Niche Site Review: Why Shane's niche site flopped

Key Takeaways

hey everybody you and I are getting to be pretty good friends because on my last video I did it with bedhead and nobody called me out in the comments and so I can trust you guys to wake up first thing in the morning roll into my home office and record video so here we go today's video is actually kind of a sad story this is on our last video that Ricky and I did how much money do niche sites earn we had somebody in the comments Shane Stanford who said I'm not sure what you two are doing differently from me but I've had three niche websites all with a decent number of articles which have been running for two years or so and each earned a ground grand total of 50 bucks per year I cannot seem to reach anywhere near the numbers you got you are Clint you claim to be reaching first I love the fact that he said claim to be reaching like I don't trust you guys but we talked on meanwhile Shane's a pretty good guy so let's talk about it we're gonna take a look at one of Shane's websites and we're gonna dissect what kept that website from one getting traffic into earning money I don't want to make sure none of this is feels like I'm making fun of him or talking down Shane's frustrated he really wants to be able to get this fixed and wants to know what's different and so in this video I'm gonna share a little bit of our secret sauce the things that make our niche sites just kind of the recipe that Ricky and I have our our process for building them has just consistently worked over and over and over so let's talk about it the website we're talking about is called rowing machine corner com rowing machine corner comm and this website has been online for a couple years it has a quite decent amount of content on it and it's just getting no traffic and no income and so why not well I have about five reasons that really stand out to me they may seem like small things but they are not these did these things make a tremendous difference on websites as we're about to see the first thing and I also want to say that I'm not saying that any of these changes make it impossible for a website to succeed everybody builds their niche sites differently some more successfully than us but this is what we do that has really worked and so I'll share share those things here first of all this topic wouldn't have made it past our niche site consultations so on income school comm and you're thinking about working on a website you can do a consultation with us and we'll review the the niche and kind of give you some feedback there and we would have if this person had done niche site school we just we would have stopped this right away the topic is a problem because it's a rowing machine corner we don't have good success on websites that are focused around a product we have better success when a when a website is focused around a topic a hobby etc and not the product so for example instead of writing a website about choosing the best camera the website is about photography and you happen to write about choosing the best camera on some of the articles instead of writing a website about the best dirt bike helmets dirt bike helmet review.com you make a website about dirt biking and then you happen to review some of those dirt bike helmets the reason for that is well several one is it's just way less spammy its spammy when you have a website that's like best rice cookers reviews.com it's just people don't trust the information when they see that on Google search result it just doesn't seem as trustworthy it just feels spammy also to Google do you think they notice when every one of your posts is called best rice cooker under $50 best rice cooker under $100 best rice cooker under $200 review of Betty Crocker rice cooker review it Google knows this is a spammy site and your content gets ham because of it now a lot of people build niche sites this way it's possible to build it this way but we have seen really poor results when we do this if I were coming at this I would make the website about rowing or kayaking or whatever else and then happen to have reviews of some rowing machines for people who are on the website so number one is topic actually of these that we're going to talk about that's one of the biggest things for me number two the articles are too short on this so let's just go here to stamina 15 903 deluxe conversion to recumbent rowing machine review and when I look at this let's see how many words this is I'm I'm just gonna go to word count word counter net and let's see how many we have I use this website pretty often 685 words is way too low I almost never write blog posts under a thousand words they just don't do well I know it seems like people are gonna want this quick review just quickly get the information but about a year ago I sat down and I just did some analytics for myself of all my different niche sites what were the the highest trafficked articles I've ever written in the top 50 the top 50 articles I've ever written all of them 100 percent are over 4,000 words long that's a long blog post all of them were that long and so I don't think you should write every blog post that long and not every topic warrants it but I just almost never see these short blog posts working I just almost never with very few exceptions so I would definitely recommend more meaty con it on there and then let's look at this so this well and also how many letters are in this we're gonna go to letter count now and I want to look at that headline I think it's too long I think this is gonna get truncated by Google so I'm gonna paste this it's sick yeah there you go so this is 68 characters in the headline well Google is going to truncate that Google is gonna cut this this headline short it's not gonna show the whole thing and so this may not rank on Google just because the whole name of the product doesn't even in there so I'd probably just call this stamina 15 nine thousand three rowing machine or vehicle you know or whatever it is we can shorten this but that's that's too long it's gonna get truncated and so people aren't even going to see that this is a review when they Google this that's a huge problem so the actual content here it is an issue okay now let's the next one which I also think is huge is adding to just the spam enos of their website is it has a poor balance of info and money posts so let's go to the home page and when I go here I see best weight bench best road bike best weight lifting shoes best elliptical machine compact rowing machine and then we finally get to one that's what muscle groups does a rowing machine workout okay that's a good post that's information and usually what me and Ricky recommend is 1:30 or posts or just information there are things like that you know how or can I use a rowing machine with a bad back whatever they're just questions that people are googling and it's gonna be very easy to rank for those terms there's not a lot of content out there so one third is that one third is feature post it's like the top 15 ways to get faster at paddling on a kayak or whatever and then one third only one third is these review posts the money posts the 15 things I had to buy after getting a new camper that kind of article and this website has a very crazy balance of like 80 to 90% of the post or money posts they're just spammy things review this review that and it's just not gonna work the next thing it's difficult to put this kind of thing into a statistic but I think it makes such a big difference it's just not very authentic the writer of the site is they're just not being real with us they aren't waking up with Bed Head and recording videos for us and just being a real human being this is just like it's really obvious all he wants is to get my affiliate Commission and this slapped me out the door this guy doesn't care about the reader I love look at a dirt bike planet.com this is what I've been working on and I'm trying to put some love into these into these posts you know top 10 tips for teaching kids to ride a dirt bike and that that's my son that's my six-year-old right there and I talked about some of the things that worked for him when he was really hot and sweaty and needed things and we needed to change how we were dirt biking so that he could enjoy it more it's real it's it's a real post and so you know when Google eventually gets good at AI and they can just write the whole web forth they don't need us bloggers anymore they can't beat this this is personal experience is real it's authentic and so if all you're doing is being a glorified blog post writing spam robot you shouldn't be surprised when people don't really love the content and when you link to products they don't click them and they don't trust I'm a professional photographer in fact I am ranked in the top 40 photographers in the world which is so cool do you think I know how to take a better picture than that yes I could take a better picture than that but this is from my cell phone in fact almost all of the photos I take on my niche sites are really junky cell phone photos because it's authentic it's real it doesn't look like the Amazon product photo it's it's real I'm holding like I reviewed it I actually have this thing and that you can't put it you can't put a statistic to it but it changes the whole dynamic of a website and so when I see people that say oh dude I want to make whatever best stand-up office desks calm it's perfect niche they cost six hundred dollars each and people are gonna love this and I'm gonna get crazy commissions my first thought is are you really into standup desks to even have one and if the answer is no it's not that you can't make the site Ricky and I have made sites on topics that we are not not into yet or getting into but it's way harder so you know if you're gonna make a website about horseback riding get into horseback riding go buy a horse if you're gonna make a website about a dirt bike go buy a dirt bike if you aren't ready yet it's gonna take you a little you're gonna make a website about archery or fishing or whatever the heck you're gonna do if you're not into it today that's fine be doing some research and planning for when you and you're gonna go buy your fly rod and start fly-fishing and it makes everything you do real and authentic and you're actually interested in the topic you can't put a price on on passion for the topic if you're not passionate about it you're just writing spammy crap to get your affiliate Commission Google will notice because the users will notice they'll go to your website and those as crap is gone okay next one thing that I think is also very important here is even if the content were good and we had traffic to this website I have problems with the monetization of this so for example you know here we have just an this looks more like an ad right here for Amazon and people don't like clicking on that they just don't and then down oh we don't even so how am I even gonna give this dude my commission because this just looks like an ad I'm gonna skip over that where do I where do i click how do I give this guy a commission if I wanted to if I want to buy that product dad that's that's a no-go this isn't gonna work so here's back to my website dirtbike planet and you know I'm writing this article and I say the smart charger that I bought and I highly recommend is the SI tech smart charger and then I put in parentheses linked to Amazon because if I just link just see tech smart charger they don't know what site they're gonna go to if if I say link to Amazon then they know oh this is how I buy and I and I they go get it or sometimes I'll have a section of the review that says price and I'll say generally this is priced really well compare it competitive to these other items click here to check the current price on Amazon because it's always changing and guess what when they click there to check the current price on Amazon I got my cookie and now I can get my affiliate Commission if they buy anything on Amazon in the next 24 hours you've got to get people over there this isn't gonna work there are a lot of reasons why I believe this this website didn't work they may seem small but that's the problem with niche sites they're not super complicated to build it's there's no magical magician sauce to this but there are so many places you can't rip up along the way and put a year into a project and see it fail that we we don't like that and that's where we have niche sites cool whole purpose of niche sites cool is to take our exact business model step by painful step and if you follow it you have a website exactly how we built it no website is guaranteed no business is guaranteed but we've seen really good success from doing it that way so check it out on income school comm and then click niche sites cool see you guys