A lot of people when making money online, I think, go into it with the idea of a niche site in mind. “If only I could rank for a bunch of good keywords”. Then it would just be a matter of converting a few affiliate purchases, and voila. Money in the bank. It sounds smart and seems like it makes sense. In this age of data and memes and small audience, it makes sense to get in where you fit in, at least at first glance. Beginner digital entrepreneurs might be tempted to try and do this, especially if they don’t have money. Why take big risks when you have nothing? I don’t think this is the right idea at all. If you’re a digital marketer and don’t know much, you want to go as broad as possible. Don’t make a niche site, don’t go buying a specific, obscure domain name. Buy a normal, broad, dot com domain name that everyone can understand and get behind. Make a name (and get some traffic) for yourself by writing a lot of posts. Keep going until you have the audience required to start making business decisions. There are several reasons why you should do that.
Weird domain names might put people off
People have gotten used to .tv and .io domain names. But most people are used to .com domain names, provided the website isn’t being used to buy drugs, porn, or fake IDs. Twitch and a few more modern streaming services and tech platforms are different, but you probably aren’t. If you want to run an online publication, you should probably use a .com domain name, even if you do end up veering off and becoming niche specific in spite of my advice.
Most pieces of content aren’t being read that often
This means that you need to be pumping out a decent bit of content as a modern-day blogger in order to be making a dent in the universe. This isn’t the early 2000s where random stuff will rank. There are a lot of people out there posting, and there are a lot of people browsing the web. Things are getting pretty competitive, and the incumbents are large and have a lot of writing under their belts. People are also browsing about a lot of random stuff. It isn’t really all that easy to get a lot of views on any piece of content. There are a lot of duplicate news stories out there, and if a niche gets saturated, people are on it. If you lose your niche, it’ll take you a massive amount of time to get your traffic back. Articles don’t usually go viral, unless it’s gender-war nonsense. You don’t want to get wrapped up in that stuff.
Your niche might go out of style
Blogging might go out of style. But even then, the entire niche that you’re in could die overnight, or over the course of several years, and you’re screwed. Don’t go niche specific too early. Start by writing a crap-ton of content and seeing what happens. You’ll be positively surprised, because this stuff does work as long as you don’t buy into the hype of passive income being a reality. You need to stay fresh, and keep making good content. Make content about what’s relevant to you at the moment. Your audience should be tuning in regularly for your new work.
You can always turn a “broad” online publication into something that people are meant to subscribe to
If you ever need to raise the RPM of your website, you want to turn it into a Newsletter. This way, you can earn monthly revenue from all the people who read your site. This is a better way of collecting money than with a one-time, high-ticket purchase, because people are more willing to pay a small amount of money to their favorite writer over time than they are likely to want to buy something expensive. This is especially true if they don’t understand the function of that thing. When you get subscribers, you can hire other writers and give your readers more and more value.
How do I pick my domain name?
I would decide the general niche of my site beforehand. Am I doing tech reviews? Lifestyle stuff? Am I writing a book to go along with the blog? Do I have digital products that I can sell? Am I accepted to any affiliate networks or programs? I would play around with AI name generators. A lot of web hosting platforms such as Hostinger have AI domain name generators. Come up with a general vibe and concept for your blog and try to prompt it properly. It took me a few tries to come up with Rising Current, but I was able to use an AI domain name generator to do so.
In reality, most of the work that comes with blogging is getting your site to $1,000 per month. If you can do that, then the rest is easy. Writing a lot helps, but in my opinion, it’s also important to make sure that you have a clear monetization plan outside of advertising if you want to make money in this industry. Don’t give away information for free. Take pride in your work and place some value on it. The more you write, the more traction you’ll get. At a certain point, you’ll be able make money from the amount of traffic that you have. It’s all about finding out where the value is. It’s not in niching down and putting all of your eggs into one basket, that much I can promise. Pick a broad domain name, even if you know what you want to write about.
Thanks for paying attention.
