Ask HN: Niche content blog gets 20k views per month, now what? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Niche content blog gets 20k views per month, now what?

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A friend and I have an NFL draft blog that started off as just for our own draft research and has blossomed to ~20k views per month, doing basically nothing to promote the content anywhere. We have some ideas about how to grow it, through online marketing, social media and the like. But, we're hoping to hear from people who have taken a niche site and niche audience, through decent side project monetization.

Does anyone have any experience or thoughts on how best to proceed to monetize the content or grow the site? Other goals would be to gain visibility / establish the main content generator as an authority.

Thanks in advance.

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Congrats on finding gold :) I don't want to sound like a sales man for Market Samurai, but I recently went through their training videos (www.noblesamurai.com/dojo/marketsamurai/) and have been using the app itself to get better visibility into what people are searching for and how to rank better. A few quick thoughts:

* look for long tail search terms (still related to your content) with high SEO value; that is, search queries that have high volume and low competition

* for your broader keywords (let's say "nfl draft research"), you can find out which other sites are also specifically targeting that phrase. Once you know your competitors (esp the ones who outrank you), you can find backlinks that are boosting the competitors search rankings. Some sites are pretty entrenched and have thousands/millions of high authority backlinks, but many niche sites can easily catch up to the top 5 ranked search results

I've seen basic SEO research and work (putting keywords into your title, h1, and URLs, consistency, etc) work miracles in terms of free traffic, especially for longer tail keywords.

If you have no urgency in monetizing, I'd pursue private ad sales as they present the best opportunity for profit (in comparison to ad-networks like AdSense or affiliate links)

If you want it to start generating even small income right away, slap some AdSense ads on it (or another) and start learning about what your audience wants/what converts into clicks/sales.

How does one go about doing private ad sales? Does that literally mean identifying companies / media buyers in your target demographic? How does private compare to networks / affiliates, in terms of revenue?

Hi I run BMS, we create merchandise and free marketing for blogs. We have a total of 3M monthly users on our blog network, if you are interested please notify me.

Margins are high and users love the apparel.

example: Tshirt with Slogan. We take care of logistics, sales, design and returns.

Hi xandyrox,

How can I contact you? Can you please put a link on your profile? Thanks!

I updated my profile, please feel free to shoot me an email.

Whats your blog's link? Would love to read it!

I didn't want the post to come off self-promoting, but since you asked: http://alphafootballexpert.blogspot.com/

My friend is the main content provider. I do the techie stuff ;-)

Small recommendation: move it off of Blogspot and/or move to your own domain name as soon as possible. If you continue to grow, you will want to do this at some point. The longer you wait, the harder it will be (with potentially negative effects on your Google rankings).

20k visits is about $50 adsense revenue.

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