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Affiliate Disclaimer: This article may contain affiliate links, if you click a link and make a purchase I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more. Hey Reader — it’s Joe (Niche Campus) It’s time to think about what new strategies might still be relevant for you and your business. Earning income via the usual methods of ads and affiliate marketing hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just gotten much harder to send enough traffic. But I have some evolving thoughts about pivoting into a strategy that could make sense for your business (niche site) with a focus on affiliate marketing. ~~~ This email is sponsored by… Conversion Collective Are you an ambitious digital entrepreneur? Join dozens of other online business owners pivoting into the next best strategy to grow and scale. -> Activate your Membership <- ~~~ #1 -> Bing Google traffic is down 90% for most niche sites. Bing traffic is still quite reliable, even with AI features integrated on the search results. But there’s much less of it, some 91% less. Some of the pages on my niche site are ranking #1 on Bing. My top traffic article is ranking highly on every search engine except for Google, with most of its clicks coming from Bing:
Even so, this is a niche that I’m not sure has the longest legs for Bing. My reasoning is simply because you have to consider the audience where Bing is used the most. Bing is most often the default search engine on a Windows desktop or laptop, which steers towards an older demographic who couldn’t care less about changing the default search engine. My particular niche veers younger, which makes it not the most ideal traffic source for me. But perhaps your niche is perfect for this demographic. If you have a niche whereby the demographic tends to be older and where products are an important piece, Bing could be a great new strategy for you. There are groups of niches which fit the bill, examples include:
You get the idea. If you can get yourself ranked in the top three spots on Bing for a ‘money’ keyword, there’s still a ton of commissions to be made. With Bing, and other secondary search engines, the ‘SEO’ remains relatively simple. Optimize for your target highest volume keyword per piece and send enough internal and external links to it. A reminder that traffic != income necessarily. The amount of traffic volume you get doesn’t always correlate with more earnings. If you were to focus on getting to the top of the Bing SERP for an important money keyword then next focus on conversions then you could still make a good income level. #2 -> Link In Bio If you already have some practice with you social media channels, then this will be a bit easier to pivot into. That’s making use of a link-in-bio funnel to direct your audience towards one or more of these options:
Psuedo storefronts on social are becoming more and more prevalent and for good reason. They’re a unique way for creators to send their audience to products they personally love and recommend and earn a commission from it. Amazon Storefront or your own psuedo store page on your site are a good way to let people know what your top picks are and save them a lot of time and frustration finding a recommendation.
And if you have some kind of expertise that goes along with your niche, you can use stan store or beacons to create purchases for services, courses and more. All you’d need to do is figure out your best end goal(s) from above, then repurpose content to make it viable for you social channel. Whether that’s converting a review or article into a visual reel for TikTok and Instagram or maybe even X posts for niches aligned with tech and a younger audience. Provide regular original value about a few specific things (ideally product or solution focused) and direct your audience to your link in bio as naturally often as possible and see what happens. #3 -> Going full creative mode Still an early idea I’m developing, but stick with me… One of the problems with building a niche site is that, sooner or later, we all fell into the SEO trap. Maybe it’s that trap which led many of us into Google’s naughty list as we prioritized content output and traffic above all else. It was all too easy for a niche site to turn into some kind of Frankenstein’s monster filled with “best X” and “Y review” without much else content that would actually solidify authority. Or maybe it was just all AI’s fault, who knows the truth. To get to the point, perhaps there is some creative project that you’ve been putting off that would reignite your love and passion for your niche. For most of us, there’s a reason we started in our niche in the first place: we had an interest and excitement for it. I know that, at least for me, I focused too much on output velocity and less on adding my unique blend of skills and personality that could make content that would sing. Now that we’ve all lost 90% of our traffic, it kind of takes the chains off. It is allowing me to reevaluate what kind of content I want to put out into the world. And in a perfect world, it would be the kind of content that genuinely amazes or offers some unique value that couldn’t be found anywhere else. We know that Google says that’s what we should be doing, but promotes something else—throw Google-pleasing aside for a minute and create something you would want to see. You might surprise yourself with what you could create. Take time on it, perfect it, make it your sole project and delicately optimize every detail. Then maybe, just maybe, you’ll have something worth shouting about, pitching to every journalist, PR, Reddit or other community, that’ll blow up and completely reignite your drive. And maybe that’s all just a pipe dream… But which option would you rather work on right now, #1, #2, or #3? ~~~ If you enjoyed this newsletter, please do “add to contacts” and drop me a reply to tell me what you think (it really helps with email deliverability). If you don’t get any value from this, unsubscribe. Until next time — Joe P.S. Rate this email: Excellent / OK / Poor P.P.S. At time of writing this, there is ONE spot left for membership in the Conversion Collective before the first price hike. Learn more about membership here. |
