Revealing The Niche: 6 Figure Website Challenge Update

In my last 6-figure-challenge update I promised that I'd reveal my niche next time around, so today's the day I do that.

I'm actually nervous and having second-thoughts about it, but I guess I always will be, so now or never right?

I'd like to point out that I'm not going to give any details of other members of the group or their niches.

That much should be pretty obvious, but I just wanted to make it clear.

When I entered the challenge, I went as an open-book with no idea what niche I wanted to work in. Since I make custom niche sites for people, I'm researching niches and keywords all day long, and so I kind of had a mind-blank when it came to choosing my own niche.

Luckily, Jon Haver had a few suggestions, and the one I ended up picking wasn't something I even knew existed previously.

My first thought was “Nah I'll pass on that one, what's next on the list?” but the more I thought about it, the more attractive it seemed, and in the end I  decided to go for it.

What's also important is that Jon had experienced a bit of success with this niche before, and knew that it could be lucrative.

This is massive when starting a site, because having a bit of confidence in your niche selection goes a long way. It takes a lot of doubt out of your mind, and lets you just get on with it.

Ok, enough pre-amble, let's get into it.

The Niche

People search, or more specifically, background checks.

There are lots of services out there where you can pay to perform a background check on somebody (or yourself), and these services have affiliate programs.

The one I started with, Verispy, is on Clickbank, and it was there that my first commission came almost a month ago.

The pros and cons of this niche are what helped me decide to go ahead with it.

Pros:

• Big industry
• Massive keyword volumes
• Decent commissions
• Recurring commission
• A few content angles
• Very clear path to monetization

Cons:

• A lot of the services in this industry don't use content marketing (no ROI?)
• A lot of scammy services in the industry (can turn this into a pro by reviewing them).

The main worry I had was that as many of the services don't bother with content marketing themselves (relying on PPC instead), was there limited success available by going this route?

It was a big question to answer, but with some digging I was able to find a few sites that are seemingly doing well with content marketing in the niche (and use semrush to reverse-engineer their keywords).

Also, as I knew that Jon was having some success in the niche already with some smaller sites, that was a big green light for me.

The Angle

So there are a lot of good keywords related to background searches, but in order to really capitalize and have success via content marketing, my site needed to have an angle.

For example, if you want to rank for “Best people search” or “Is he married?” that's all well and good, but most people search websites are just a landing page with a search form.

That might be good for conversions, but it's not going to get you very far when you're reaching out to other sites for link and guest post opportunities.

Therefore, I went for the dating angle first. I've been adding content 4 times a week, and most of it has been focused around dating, things like “How to spot a fake dating profile”, or “How to know if your date is already married”.

The idea is to use this content to get search rankings, and to reach out to the hundreds of dating blogs out there for link opportunities. After that, hopefully a lot of people will end up following links through to check out people search services.

So that's one angle.

The other angle is to do background search related content, such as “How to do a background check for free” or “Best people search services”. These will also be good for linking to from  guest-posts and outreach efforts.

Of course, I'll also be reviewing different services. There are a lot out there and some of them are utter garbage, whereas others are pretty good. We all know that “review” sites do very well, and I'm optimistic about this.

My main keywords (which I'm not really revealing yet) get A LOT of searches, but might not necessarily be articles that other people would link to.

It's important that I have lots of other ways to build links through content (as explained above), so that the whole site will benefit.

Remember, if you want to improve your rankings for 10 of your articles, making one of those articles really really good and really link-worthy will benefit your whole site. So as I get links to my dating content and background search guides, my “money pages” will also have their rankings increased.

Make sense?

The Site

I'm still not ready to reveal the URL, although I will be doing so soon. My main concern is that once it's out there, there will be a bunch of copycats climbing all over my site.

This is something I can live with, but not until the site has got a little bit more traction and progress.

When I do reveal it, I'll go into more detail about the silo structure, the theme, the use of Thrive plugin, and all of that fun stuff.

For now though, it's time for an update.

Latest Happenings

Social

So last week I hired a social media manager to handle my social accounts. I'm more interested in growing these out for outreach and “eyes on your site” purposes than for traffic and conversion purposes.

I'm going to focus on Twitter and Pinterest first. The Social Media Manager (SMM) is going to spend an hour a day growing these two accounts. This will be done by pinning/tweeting other people's stuff and useful content from other sites. They'll also follow relevant accounts to our own.

Nothing particularly difficult.

Of course whenever a new post goes live on my site, they'll also share that, but the emphasis will be on sharing other people's stuff and growing the number of followers on all accounts.

The ultimate goal is to get accepted onto a few “group boards” on pinterest, so that when we share the real epic guides and infographics, they'll get a lot more traction.

Questions about this? Ask below.

Outreach

I also hired one of my writers to do some blog commenting. This is laying the foundation for future outreach efforts, because as many people know, it all starts with a good comment.

She's going to be commenting around 5 times per day (always on different sites) and over the course of the next few weeks, returning to some sites and leaving more comments. Once we've got to 3 or 4 comments, we'll send them an email with an outreach attempt. This could be a guest post request, or something else we feel appropriate.

The main thing to consider here is that the comments must add value and not just be comments for the sake of comments.

It's a simple strategy, and just takes time.

Later outreach efforts such as link requests, broken link building, or skyscraper methods will all stem from this initial blog commenting as well.

While I'm not expecting a whole lot of success off the back of the commenting itself, it's the all important foundation layer that everything else will stem from.

That's my update for now, I'm sure you've got some questions, so leave them below.

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