Anne from Unique Gifter (awesome blog btw, you should check it out) asked me the other day if I had any recent updates on the Coon Hunters Club and, I don’t.
If you’re a new reader I’ll catch you up real quick. A year (or more) ago I had the bright idea to start a niche site that revolved around raccoon hunting. There was little to no competition, and based on the fact that my friends were obsessed with coon hunting and spent lots and lots of money on it, I thought it would be the perfect niche site.
A niche site is just a blog or website built around a specific topic. (In this instance, coon hunting) It’s run more like a business than most blogs are and the main focus is to make money (while also providing useful information.)
I ended up ranking in Google for multiple keywords fairly quickly and had decent traffic for a niche so small. But – I made virtually no money.
So today I wanted to go over my big mistakes and give you some advice that you can apply to your own niche or money making blog.
Decide How You’re Going to Monetize Before Building
I’d write on Single Moms Income whether I made money or not. I enjoy it. But writing about coon hunting? Yeah, not so much.
The whole point of the website was to make money. Instead of checking to see if it was a profitable idea I jumped the gun and just went with something I knew would be easy to rank for.
Here was the problem.
Adsense – (ads that pay you for every click) To make money with Adsense your ads have to be relevant to what you’re writing about. I’ve done pretty well with Adsense on this site because of that fact. But there were virtually no ads in the coon hunting space. And because of that the payouts were ridicously low. I’m talking pennies per click.
Affiliate Sales – I made a few affiliate sales through the Coon Hunters Club. (Even a big one where someone purchased a $500 item!) The problem was my affiliate links went to Amazon. Amazon pays commissions of around 4 percent. That $500 sale earned me a whopping $20.
Another thing I didn’t think through is that most hunters want to see items in person before dishing out their money. Especially the expensive stuff. Pair that with a super low commission rate and this was another bad idea.
Those were my two monetization strategies. Had I thought the whole thing through before diving in I would have been able to see that this site wasn’t a good money maker!
Have a Traffic Generation Strategy
The more traffic a blog or website has the more money it’s going to earn. (In the case of monetizing with ads, anyway.) I knew that my traffic was pretty limited to Google. The problem was I had an unrealistic monetization strategy for that low amount of traffic.
If I ever started another niche site or blog I’d make sure to choose a niche that allowed me to use Pinterest to my advantage.
You know how I said I did some behind the scenes blog work last month? Well, that was Pinterest. I joined some group boards, redid some images, and with fairly minimal effort increased my page views by more than fifty percent.
You need decent traffic to make money off of a blog with affiliate links of Adsense. It takes a lot of time to build up that traffic with Google search but a good social media strategy (or even guest posting strategy) can get you that traffic much quicker!
I Let Her Die
I was actually offered a couple hundred dollars a few months back for the Coon Hunters Club but I chose not to take it and just let it die.
It’s a pretty good domain name in my opinion and hopefully a big company will want to obtain it one day and pay me more 🙂 I can dream, anyway.
I can officially say the Coon Hunters Club was a fail. (But also a good learning experience!)
Do you have any website or money making failures?
P.S. If you’re interested in trying to make money off of a niche site I’d suggest reading niche pursuits and MMDs niche site case studies. You know, learn from people who actually make money with their niche sites 😉
Sorry to hear about your niche site. On the positive you learned from your failure and didn’t let it take you down. Pinterest is powerful. I have been reading books and discovering how wonderful it is.
Pinterest is SUPER powerful. I wish I’d have jumped on the Pinterest train a lot sooner. I can’t believe how much traffic a little bit of work got me last month. It’s insance!
I can’t believe you got a $500 sale!! I never get anything nearly that big, ever! (Despite my efforts!)
Thanks for writing this post. I’ll be honest and say I’m surprised that you let it die, if it was trickling in money and the upkeep cost would just be the URL.
Every time I read about people’s niche sites, I want to have more sites!
I know getting that $500 sale was epic for me! But most of the coon hunter supplies are pricey! (Dog boxes and GPS Collars 🙂 ) For me I had to let it die. I kind of have side hustle ADD. That blog wasn’t pulling in enough money to cover the hosting renewal. If I would have kept it up I would have worked on it more than I should have for what it was doing for me. My new mantra is focus 🙂 I think if I can focus on one thing at a time I’ll make a whole lot more money.
If you figure out how to conquer internet ADD, I will pay you to share your secrets!! I have the exact same problem 🙂
This is great timing as I am finally going to go “live” with my niche site. There were a couple of points that you made that I hadn’t considered. Thanks for the update.
Excited to see what your sites about!
I am just about to start my first try at a niche site and am really interested in your work on pinterest. My site would be a perfect fit with pinterest but I am not sure how that all works. I am doing research as my tech and social media skills are somewhat lacking. I find it all a little intimidating but know it is something I can do. I am really looking forward to blogging on my site because it is something I am interested in to. This post of yours was very timely for me. Thanks.
I am not a person who loves social media other but over this past month Pinterest has changed that!
I’m gonna try to break down my Pinterest strategy very easily 🙂
The basics – with Pinterest the best images are vertical. Square or horizontal pictures don’t look very good in the Pinterest Feed. I use IdPinThat.com to get free photos I can put text on and if I can’t find anything there I’ll get a $1 or $2 photo from 123rf.com (I buy them very sparingly and only on posts that are already popular.) Then I use Picmonkey to add the text. (Although I’ve heard good stuff about Canva too.) I’ve found that any resource, how-to, or tip type of posts do really well.
Then the great thing about Pinterest is that you don’t need very many followers to get traffic. (I have about 360 followers and got an extra 20k pageviews last month) What you need to do is go through and find any group boards you can join related to your niche. (If you look at my profile the group boards I’m in have three heads beside them) You can find group boards by looking on other bloggers profiles or by searching at pingroupie.org Join as many group boards as you can! (Open group boards will give you instructions on joining – either email them or comment on a pin)
The group boards you join will tell you how many pins you can post per day. These can be ALL your own pins. So I try to pin at least one of my posts per day to different group boards. ( I don’t keep posting the same pins over and over though.Different ones each day.) Then on my personal account I just try and pin at least ten others bloggers posts.
Does that make sense?
Thank you for such a detailed run down on how to drive traffic with Pinterest. I had recently ruled it out for my blog but you’ve inspired me to give it a try. Especially since you provided the technical information to make it work. I’m so grateful. Great success to you!
Wow! I’m honored to be considered among the niche site resources along with Niche Pursuits. Thanks for the share.
That’s too bad the site didn’t work out. But that’s a great point about working and writing about something you really like. The way things are going in the niche site game it seems like you have to really be “all-in” or don’t even bother. Fortunately I still am very happy to write material for 3 of my 4 projects, and I think looking at the income for all my sites you can tell which one’s I’m motivated by and which ones I’m not.
I’m surprised you didn’t take the buyout offer.
I think you’re doing really well with keeping your sites high quality! My pride probably kept me from taking the buyout lol. I thought “there’s no way $200 can buy all that work I put into that site” haha
Sorry to hear that it didn’t work out! I’m sure you have tons more ideas for niche sites buzzing around in your head, and when you decide to go for them, you will be able to learn from your mistakes!
Coon Club got you bragging rights to being on page One of Google !
~ C
Yeah I’m surprised at how easy that was to do with that particular site!
It’s awesome that you gave it a try. Do you think you’ll do more niche sites in the future? I’ve considered it but decided to go with trying to develop a larger site for now.
I have tried doing a couple niche sites in the past, but I always got bogged down in trying to learn what to do instead of just doing. Two Kidsa And A Budget is my first blog that has done anything at all, but I also think it’s because it is the first site I have ever truly cared for.