How do you guys operate in so many diverse niches?

[gcomt]

I consistently see people making sites in smallish niches where there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of competition. But, it seems to me that there would be a lot of knowledge overload going into a different niche every time you wanted to set up a site/product/promotion. I meant in terms of writing content and learning about the market you are going after. Writing content could easily be outsourced, but you'd still have to learn the ins and outs of different industries. I have been trying to tackle one niche, but it seems like everyone else is in two or three different ones at once. Is this something I can work on once I have something running in one niche?

 

[CCarter]

Are you talking about MFA (Made for Adsense) sites OR running multiple businesses?

The MFA model is to generate enough traffic with marketing - mostly SEO, so each property is bringing in dollars. With that model, you'll need multiple sites up and your business IS having websites that generate dollars. I'm not a big fan of that for the long term, but meh, people make a good living off of it so can't knock the hustle.

Back in my day, when I did have multiple properties I never went in-depth knowledge wise since I never wrote any of the content, just looked up titles and quick descriptions for the writers on what topics to talk about. Once you got a system, you had it off to a manager with a VA/outsourcing team and that's a wrap.

With the internet it's not that hard to learn about the market you are going after since wikipedia is usually my first source of knowledge for a new topic, then from there I branch out and figure out who the dominate authorities are once I understand a topic. It's rare to get into a niche where there is not some basic knowledge on wikipedia about it. It may not be the greatest, but as of now it's a lot better then the old days before Google and Wikipedia.

Running multiple businesses online is a whole different story - that takes a beast to do.

 

[Indian]

Back in 2007 I managed multiple adsense websites. I used to give 1 whole month for a project. After its done, I update each website twice in a week. That strategy worked and I replicated it to 30 properties.

 

[Callum Short]

Back in 2007 I managed multiple adsense websites. I used to give 1 whole month for a project. After its done, I update each website twice in a week. That strategy worked and I replicated it to 30 properties.

Hi Indian, can you provide more information on the power of these sites and how much they were able to make per month?

 

[maximus]

Managing multiple niches really depends on your abilities, personality and age. MFA made sense when i was starting out but personally i learned never to rely on 1 source ( google ) for money. That is a recipe for eventual disaster.

I cant remember who/where i heard this idiom but a good recipe for financial success is by being very very good and very very little.

#ballinisahabit

 

[Samwise89]

For me, getting into more and more niches only meant that I had to automatically scale backlinks to get any results on all the sites. Take a wild guess where that landed me

I think the advice of spreading eggs in many baskets is good later, but early in the game it's best we focus and work 200% hard on one single project. And do it right so its a guaranteed win in some capacity and not a penalization.

 

[eliquid]

Im sure people will disagree with me, but running multiple sites ( which could just be 1 business ) is much easier then running multiple business.

IMHO, you should only run 1 business, 2 tops. What that business does though could be multiple things ( like multiple niches in a MFA empire ).

In both, outsourcing and employees ( or vested partners ) can help push the business further.

 

[Net30]

The guys with 100's of micro-niche sites are doing just that, very very micro sites on micro topics for very low hanging fruit with little competition. They just order crap content and get it to rank, requiring zero knowledge about the niche. They may even spin content for the money sites. They just want traffic and a crap presentation so people click the ads for better options. Its a bottom-rung approach that ends in disaster

 

[urban zen]

Most of the MFAs have disappeared off the search already, but do some of you still have profitable MFA pages that still makes good monthly ROI?

many of the thin info sites I've came across are doing url shortening, amazon items, and masked affiliate links to generate profit. but then it's been a while since i surf other websites. Even some of the more niche forums that used to have adwords sidebar have removed them.

 

[stackcash]

I believe that people operating a ton of sites on a bunch of different topics aren't really "in" each niche. They have just created a profitable process that they can repeat over and over if a given niche meets a certain set of criteria.

Operating within a niche means that you have a fundamental understanding of what makes both businesses and consumers tick, where the future is in the niche, what's about to die out, etc. Basically, you'll have an intimate knowledge about everything in that particular industry. It's not really possible to be able to do this across tens of niches at the same time.

I think you either need to just focus on a niche you feel passionate about and grow your business from inside, or create a business model (such as MFAs, for example) that can be repeated ad infinitum. You don't need to have such an intimate knowledge of each niche in which you apply your model - you just need to do enough research to know you can make money...which is the obvious point of all of this.

 

[Nate]

Pretend there's a continuum that looks like this:

Unshareable---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Must share
Unlinkable-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Linkworthy
[Shitty content]------[Average web content]------[Above average web content]------[Remarkable content]

Shitty content written:
This is the classic MFA/microniche type stuff. Depth of knowledge doesn't matter at all here, since there's literally 0 effort put into quality. You give your cheap writers (usually $.01/word or less, usually offshore) a keyword, and they write an article about it, usually filled with fluff. You can produce 1000 sites in 1000 different topics and it doesn't matter, because the content doesn't matter.

This model really doesn't work anymore unless you're doing churn and burn (ranking w/spam, and replacing the site once it gets penalized with a new one)

Linkworthy? No one would ever link to this crap, so the only way to get links is via spam or PBNs.
Shareable? More likely to get reported to Google as spam than shared.

Average web content:
Most web content isn't special or remarkable in any way. Its boring, filled with factual errors, and the occasional spelling mistake/grammar error as well. But it can still rank in Google. It can still be MFA.

You don't need to hire niche experts to write your content, but you need someone who can at least write a decent article and do some research, and some minimal thought needs to be put into your site. Native english writers are a given.

Its fairly easy to run multiple sites in multiple niches with this type of content since you only need superficial knowledge of your niche. But you still need to be decent with systems and have a team of decent writers and well trained VAs if you want to maintain a minimal level of quality.

If you're having trouble managing more than one niche at this stage, it's probably because you haven't spent enough time in each niche to setup systems that can automate parts (or all) of the publishing/promotion process.

Linkworthy? Not really...no one's going to link to it naturally unless maybe if its been showing up #1 for a really high volume keyword for a long time. But its at least good enough that if you're doing some forced tactic like broken link building, its not going to get outright rejected everytime.
Shareable? No, except in certain niches. E.g. celebrity gossip or stupid list articles.

Above average content:
This is where you usually have someone who knows what they're talking about and who is also a very good writer. There has been lots of effort put into fact-checking, understanding the needs the reader, and keeping their attention.

The owner of the site doesn't need to be an expert in the niche necessarily, but should have a decent understanding of the niche through research, and be an expert in online publishing/marketing. The writers should definitely be experts.

By hiring experts and putting systems in place to track user/social engagement, what's going on in the niche, and having systems in place to control quality + promote content, the owner can still run multiple sites in multiple niches, but at this point there's definitely some bandwidth penalty if the owner is dabbling in too many niches.

It makes a lot more sense to focus on a handful of niches (maybe even a single niche) and take advantage of the benefit of scale when you're playing in this sandbox.

Shareable? Yes.
Linkworthy? Yes.

Remarkable content:
This is the type of stuff you read and it just blows your mind.

There's almost no way for a multi-author site to put out only remarkable content. Most bloggers/sites that produce above average content will have an occasional piece that hits "remarkable" status.

Some bloggers manage to put out remarkable piece after remarkable piece, but they're definitely not dabbling in multiple niches, and they're usually only putting out blog posts once in awhile.

Shareable? Hell yes.
Linkworthy? Hell yes.