How to Start A Niche Content Site

Can’t imagine having to write 100 articles a year for some kind of niche, lets take electric mountain bikes, most of the articles would have to be reviews of some kind and that means first getting your hands on them.

Maybe I’m missing something.

I see this exact thing with a lot of artists I’ve known. To be fair most of them are trying to make it their livelihood rather than just a hobby they’re monetizing. Anyway they’ll start hustling on twitter and Instagram, trying to build their follower count and drive people to their Patreon.

Most of them can only survive this grind for a year or so before they just implode from stress and depression and whatever else. It turns out to be less lucrative than they were expecting. If you sink enough of yourself into a particular identity (like being an artist) it can be an enormous blow to your ego to “fail” like that.

Ha, this reminds me of the "How to get rich quick" books that start off with "To get rich, write a book on how to get rich."

Besides that, I loathe """content""" sites. There may earn $10k a month, but they aren't adding 10k worth of value to the world. Their motives are clearly in money-making, not in informing, and the huge swath of them on Google search has drowned out everything that isn't SEO-optimized. Man, I miss the old internet. Please don't make things worse.

That's one of the main reasons I have to go on living.

Let me know if you need collaborators.

It’s exactly this type of thinking (and acting) that created the dismal state of search, especially in the product review space. I can’t find anything but “content sites” when what I really want is genuine reviews or experiences from people who use the products I’m considering purchasing. It’s obvious that most of the sites in the top results for almost any product search are using a playbook similar to this. I can almost never find trustworthy, real reviews.

Now I try to find communities on Reddit or elsewhere to find real information and opinions. In some cases I’m sure my purchases have been influenced by some marketing drone that gets paid to post positive reviews on Reddit as well. Finding and supporting great makers and products shouldn’t be this difficult!

Please don’t make everything worse by following any advice in this article. If you truly want to turn a hobby into cash (a potentially fun-killing enterprise as others have mentioned) then let it happen organically, or at least keep the end users’ experiences in mind. For every person making $10k a month on terrible content sites there are thousands of people wasting their time sifting through hundreds “content” pieces in an attempt to find reality.