Niche Sites: The Understated Advantage
By: Brian Turner
I’ve seen a few conversations recently where people have suggested building generic over niche sites, as a general way to develop a stronger presence online.
The most recent is Rand Fishkin’s Five Reasons Why It’s Better to be Big & Popular than Small & Niche.
The trouble is, Rand’s post confuses niche development with microsites IMO.
Microsites vs niche
My personal definition of a microsite is something created just to target a specific keyword. I’d say MFA sites play on this a lot. It’s not really anything to do with targeting a niche – it’s just a narrow string of keywords. You set up a site, just to have some kind of limited presence in that area.
Niche sites in the proper sense, as I use it, actively develop themselves into useful resources in their niche. And the amazing thing about hitting a niche is that it’s incredibly easy to become an authority in a niche, especially in emergent markets. Anyone with SEO/marketing knowledge already has an unfair advantage here.
So how would I actually define a niche? Simple, really. Take DMOZ as an example – the front page shows a range of generic categories.
Let’s click through computers. What I see there is niches – Computer Law, Hacking, Supercomputing, MIS. Yes, I see these as niches – slam a syndicated news site in any of these areas with a heavy resource section and blog coverage, and I bet you would see a great return on investment from natural link profiles.
A microsite? Let’s click through algorithms. What do I see? Pseudorandom Numbers, Compression algorithms, Numerical Analysis.
Okay, you build a site in these areas, you’re going to be very limited in what you can do. Can you write regular syndicated news on any of these? Probably not really. A blog? Sure – but unlikely to update often, and because you probably would find it hard to find someone to write in these areas, you’re never going to develop authority status. A few generic comments, trackbacks to other blogs in these areas, and you have a microsite – maybe fine for link placements, but not much else.
But develop a resource site dedicated to covering Algorithms in general as a niche? You could build that into an authority – if you take the time to do so.
So, niche is good. Niche is playable. The way you play is by the book – no switch and bait – just plain old good fashioned useful web publishing.
Benefits of Niche
I’ve already weighed up some of the pros and cons of generic vs niche targeting here: Consolidation vs Niche Targeting: Pros and Cons.
And though I was uncertain then, I’m more certain now – niche rocks!
The big problem for generic sites is that they may offer bigger potential, but they also face far stiffer competition.
And unless you are able to directly compete in generic spaces, that means you will develop little presence, little traffic, few links, and profitability will be minimal.
Attempt to develop a niche site, and you can develop a strong presence, good traffic, great links, and authority status. And profits to investment are relatively higher.
I’ve been pretty amazed to see just how well my niche sites have been performing, and the amazing way they collect links. Yes, I do push these niche sites, but the effort is no way as great as with generic sites.
In fact, if asked if my generic sites are authorities, I would have to pause and reflect. A couple of them are fairly decent to some extent. But are they really authorities?
Asked if my niche sites are authorities? I’d say definitely in their niche, and a certain extent outside of that.
More pointers on niche sites
Another couple of great points about niche sites:
1. You can widen their remit later. I accidentally developed a forum in a certain niche. Through the niche targeting, I’m now going to slowly widen it to cover related niches, and springboard from that into generic. By then I should already have developed a decent authority because of its developing niche presence, which can then be leveraged into generic areas;
2. Eggs in many baskets. It’s a risk thing. Invest everything into one big site – Google farts – your site is toast. Rightly or wrongly, it could take ages to get this addressed. But own a number of developing niche sites, and if one takes a hit, the others likely won’t. We’re not doing anything blackhat here, so we shouldn’t invite the whole slew of niche sites to take a hit, and the fact they can rise as authorities naturally means unlikely to do so anyway.
Overall: niche vs generic
I’ve been amazed to see the traffic my niche sites develop. No, they may not get hundreds of thousands of uniques per month, but most of my generic sites don’t either. In fact, my strongest niche sites easily compete on traffic levels against my strongest generics – even surpass it in some areas.
And what’s even better is some of the niche areas can be really profitable.
I bought a forum last year – just because it was a forum – and after a clean up, just let it run. I do very little work with it. But it has consistently been my highest earning adsense site and one of my highest traffic sites. Just because it is not simply a niche, but also because as a SEO I can easily beat most of the competition even just through on-page SEO stuff, and use a few discrete links where most useful.
I see a similar pattern with niche news sites I cover – they require less work, but offer better returns on an honest webpublishing platform.
Of course, some suck, but some do brilliantly – Microsoft.com even links to one of them – and my most successful niche news site out-traffics my most successful generic news site.
And by running a number of niche sites, I not only limit my risks, but also open up multiple income stream potentials, none of which I’ve seriously explored.
So – when it comes down to planning sites, pick a niche – especially a more emergent one if you can. This is one of the very few instances where “build and they will come” will actually make sense.
This is because niche still offers one of the last frontiers of opportunity on the web – for developing an online presence that offers potential for creating an authority site. And once you have any kind of authority, you create a platform for revenue generation you can eventually look to tap into.
