Making Money with Blogs vs. Making Money with Niche Sites

Court put up a couple very pointed articles on his blog just recently that suggested that niche sites were the better route to go for the majority of people out there. Now obviously, his view on it is a bit slanted (he sells a course that promotes making money with niche sites) but to a certain degree he may be right since blog marketing can take months (sometimes more than a year) to set up before you are making any kind of money.

In this article, I intend to tackle the pros and cons of choosing a blog vs. choosing niche sites.

Now, I have stated before that it is much easier to make $3,000 a month with several sites than it is with one. Most bloggers don’t get that. It is much easier to earn a living online by building several hundred micro-niche, ultra-specific, keyword focused websites over the course of a year or two than it is to spend 40+ hours a week grooming your authority blog and getting people interested.

The Problem with Blogs and the reason why most bloggers fail to make a significant income from blogging….

There are actually two problems with trying to make money with blogging….

1. The first is that instead of catering to keywords (the search engines don’t care how good or creative or crazy cool you are and therefore it is much easier to game), you are placing yourself out there to be actually judged by your peers. What this means is that if you are saying the same old, same old, chances are your “signal” will get lost with all the other bloggers producing the same old, same old.
2. The second problem is that most bloggers don’t think like marketers and therefore don’t think in terms of how to funnel folks to their sites. They have no plan…..they are just mindlessly spending hours of their day trying to figure out what they are going to write from one day to the next and have this mindset that if they build it, they will come….

Catering to people is much harder than catering to the search engines but can be more rewarding….

One of the biggest reasons why building a blog that makes money is much harder than building a network of niche websites is because you are subject to the opinion of your peers. Unlike niche websites, which will typically target a particular conversation and rank it organically by adding backlinks, a blogger has a much steeper climb.

Unless they are in a market as an early adapter, they will normally face entrenched competitors and will have to somehow figure out a way to make their site different than every other blog out there that is struggling to “make it” like themselves.

Another big uphill climb for a blogger is that a blog tends to be less focused than a niche website. Most niche websites are simply trying to rank for a couple keywords…a handful at the most and because the focus is so laser targeted, the chances of success are much higher.

Try doing that with a make money blog and you will see…..you are just one in a sea of thousands….that, my friend, is a lot of noise to rise above.

What’s your USP?

USP stands for Unique Selling Position. For a marketer simply marketing an offer, establishing a USP that will move their customers to buy is perhaps the #1 asset to strong copy. In the case of blogging, you are essentially selling yourself and what you know; in effect, YOU are your USP. Your personality, what you say, and how you respond to your visitors becomes far more critical to your success.

In contrast, a niche site doesn’t need a USP. In most cases, all they need is rankings. What you say isn’t that important and for a niche marketer, the idea isn’t to have someone coming back over and over for repeat business….it is simply to get them to click to whatever it is they are selling.

Most bloggers don’t even factor this into the equation. I imagine that if you randomly took a poll of 100 bloggers, you would probably be able to count on one hand the people who could clearly tell you what their mission is and what their goal is in terms of how they are being seen by their visitors.

That is good news for marketers who are wanting to make a splash in their market because it makes for easy pickings….bad news for all the rest who are mindlessly posting “me too” content though.

A strong USP will help you separate from others in your niche. Not everyone will like you but those who do will love you.

Bloggers typically don’t focus hard enough on small niches

Most bloggers will go in over their head in terms of competition. For instance, rather than even tone down their scope of content to a niche within a niche, they start very broad, thinking that the broader they go, the more traffic they will get. What they are actually giving themselves is much more competition and in a lot of cases, they go in way over their head, competing with websites and other blogs that have far more resources and money.

Couple this with no USP and that makes for just another “me too” blog in a sea of other “me too’s”…

The biggest problem with this strategy is that it lengthens the “sticking” process. Most bloggers suffer burnout long before they get to where they think they should be. The better option is to find a niche within a niche to dominate and slowly work yourself from inside out, building up traffic and credibility in a kiddie pool before you risk dipping your big toe in the deep end.

Example- Most bloggers who want to be in the fitness niche will focus on general fitness with general categories trying to appeal to everyone when they should instead be focusing in on a much smaller niche within the niche and specialize….instead of dieting tips, focus on the caveman or paleo diet.

~Visibility and Traffic~ Two different strategies and the reason why niche blogs produce better profits quicker…..

There is a caveat to the above statement. While it is true that niche websites will traditionally make more money quicker, a blogger has a better chance of actually increasing their revenue stream the more “known” they become. I will talk about that later.

Bloggers go about getting traffic in a completely different way than niche websites.

Most bloggers aren’t concerned about laser targeted visitors. Most simply want eyes on their page. Because of this, most bloggers will find themselves catering and hanging around other bloggers in their community, looking for a support system, that in most cases, doesn’t exist (unless they have a USP and personality).

They leech traffic via comments. Some of the smarter bloggers figure out that guest posting will help them. Some will hang in forums in their community. SEO is an after thought in most cases. Social traffic is their mainstay.

What you essentially get are bloggers giving each other (pardon my french) proverbial hand jobs that just feel good. You can see this happening by looking at comments like “wow, thanks alot for the great information” or “your blog is an inspiration to the [fill-in-the-blank] community.”

Compare this to the niche marketer, who will target certain keywords, rank them and then start to get a stream of traffic from people that are looking for exactly what the niche website has to offer because there is no question that the visitor is looking for specific information.

So does that mean that niche marketing is better? Not at all. Easier maybe…but better? No way….

But, if I was going to place a blogger in the ring with a niche marketer in a loser leaves town steel cage match, I would bet the farm on the niche marketer as to who would make the first dollar.

It is simply not a contest.

• Niche Marketers are marketers
• Bloggers are…well, they are…bloggers.

Niche Marketers have no issue naming a page on their niche website “red widgets” because they aren’t necessarily depending on social traffic and frankly, they really don’t care about their visitor…..their only goal is to rank for red widgets

Alternatively, a blogger has been hit over the head that they need to create memorable headlines to draw in traffic.

A niche marketer will write a write a 400 word rehashed ezine article that says nothing but has just the right keywords in place in 7 minutes while a blogger will spend an entire day perfecting an article that will, in most cases, get them that “proverbial” hand job from other bloggers that simply want them to reciprocate.

Comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges, a blogger without even basic internet marketing principles stands little chance…..

Rather than search engine traffic, a blogger will usually depend more on funnel streams than niche marketers. They depend on random citations throughout the web from credible websites that get traffic as well. It becomes their life blood for traffic and helps to not only increase their visibility but also will help cement their credibility.

This rarely happens though.

The reason? Once again, it all goes back to unique content, personality and USP. If your peers don’t like you and aren’t willing to “cite” your site, you will go nowhere. And unlike search engines in which you can game and coax into giving you good enough rankings to get traffic, without your peers vouching for you, you are sunk.

Niche marketers usually don’t build links from credible sources because their content tends to be thin. When I say “thin”, I don’t mean blatantly bad, mind you. I simply mean that they don’t go out of their way to create good content…it just needs to be “good enough” to pass a manual check.

Your Marketing skills as a blogger IS the “X” Factor

Court has mentioned that the reason why blogging is such a tough road to making money online is because you have to continuously maintain your blog. You will see that a lot of blogging gurus will tell you that you need to write daily in order to do something.

In reality, you just need to write something good. That is a tough call but it is much easier to write something good once a week or twice a month that could have a chance to get cited than to regurgitate or echo what is already being said.

How scarce is your information? The scarcer the information you are giving, the more important or valuable you will be deemed. Most bloggers sacrifice scarcity for volume. If you are looking to build your own tribe, you better be able to either say something different than the crowd…or say the same thing….differently…

They tell you that connection is everything…

And it is!

But here is where a blogger who knows how to market can level the playing field…..by using the various tools out there to constantly connect with your audience. This can be a number of things….

• List building and permission marketing- Some say it is dead. My bank account would say otherwise…
• Twitter, Facebook and other web2.0 properties- I am not a fan of using these for internet marketing or make money online niches but they do work in other niches.
• RSS Feeds- Bloggers focus squarely on raw numbers….reach is a better indicator though

If you believe what I have written so far, should you even bother to try to make money blogging?

So, up to this point, you would think that I would say that blogging is a complete waste of time and that, if you were smart, you would run out and build hundreds of crappy thin websites and top them with adsense or point them to an affiliate product, right?

Actually, there are benefits of blogging for a living….if you can build it.

The most obvious benefit is your sway with your readers.

Let’s say that you have managed to build a blog over the period of a 6 months to a couple years, have a list in place, and your sphere of influence (ie. you are cited everywhere as the go-to person in your market) cements you as one of the top bloggers in your niche.

If you can get THERE….if your USP is unique enough or you managed to get into the niche early enough, then you will make more money than a hundred niche blogs doing less work and it will be more “fun” because it won’t feel like work.

I am saying this and really shouldn’t because THAT is obvious.

A flagship blog will make sales more easily based on the reputation and credibility of the blog. And the sales could be market related, along with the verticals associated with that market……

…..And you also get to enjoy the fruits of success…one of the things no one really talks about….when you are successful, you will naturally become more successful….

Your Click Through Rates are higher and your conversion rates are through the roof. I have had promotions where my conversion rates were literally 50+% (I actually received a phone call from the president of a forex product I had promoted several years ago because my response rate eclipsed all the other affiliates).

You cut better deals, get insider offers and free stuff. You also get access to information that most in your market don’t get.

You are suddenly an insider…inside the good old boy’s club of your market.

You also aren’t at the whim of a search engine….YOU become your product. Only YOU can ruin it for yourself….

So **rosy**, right?

The problem, of course, is the journey. And most bloggers, unlike niche marketers (who take it one day at a time), have huge aspirations without the skills necessary to take them to that next level.

This is primarily the reason why you hear most niche marketers lambast blogging for money. It is because somewhere down the line, they tried it…it didn’t work…and because it didn’t work for them, it must not be the right road to riches.

I say that with a smirk, by the way.

If you don’t have the personality (***ahem*** E-G-O) or the writing skills and can’t clearly define what makes you different than everyone else in your niche, then niche marketing is the way to go.

Your Blog as an Extension of Yourself and Your Business

Marketers tend to use blogs as credibility posts. What I mean by that is that people like Yaro Starek began blogging with the bigger picture in mind. He would use his posts to increase credibility and to sell his own products to his readers and visitors.

Other marketers do it as an addition to what they are already doing. Frank Kern’s site isn’t SEO friendly and isn’t meant to rank but rather is meant to help him cement his credibility and draw in more “flies” by giving his fans a more intimate way to reach him.

Court’s blog is simply a satellite funnel (albeit internally) to sell you on the fact that he not only knows what he is talking about but also that he happens to have a membership site that will teach you how to make money online.

Timothy Ferris’ blog is a hodge podge of random posts that give the reader an escape from the drudgery of what most of us call “life” by watching him hang out with gun runners in Libya and eating exotic foods that would make Anthony Bourdain cringe at the thought of eating….oh….and by the way…he also happens to have a best selling book too….

So that is pretty much it. Both niche marketing and blogger have their ups and their downs. But Blogging for money is much harder than niche marketing simply because your peers, not you, decide on whether the information you are giving is valuable enough to merit citations and traffic.

Personally, I find blogging to be far more gratifying than niche marketing. But hey, I also wish that NBC would air the Chinese Table Tennis Championships……..to each their own I guess….