People in the world of internet marketing push hard for creation of what they call “Niche Sites”. They’re a good concept in theory, but in practice, I am not sure that they’re the best for making money online over the long term. I personally am not much of a fan of niche sites, unless they’re in shopping related niches. Cooking and recipe sites are pretty cool, but ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI are increasingly making them obsolete. I’m sure this is also the case for many of the other “easy” niches. Generally speaking, the lower effort and faster the money is, the more quickly the market gets saturated. Niche sites make it easier for you to fall victim to market saturation, due to the fact that anyone can hyper focus on the same skill set as you and then overshadow you with a bit of content. Niche sites are also kind of their own project, and you have to be intentional about being flexible if you want to make them creative. I don’t recommend you do them. Here’s what you should do instead, based on my experience.
Pick a broad name, and then focus on one or more niches
This blog is a multi-topic blog, but it has a few specific areas of focus. I talk about religion, business, blogging, productivity, “Men’s Health”, and being a digital nomad. I used AI to generate my name, and wrote about topics that I believed have value. So far, so good. I have a growing audience on Medium and my articles got picked up by Search Englines. If I had bought a domain name dedicated to a specific topic, I might have become hyper focused. Writing about other stuff would have felt awkward, and it wouldn’t have been in line with the other brand. With a multi-topic blog, you have the option to write about whatever you want. This allows you to hyper target your customers and write content tailored to them. This translates to a lot of money on the backend.
Start Live-streaming and/or making short videos
In my experience of creating content, you want to be at or near the cutting edge. This means that while YouTube can be monetized, the days of making money from YouTube ad revenue are likely over. You can make money doing it, but the competition is very very steep. The solution? Start live streaming. Live streaming is less competitive, and you make more money when you’re getting paid by engaged users. This is because live streaming allows you to talk to your audience and establish a personal relationship. You can get tips and subscribers, rather than relying solely on ad revenue. If you have time, you can make short videos to boost your audience and make some extra ad money.
Post Live Streams to YouTube
Being an independent videographer on YouTube seems crazy to me unless you have a large audience. And getting a large audience isn’t so easy nowadays. It’s easier to increase the value of your audience, and that can be done by live streaming and reposting the streams to YouTube. Reposting the streams to YouTube will also have a similar effect to making Tiktok or YouTube short videos.
If you follow all three of these steps, you should be making pretty good money, although it’s not necessary to start doing video content. Written content is less competitive, and the good stuff pays more as a result. If you put lots of time and effort into maintaining your blog, you should be able to make a few dollars online. Blogging is a bit of a slog, but the traffic is far more stable than YouTube or social media. This means that if you’re consistent, getting to 30,000 page views per month after 3 years should be easy. This will take consistent effort on your part, but it’s certainly doable if you write 9 posts per month. That’s less than a post every 3 days! You could be making up to $10,000 per month in your sleep from 30,000 views. It’ll be worthwhile if you’re earning even 1/10th of that from your spare time.
Sell a product
If you rely on ad revenue alone, you’re putting all your eggs in someone else’s basket. A multitude of things can change your business at the drop of a hat. New ad formats can pop up. Your content might fall out of favor. Absolutely anything can happen. So in today’s world, the solution is to sell a product. It could be anything. A digital journal, a course, clothes. As long as it’s yours and not something that’s being drop shipped. The only exception to this is print on demand, because you’re selling the design there. Creating your own product is always more lucrative than dropshipping. Dropshipping is basically glorified marketing. It can be very lucrative, but you usually need a lot of volume to make it worth your time.
This might feel depressing when you’re a content creator who’s just getting started. You might be thinking it’s a big risk: doing all of this blogging just for a chance at creating a product. Well, if you’re getting 30,000 page views per month and you have a product, you probably aren’t going to be hurting for money. And if you followed all the steps in this article then you’ll also be earning revenue from video content. So you should become pretty rich following my blueprint, in actuality.
The fact that making a good living online is so competitive and complicated gives those of us who are hard workers a unique advantage. Most people won’t be motivated to post much as the returns diminish. We’re already kind of seeing this with TikTok, and we saw it when the blog era in the past ended. If you treat content creation like a real job, you can definitely make money doing it. You just need to think carefully about how to “hack” the system and put together all the pieces to the puzzle. It’s possible to make a living creating content. You just need to be consistent, persistent, and think it through. Just make sure to actually execute.
