I Was Totally Wrong (So Trust Your Gut)

Is my niche good? is a question I get a lot. Sometimes, it's tough to say exactly yes or no. ANY niche can make money if you tweak it enough and work on your site long enough.

Even as an "expert", my knowledge is limited! A great example of a bad judgement call was my own website I started a couple years ago. I thought it didn't have much potential, but it turns out I was wrong.

My Home Brewing Website

I started a website about homebrewing about six years ago. They always say to make your niche something you love, so I figured I should start a site about my #1 hobby: brewing beer!

After a couple months, I started running out of ideas. It was more work than fun, and I stopped working on the site so much. I still publish from time to time, but it's mostly to show examples and training I do for Wealthy Affiliate or my site in the MMO niche.

I just figured homebrewing was too small of a niche to generate traffic. I thought that there wasn't really a path to making good money.

Well, I was wrong!

I stumbled upon a beer and brewing website just this week that has some pretty crazy traffic numbers. SEMRush isn't exactly accurate with traffic, but based on what I researched, it looks like this website is getting about 350,000 Page Views per month!

That's pretty crazy. After checking out their website, it looks like they are not publishing anything too crazy or insightful. It's basic stuff like How To tutorials and Top 10 lists.

Meanwhile, here's the traffic to my beer blog:

Very unimpressive!

If I had been working on my site for the past 5-6 years, even if I was getting just half the traffic of that other website I'd be happy. I guessing they make pretty good money! They do the Amazon affiliate program as well as other affiliate companies.

I think if I had read Kyle's blog post about succeeding with golf balls (then scaling with shoes), I might have understood that I could branch out to more beer related stuff outside of homebrewing!

Does Your Idea Suck? It Might Not!

If you have something you're passionate about but are unsure if it can make "real" money online, you really should give it a try. You never know what could happen.

As you go through the training and get in the mindset of having an online business, you'll have more and more fresh ideas. You could take your website in a direction you never imagined. There's so much to learn!

If I had stuck with my beer site, I could be getting paid to drink beer right about now.

"Garçon, I'll take an IPA. I'm working."

The moral of the story? Don't be afraid to try out your ideas! Hard work pays off in the end. This whole affiliate marketing thing is a crazy path that could have you end up getting paid to do something you love.