3-7 posts a week when I asked my original question. I guess my niche blog was a little too niche - you’d never put the same level of work into that that you put into a jocks blog.
So I guess my question would be if you put the same effort into i guess a group of small niche blogs that you put into something like a jock blog, which is a better use of time? which will make more money? i get the fact that the niche blogs are good, steady income that you can almost set and forget, but can’t working on a big category exceed that if you do it right?[/QUOTE]
