A Mogul To Be

Different categories of niche sites

August 20th, 2007 by Robert

Welcome to part 2 of my Building a nice site empire series where I will cover the different types of sites. In most cases a niche site is generally defined as a small, say less than 6 pages, site that is built for a very specific topic.

Specific, not general

So for example, instead of building a site about plumbing, build one on sump pumps as Jonathan Wold did. In other words, pick a category, then pick a small subset of that category. Halo 3 instead of XBox games, mattresses instead of bedroom furniture, LCDs instead of televisions, you get the idea.

Long term vs. Short term

The other item to consider is if you want a long term site vs. a short term site. For example, on NetBusinessBlog, he goes over building a mini-site for a computer game. The lifespan for this type of site is say 12-18 months. Make your money and move on. However if you pick a topic that is not time dependent then your site can more or less live forever. How long your site is up can help considerably in search engine rankings and it also means that you can add to your list of sites instead of having to replenish them.

There are pros and cons to each of course, and maybe the right idea is to have a mixture of short term and long term sites. If for no other reason than to keep it interesting or because a hot topic is coming (can you say iPhone or the Wii???) that is worth building a small, short term site for.

Small vs. Big

Here we are talking about number of pages. Most of these sites should probably be less than a dozen pages or so. This makes them easy to build, easy to supply content for and easy to manage. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go for a big site, but be prepared to supply content for it. One advantage to a larger site is that you have the potential to keep a visitor at your site longer through more pageviews and thus increase the chance of profiting from that visitor through one of your many monetization strategies.

Decisions, decisions

Yes there are a few key decisions here that you need to make, but they need not be difficult. Remember, the idea is to build many of these beauties, so don’t be afraid to build different combinations to see what ends up working for you.

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