A Mogul To Be

A niche site experiment

July 8th, 2007 by Robert

I’ve decided to give the niche mini-site idea a go. My idea is slightly different than the one described by the Net Business blog and that I mentioned in building a business around niche minisites.

Mine is a purely passive site that relies on RSS aggregation to supply content. I’ve take the core of my Luxor project and slightly repurposed it for my needs. The site is called CelebrityBlender.com and aggregates the feeds from a dozen or so celebrity gossip and news sites.

I launched the site last week and wrote about the design an technology behind the site in my other blog. Due to that blog I’ve gotten a couple hundred visitors to the site and Google has finally started indexing it.

Promoting CelebrityBlender

The real key to making this site work, at least initially, is Google searches. Celebrity sites and searches are growing at a dramatic rate according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which is good news to me. I thought about doing a few AdSense ads, but the competition is pretty high for celebrity keywords and I didn’t want to spend a lot of money.

Monetizing CelebrityBlender

I am primarily using ads from Commission Junction for monetization. A couple of reasons for this were Google ads only kept showing ads for celebrity cruises. I wanted something that would appeal more to the demographic of the readers so I signed up for a bunch of advertisers with CJ with the idea of having multiple ads rotate, using phpAdNews for the banner rotation software. I also threw in some AuctionAds for variety but not sure how well they will do on this particular site.

Next Steps

Once this site is making enough to pay for itself — the server is $25 a month — and enough to cover one other niche site, I will probably start another site in another niche area. I have a couple of ideas already but don’t want to get too far ahead of myself.

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