Why Niche Sites Fail - niche site review: why shane's niche site flopped

There are 8 reasons why your niche website will fail

Affiliate marketing is on hype nowadays. You can be sure of it by visiting any digital marketing forum, where you can find plenty of questions about niche blogging and affiliate marketing. These topics are brought up and discussed every day.

Nowadays many blogs are started with an intention to dominate a chosen niche and make a living.

And there is a valid reason for this — blogging is a relatively simple way to earn your living. Well, at least it’s seen as a simple way by many. However, it’s not an easy feat. Especially if we are talking about high stakes, like 3000 USD a month.

You can get started pretty easily with a CMS like Wordpress, so you don’t need any coding or technical skills to build a blog. There are comprehensive tutorials for beginners that can teach you anything you need.

As I mentioned, there is a trend to start an affiliate blog. In simple words, you create a blog about specific products like hammocks, and you write about it until you are dead. Best hammocks for kids, best hammocks for elderly, hammock reviews, how to buy a good hammock, etc.

However, there is something wrong with this trend. And I will tell you what it is — false perception about the profit and amount of effort you need to put in to grow a significant website.

A lot of websites are started daily and almost all of them are failures. Probably the main reason is a lack of vision (because of the focus on the money). Many people start a website by having a goal to earn 10, 30, 50 or whatever dollars daily. And that’s exactly the problem.

In this article, I will attempt to prove that your website will fail.
Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

Everything I am going to write about here reflects my own point of view. The experience I have right now comes directly from my own mistakes. I am not a guru or expert by any means, and everything I am going to write about in this article isn’t indisputable truths.

I hope this article will make you rethink your ideas once again and validate them before you start executing them.

Passive income is a good selling point for “business teachers”.

Everyone wants to have a passive income nowadays, but the reality is that it’s harder than any newbie expects. Even if you managed to create a stream of income that generates money, that doesn’t mean you won’t have to put in any effort anymore.

Everything is changeable and at any time your business might change Google algorithm, Amazon terms or anything that your business is dependent on may change, and BOOM. It affects your income.

And don’t forget about the competition — it doesn’t sleep. Any niche you will choose, there will be people with the same goals as you. They might have better skills, deeper knowledge, more time or money to invest or maybe just might have a lot of motivation to outperform you.

You will need tremendous willpower to achieve anything with your project. And I truly mean it. T R E M E N D O U S effort. You will get tired, you will see no profit at the beginning, you will fail at some things. It doesn’t matter if that’s the fault of technical aspects regarding Wordpress or SEO. You will make numerous mistakes.

And will struggle with getting quality backlinks.

But you know what? This is how every business starts. That’s not only true about online businesses. At the beginning, you will have to work for every single dime.

There is too much optimism for someone who is making his first steps in the cruel world of internet business. Most of the introductory articles install this optimism with their high numbers and success stories. And for someone with fresh eyes to the business, this makes it look like an easy walk towards success.

“If he is earning 20k a month from a blog about fish, it will not be hard for me to earn 2k a month by writing about sharks”

I know that you will get caught by this idea. I was. And I also have seen an article that advertises some kind of digital product by using this selling point. “Look at my blog, I am earning 20k a month, buy my courses about blogging and you will earn 2k a month. It’s easy.”

Well, no. It is not easy by any means. If you landed on this kind of article, that means you are a newbie. And to start with a false perception of your end results is a bad idea.

On the internet, anyone can be an online marketing guru. To pretend that you are a very successful businessman is not that hard. One major success? Great! You are a guru now.

The truth is that to create a profitable business nowadays is hard as it never used to be. Google doesn’t rank low-quality articles anymore, getting good backlinks is hard and the competition is here.

The person who is bragging about his success obviously has much experience. They failed numerous times, tried a lot of stuff, this was not their first project. It might be that they tried 20 times before yielding such a high profit.

And it is very likely that they invested thousands of euros/dollars or whatever to their project. Are you willing to put up all your savings for your first project? I hope not.

Enough talk, let’s get to the point and let’s see why you will fail (ouch):

1) You are a newbie

Do you find yourself reading article after article and you still feel confused about the big picture?

That means you are at the beginning of a steep learning curve.

There are a lot of great blogs about getting started. You can spend several weeks reading articles, watching videos to learn just enough to start doing something.

It is obvious that you might not be the best in the league at the beginning, but if you took the time to learn the fundamentals, you will be able to build things.

However, in the beginning, you will catch yourself uncertain about many aspects, you will keep searching for the information, reading blogs. And that is not bad — that is how learning is supposed to be. But in this case, don’t expect big money to come.

In the beginning, you will be learning a lot and the experience will be your reward.

Even if you started with a low competition idea, that doesn’t mean you will come off well. Low competition ≠ easy.

If you start a project and you keep googling even the most obvious things, it shows that you don’t have an insight into the business. You have probably heard something, had read some of the blogs, possibly even spent a lot of time reading the posts about niche blogging.

It might be that you have started your website out of enthusiasm. Your hyped up attitude doesn’t mean you will succeed. Of course, everything sounds easy from the lips of an expert blogger, but keep in mind that they made it look simple. It might even be simple with their experience and resources.

But what are the chances you will succeed without any experience? If you don’t have enough technical skills, you will spend time learning things like setting up Wordpress.

It is possible that the hype will be gone by the time you finish setting everything up in your website and start creating content. Your main goal was to earn money, motivation will gradually start to decrease. Who knew it will be that hard?

2) You don’t have any strategy

So you have a brilliant and easy idea that will earn you a lot of money? Let’s analyze it. Let’s say you want to create a website about cryptocurrencies. You will be reviewing different crypto faucets (websites where you can earn low amounts of cryptocurrencies) and various crypto exchanges on your website. You will earn money with referral links that you leave in articles and ads. Sounds good?

Well, there is one obvious problem — huge competition. But let’s just say you ignore it and think you will be able to compete with someone that is able to put a significant amount of money to stay in the game.

You start working on this likely unsuccessful idea and it’s just a matter of time before you realize that there are many questions you didn’t think about:

How you are going to attract people? Organic traffic? Not for this niche.

How you are going to get backlinks?

Who is your target audience?

What are the chances you will succeed?

Will you use social media? What strategies will you use?

How you will retain users on your website?

What value are you going to provide? (why should people read an article that is written with an intention to earn money)

… and many more.

The best decision would be to leave the mindset you have. Don’t have any expectations about the profit. Make sure you enjoy the topic you have chosen.

Don’t have any unrealistic goals as that will demotivate you when you realize you aren’t able to achieve them.

3) You are not willing to put enough time

Everyone is extra determined at the beginning of anything new — going to a new school, starting college, getting your first job.

If you’d asked any person that just finished high school what plans they have for their career, they would tell you about how good of a specialist they’re going to be, how they will study daily, how they will volunteer for nonprofits and so on.

And that’s before the life kicks in. There are many distractions and entertainments around, it might be tempting to spend time playing a video game instead of working on a project that is generating exactly 0. And there is no guarantee that it will pay off the time you spent.

If you want to achieve anything, it takes a significant amount of time. As you are just starting, you do not know how hard it will be or how long it will take for you to achieve your landed goals.

The “online gurus” won’t tell you how much effort it will take to achieve a goal when you have zero knowledge.

With a new project, everything will take a lot of time. Writing will probably take most of the time. And I am not talking about some low-quality 600-word articles, I mean writing a well researched, SEO optimized interesting 2k+ word article that is formatted and has images in it.

It depends on the topic and your goals and skills, but it might take more than 10h to write a single, quality article. If you have a full-time job and can spend only 2h a day working on your side gig, it will take 5 evenings of your workweek to write a quality article.

And don’t forget that it won’t bring you any money at first. You will spend a lot of hours working without any results.

It is easy to get demotivated pretty fast and start prioritizing other things over your project.

4) You are overestimating your skills

So, you think you can write. Are you sure about that? Writing an appealing article is not only is the master of a language you are writing in, the craft itself demands a high level of expertise and a huge effort.

Writing an interesting and appealing article is hard work. Even harder is to provide value and a unique point of view.

Not everyone has a gift of writing. Anyone can read and write, but not each person can be good at it. If you are writing in English and it’s not your native language, it makes writing even harder. Be honest — can you write?

And what about the other aspect of a blog? Are you able to configure a CMS, create a good looking UI, persuade people linking to your site and so on?

5) Perfectionism might be your enemy

Everything starts with creating and customizing a blog. Different themes, widgets, color schemes, layouts and so on. You can easily get confused by many different options.

That’s a headache already, to choose a good theme because there are many options. But you might not like something with the theme you chose, and you spend time customizing it. And after that, you see that something doesn’t fit with your theme (some widget, for example). So you either spend time trying to customize it, or you are trying different plugins.

Let’s say you managed to survive through the first phase where you spent hours tuning your theme, customizing small details of your theme, installing plugins and making your website look perfect.

So you finally started writing your first article. It might take you many hours to finish adrift. After that, you might not like many things that you wrote, and even think that some of the points from your article are stupid.

You spend many hours tuning your article. And even after that, you don’t find it perfect. And even after you hit “Publish”, you might not like it. You could be thinking that the person who wrote this is a complete idiot. And you spend countless hours editing every minor detail of it.

Concentrating on all these minor details will take away time. And by the time you have one article published, your competitors might be able to produce three times as many.

6) You have no passion for your topic

If you spend time reading about niche website, you do know one of the dogmas of success — target low competition keywords. That’s good advice for sure. By targeting broad keywords such as a WordPress or hosting will not result in a great success for someone who is just warming up in this dire world of SEO.

Let’s assume that you are doing this not because of the passion, but because of the reasons that are so common among many pre-bloggers — you want to quit your day job and you want to make money while staying at home or anywhere else, just not in the office, as the office is evil place that absorbs your precious time (I am kidding of course).

The most common way of monetization for these websites is affiliate marketing. Unless you are passionate about selling things or you love writing no matter the topic, writing those product-selling pillar articles (that will be over 2000 words) will not be the most enjoyable activity for you.

Let’s use the same example that I used at the beginning of this article — say you want to write about hammocks.

Best hammocks for over 50, best hammocks for kids, how to make your own hammock… After how many articles will you start hating hammocks? 20, 30 or more?

There is a high chance you will be hating the topic (and hammocks in general) even after 5 articles that has 2k+ words.

But if you are passionate about hammocks, you like it, own it and can’t imagine your life without one — you will have an edge over someone for who it is just another topic to earn some money.

7) You can’t provide a unique view for your reader

This relates to the previous point. If you don’t like the topic, you will not be able to provide a unique view.

However, even though someone has a passion for his topic, the writer that can make an interesting article will win. Having passion doesn’t mean you are concentrating on the right things.

Having a passion for something doesn’t mean you have a unique point of view.

If you are writing typical “money-making” articles that don’t differ much from articles of your competitors, there is no reason why you should perform better. SEO is a nasty thing and you can compete in your chosen niche in two ways: by providing incredibly good content or by dominating the technical aspects of SEO and building backlinks.

Make sure people like to listen to you and you can provide them value.

8) You don’t know how to get backlinks

One of the biggest headaches in the SEO world is backlinks. You can always get low-quality backlinks, but it is very hard to get a good backlink.

Probably the best way of building backlinks is outreaching website owners and suggesting to guest post for them. For the post you write on their website, they will give you credit by linking to your original website.

However, the thing with the outreach is that most of the website owners don’t answer your emails. Either they choose to ignore it as they might get dozens of similar emails every day, or they don’t want a guest post.

And even if they answer your email, they might agree with your guest post, but only if you pay them.

From 1000 people you contact, you might not get a response from anyone. This shows how hard it might be to get backlinks. And without backlinks, your website will not make it big.

How do the high achievers make it big?

Only they can answer this question properly, but there is one obvious fact — they aren’t doing everything themselves. They have people or even teams (or outsource people) that write articles, take care of the SEO, backlink building and any other aspect of the business. Most of the tasks are taken care of by professionals with many years of expertise.

For example, Spencer Haws started a website that earns him 1k+ dollars a month at the moment of writing this article. But it took him about 18,000 $ to make it happen, and keep in mind that he is a guru, any newbie gave this amount of money would probably achieve the only tenth of his success.

That has nothing to do with luck, it’s just pure work. Either you have to work by yourself, or the money has to work for you.

But if you are willing to put the money in there, you still need to know what you are doing. And if you didn’t have any success when working by yourself for the project, the chances that you will succeed by putting money is not very high.

You gain experience by investing either your time or money.

Final thoughts and tips

" Instead of thinking about profit, concentrate on problem-solving. Think about the struggles you will have to face before success. Don’t believe the false promises of success by other bloggers."

"Invest enough time to learn the things that will benefit your project. Develop your own voice and stick to it, concentrate on the content and value creation."

"Be committed to putting enough work before seeing any results "