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Comment by sixQuarks | Hacker News Reader

Same boat here, I only have to work about 2 hours per week to maintain $500K annual profit. I'm the biggest procrastinator in the world and don't know how to program (although I'm now learning just for fun).

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Could you share a little more about how you're achieving this?

Knowing something about how you managed that might be interesting.

Basically content marketing. Researched an industry very, very deeply and summarized the important concepts, tactics, and strategies one should follow to save money or save time within that category.

Make the content free - attracting a large audience, and recommend the best online services that help with that particular vertical (affiliate marketing/lead generation).

The 2 hours per week is just summarizing anything new that happened that week.

This is not a get-rich-quick thing, took almost 10 years to get to this point, and huge amount of focus on this one thing - and I've truly become one of the leading experts in this vertical.

I am more interested in the process of finding and selecting a niche in general, how did you do that? How did you stay committed all those years unsure about whether working in your niche would even be viable?

Most important thing is to go into a category that already has lots of competition. It's counter-intuitive, but this is important. The thing you want to do is slice out a niche within that category that you fully own. It could be information on getting the best price, or info related to your own city/region. Once you get a small foothold in that niche within the category, you can expand and grow within that category.

that's a really good point, and advice I very much needed to hear today. the wheels are turning. thank you!

What area are you thinking about? And what kind of skills do you have? (coding, design, marketing, etc)

well I don't have any ideas for affiliate marketing sites, I'm just applying your mantra about niches to my career (professional services). I do have experience coding, building sites, marketing etc, but at this time I don't know of any niches to do what you did with affiliate marketing. would love to though.

what does "professional services" mean?

I am a lawyer. I've practiced on my own, but my area is pretty saturated and it's discouraging. But I need to get into the mindset of slicing a niche and sticking with it for a while and try to become the top expert within it.

Would much rather run a content site that earned revenue, but cannot find a niche there ... I used to do this a decade ago and it was quite fun but the internet was so much quieter.

would you start an affiliate marketing site from scratch today? I would even hire you as a coach to help me find an opportunity.

now that I think about it, I've had the mindset of a content based lead generation site builder for a while, but just haven't had the balls to execute on it because I didn't think it could actually make money. I have a few domains in my pocket which would be great, I just have to select which niche to dedicate myself to. could definitely use help with that.

Is traffic to your site mostly from Google searches, and if so, could you say what you found to be the most effective method of improving your ranking in the search results?

It's always good content

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