Hey FreddyJames,
This question is for you or Meathead.
1) You mentioned you have several niche website. Why not just focus on 1 Review Website and turn it into An Authority Website and Eventually maybe into a Membership Website? How are you an expert in all these different niches?
You can go either way on that. If I had my time again I would probably have created one website for each category rather than niche, but it really doesn't matter. One of my "niche" review websites has over 50 pages of content now, so it's not like a smaller review site is small.
As for an "expert", I wouldn't say that I'm that, however if you spend 1 month researching a subject you'll find you know more than the average bear about any subject quite quickly.
2) Content Generation
- What would be the best method for creating reviews / articles.
- Would you recommend going on Amazon and see which product sells the most (then write a unique review on it)?
- Researching forums too see what hot topics are being talked about and then create an impartial article about it?
- Would you recommend mixing general based articles like "10 Tips for Beginners" (based on something popular in forums) with reviews?
Thanks for your help. Very grateful!
This is easy: The best way for creating reviews for CB products is to:
1: Get your hands on the product
2: Review it!
You can go down other routes of course and cobble-together other people's work, or read a few other reviews and write something similar, but doing it yourself is best. Doing this you can add your own style and quirks.
I personally stay away from Amazon, not just because 4-8% commission is low, but because I pay more tax in the UK each year than they do, which I believe is a piss-take considering the amount of money they make here so flat-out refuse to help fund the evil monster. This method does work with Amazon though, as I know others are doing well with it.
Adding general articles to your site helps with organic traffic down the road, and also helps with reader-trust, just make sure you do good seo/kw research, however:
No amount of organic traffic you will get from articles like that will come close to what you can get immediately through social media marketing. I spent 3 years writing "filler" articles for my sites like these and the traffic they have brought in is just not worth the time. Now articles like these are just there to pad a niche site's content and give it an air of authority should readers want to browse it, which rarely happens, and I concentrate on building pages that make money and directing traffic to them.
I suggest you concentrate on the important things to begin with: Review articles. Review as many as possible and don't stop promoting them, as they are where the $ will come from.
Additionally;
FB and Disqus have moved the goalposts recently with algo changes, but as the guy above mentioned, there's always a way around them. You just have to be creative and realise that their algorithms are based in mathematics. Unique comments will always get through, it is easy to set up multiple sites to redirect to your money site so it appears you are not just linking to one site over and over and it is quite easy to spend a day working with a spinner to make uniqueness of comments high.
The days of copy/pasting one comment everywhere are coming to an end. Anybody doing this now is going to have a hard time with bans/ghosting etc. If you try pasting one comment on disqus platforms now, you'll get banned and marked as spam within 10 comments - however there are plenty of ways around this.
If you're willing to put in the hard graft with this, the rewards are very fruitful. On the flip side, if you're lazy and take the path of least resistance you're going to most likely fail. I still read this thread every day and for the most part when somebody says they are going to try it and updates what they are doing here, I can tell immediately whether they will make money or not.
This method for me is now totally hands off and if I ever get the time, I'll scale it up with additional VA's commenting with unique comments for multiple websites. IMO this should always be the aim when starting this method, or indeed embarking on any way to make money - you MUST have a plan to ultimately get the method to work for you, not the other way around.