Niche Website Gold Rush: Cash-In With Auto-Pilot Income In 2023 | The Growth Booth #64

Aidan

Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode number 64 of The Growth Booth where today I'm joined by a good friend of mine, someone who I've known for almost a couple of decades now, online, and his name is Adam Short. We are talking about the niche website Gold Rush and why perhaps there's never been a better time to make passive profits from simple niche websites.

Adam was a real pioneer in this industry, and he's built dozens of different, very specific niche websites over the years that have earned him huge amounts of money. He's also taught what he's learnt to thousands of students from all walks of life all around the world.

So I thought that there's no one better that I'd want to get on the show to talk to about this than Adam. So, Adam, thank you so much for being here with us today, and for taking some time out of your life to share a bit of knowledge with everyone.

Adam

Of course. Thanks for having me, Aidan. It's great to be here. Always enjoy it when we get a chance to talk, and I love sharing what I've learned over the years about niche marketing. So looking forward to it.

Aidan

One of the first memories that I have of Adam was when, I think I must have been watching one of your webinars a long time ago, and you were living in, I think, a luxury hotel on the Strip in Las Vegas. Is that right? Am I remembering that right?

Adam

Yeah, that's right.

Aidan

What was that like living on the Strip in Las Vegas?

Adam

It was a lot of fun. Yeah, it was fun. It was cool because my mother and sister both lived in Vegas at the time and my sister, she was a professional dancer. She danced in different shows on the Vegas Strip, and so I got to go to her shows. I got complimentary tickets. I would go and I would get to meet all her cute friends. I was younger at the time, so it was paradise for me. I've since moved out of Vegas. I'm married now, I have a daughter, so things have changed. But, yeah, it was a good time.

Aidan

Yeah. I can always remember that photo that you shared with me, and there's like, a little arrow going to this apartment or something up in this skyscraper looking over the Strip. So I always thought that was pretty cool.

How did you get started with your online marketing business? Because, as I mentioned at the beginning, you were one of the people that was a real pioneer getting in, I think, in the early 2000s. What sort of led you to that?

Adam

Yeah, well, when I graduated from college, I ended up getting a job at a search engine company, a really early search engine company called Overture. Overture was a pioneer in the world of pay-per-click. They were kind of on the cutting edge of they were developing the search engine pay-per-click model at the time that we now see used all over the place, where advertisers pay for ads and every time somebody clicks on those ads.

So I was there during that time, and I thought the internet was cool prior to that. I used it all through high school to research and write my high school paper assignments and things. But when I got there, I really started realizing the internet is a big thing, and it's something that's going to be a big part of our lives going forward. I could see all of this money being generated online through this advertising model.

That just really opened my eyes. I started kind of experimenting with the Overture platform. Back then, you could run ads on Overture. Like, anybody could just run cheap ads and get sent traffic to affiliate offers. Basically, you didn't need a website or anything, and you could just rack up affiliate commissions really easily. So that was kind of my introduction to the world of making money online.

Aidan

Awesome. Was there something that inspired you to go down this path of building niche websites? I mean, were you looking to get a bit of a side income coming in, or did you go into it thinking that this would replace your day job? What was the feeling there?

Adam

Well, when I started making money, I was working at Overture, but I was also making money using Overture, so it's kind of interesting. Overture ended up getting bought out by Yahoo while I was there. I actually ended up leaving though a couple of months before that merger, because I was making more money with my Overture ads than I was from my salary at the company. I was really hooked by that because I was making my own money, and I wasn't reliant on a job.

That really ignited kind of the entrepreneurial spirit for me. I wasn't really planning to be an entrepreneur before that. I always thought I would just go down the corporate path and just work in the corporate world, but yeah, so that was a big shift for me.

But when I left Overture, they started tightening up all the rules. Like, it got much more structured.

The model I was using pretty much stopped working within a couple of months of my leaving, actually, so that kind of left me in a weird spot because I didn't really have any other ideas for a business I wanted to start. I didn't really have any skill sets. So that's kind of when my search started. It was actually a tough couple of years because I was hooked on the idea of being an entrepreneur, but I didn't really know how to do it.

So I was working part-time here and there at different companies, but trying to spend most of my time figuring out this internet thing. "What's the best model to go into now?" So I bought a lot of different courses and gradually going kind of further and further into debt because I would spend money on these courses, spend money on what they were telling me to do, but nothing was really working for me. It wasn't the fault of the courses. It just wasn't working for me, so it took me a while.

And then this niche marketing model, it kind of found me because I ended up buying a course from a marketer named Frank Kern. Some people watching may have heard his name. He's pretty well known. He had a course called The Underachiever Method that was like a very, very simple early version of this niche marketing model that you and I are talking more about today. It's come a long way since, but he had kind of the bare-bones ideas in place, and he just taught a really simple way to publish content online in a specific niche and make money.

I started doing it, and it just worked immediately for me. It just resonated. I've always enjoyed writing and researching. I genuinely liked the idea of publishing content online. I liked that more than selling products because there was an e-commerce model coming up at the time, too. But I found online publishing just more fulfilling, and it just started working. I just did a little experiment.

I had this little Betta fish, a little Siamese fighting fish, on my desk. I was trying to think, trying to find a niche to go into. I was following the steps that Frank Kern was teaching in his course. But I just looked over one day and saw this little Betta fish and said, "I'm just going to build a site sharing content about how to care for a Betta fish," and I did that. The site, it wasn't a huge moneymaker, but within a couple of months, it was making five figures a month. And that was kind of my new beginning. I realized, "Okay, this is working for me, and I can take this and run with it. I can build lots of sites like these and build up a really nice passive income."

Aidan

I really love that. I think there's that moment that most people who go on to see a lot of success online, they have that sort of before and after moment where you realize that you're onto something, and you've made $1 or $100, and you realize, "Oh, I could replicate this a thousand times over now, every single day kind of thing." I know you've really went to town on that and ended up building lots of different niche websites. It's interesting as well that you said that e-commerce was up and coming at the time, at the same time as content publishing, because I was starting to dip my toes in the water back then as well.

I was kind of dragged down two rivers at the same time. I remember building up my niche websites where I was getting affiliate commissions. Very, very specific websites, like a website specifically about cocker spaniel dog training as an example. But at the same time, I was also building very specific niche websites about e-commerce, for example. I had one that was selling pregnancy pillows. Very, very specific websites, and it was interesting. It's been interesting to see over the past 20 years how each of those models has matured. I think with niche marketing, many of the same ideas that were really foundational to what you were doing 20 years ago are still foundational to the way that we would approach niche marketing and do approach niche marketing today. Would you agree with that?

Adam

Absolutely. That's one of the things I've been really pleasantly surprised to see, is that the model, like exactly what you just said, the foundation of the model really hasn't changed. There are new techniques and new strategies that have come along that you can use to enhance your results. There are lots of those. But the foundation, the nuts and bolts of getting a website online, getting traffic, and making money really have not changed.

That's amazing because the internet has evolved so quickly. You would think that it would be completely different today than it would have been back then when I got started. But it's been very consistent, and I love that because it gives me peace of mind, it gives me confidence that it will continue to be that way for the foreseeable future.

I always share with people that when they start getting into this, you can relax, you can have confidence that this is going to keep working. It's been working for a really long time. You can rely on these nuts-and-bolts strategies and just implement them with confidence. If you do it, the results will follow, and you'll have something that will very likely be a really strong income source well into the future.

Aidan

I think also it's a good moment now to really reiterate what we're talking about here and what the model is. You gave an example of one of your first websites was about Betta fish, and what you were doing there was creating content, you're publishing it on the web. So you had a niche website. And then I guess initially you start monetizing that through affiliate links. And nowadays, that could be an Amazon affiliate link that you earn an affiliate commission on if someone ends up going to buy something. Or it could be maybe like absent. So you're getting absent revenue from Google or any other kind of affiliate-based business. The way that you get the traffic is by ranking for hundreds or even thousands of keywords related to your topic. So in the Betta fish niche, which I know nothing about, I guess people would be searching in Google 'how to care for a Betta fish', what other things would they search for?

Adam

Exactly. Yeah, 'how to care for a betta fish', 'how to properly feed a betta fish', even 'how to breed betta fish'.

Aidan

Sorry to talk over the top of you there, but your website would rank for these types of keywords. It would appear at the top of Google, you'll get free traffic, organic traffic as we call it, not just Google, but other search engines as well. That's how you make money, and that's how we've made money. That's really the crux of the model.

So bringing this into 2023 and understanding that a lot of the fundamentals are the same as they've always been, how would you go about identifying a profitable niche nowadays, and what tools or research methods might you use if you were starting from scratch here?

Adam

Well, it kind of starts with understanding what makes a good niche. If you understand fundamentally what makes a good niche, then you can kind of let niches come to you because they're all over the place. The best niches that I have "found" have just been more me just kind of living my life kind of with these niche glasses on, this filter on, and spotting niches just based on what I know makes a good niche.

To give you an example, first, maybe we can talk about what those fundamental aspects are. So like a niche, just to define it, is just a specific topic. It could be anything. It could be how to care for Betta fish, how to care for cocker spaniels, how to build a shed in your backyard, how to care for chicken coops or chickens, or backyard chickens.  There are hundreds of thousands of niches out there. But what makes a good niche, a niche where that's going to attract traffic and actually make money, is one where there is a lot of either fear – sounds kind of bad, but it's true because fear is a fundamental human motivator or passion – so kind of either love or fear, you can think of it that way.

A fear-based niche would be like survival. There are lots of different kinds of niches within the overall survival niche. I had a website that was very successful just teaching about this one kind of, I don't want to say exactly what it was, but it was an environmental toxin that some people are worried about, some people aren't, but the people who are worried about this are very worried about it.

So the website was all about just kind of how to protect yourself from this. It did very well. So that's one example of a kind of fear-based niche, but you can go in the completely opposite direction. On the positive side of that would be something like, I had a website on kayaking, which did really well. And people, they kayak for the love of it, for getting out in nature, and for all of the positive things that that can bring exercise, etc. So, you know, it's not really there's no fear there, but there's a lot of positivity.

And then if you can combine that with an audience that either needs or wants to buy stuff to kind of feed that passion, then those are the best niches. So with kayaking, it's excellent because people need kayaks, they need ores, they need life vests. There are all sorts of gear that you need to pursue that hobby. Then with that website I mentioned, with the environmental toxin, there's certain things that you can buy to help protect yourself from that, and so there's a lot of motivation to buy stuff. That's good because that's how these websites earn income, is they earn income through people clicking ads on the site, pay per click ads to go buy stuff, or through affiliate commissions, so clicking your affiliate links of products that you're recommending on the site.

Aidan

Right.

Adam

That's just a quick summary of kind of what makes a good niche.

Aidan

Yeah, I think that's a really good starting point, the love/fear. I've often spoken about passion and pain, which is the same kind of a thing. Some of the best niches that I've had have been about helping people with solutions to things that could otherwise become painful in their lives, health conditions and so on and so forth. Then on the passion side, I've done very well in the Halloween niche, believe it or not, something that people get passionate about. That's one that's actually got a sense of urgency as well. When people are coming up to Halloween, they need Halloween costumes and lots of other decorative items and so forth. That's a passion niche.

Are there any special tools or research methods that you use? Obviously, you've spoken about drawing on things in your own personal life experience you may have, but are there tools out there that people might start looking at to identify a niche?

Adam

Yeah, my favorite tool is Amazon, because Amazon is kind of like the ultimate collection of anything and everything that people are interested in. They've got their physical product side where you can buy products, anything that you need, and then they've got their information side, which is their bookstore where they're selling information. You can kind of look at both.

Amazon gives information too that can show you how well products are doing, how well they're selling in the Amazon marketplace, at least compared to other products. So you can go into a category if you want to be proactive, you could go to the Amazon Books section and you can look in Amazon and see what categories are more popular than others. Then you can dig deeper and you can see what topics within those categories are more popular than others. That's kind of the general way to narrow down to a niche.

One of the keys is not to go too broad with these niches, but also not to go too specific. You kind of want to go somewhere in between, and that kind of ties back to competition. If you go too broad, when you go to try to get your website ranked in the search engines, you're going to be playing with a larger pool of competitors. If you go too specific, you might not get enough traffic because there's not enough keywords to rank for. But if you go kind of right in the middle, that's kind of the perfect spot where there's not too much competition, but there's still plenty of traffic, and there's methods for measuring that and really honing in on that perfect sized size niche.

Aidan

Yeah, that's great. I think Amazon, in addition to being a good research tool or part of the research, is obviously validating that there's commercial intent there. So if you can see that there are a lot of products that are selling well on Amazon and they're selling at a price which would allow you to actually make some good commissions, then that's really positive. If all of the products in your niche are dirt cheap, then it probably means that there's less money to be made even if there's huge amounts of traffic.

Now, in terms of the key elements that contribute to success of one of these types of websites in this business model, what would you sort of pull out as maybe two or three of the most important things? Obviously, you need a website, you need rankings. Anything come to mind?

Adam

I would say there's four, and I'll just talk about all four here, and they obviously all tie together. But like you just mentioned, it starts with building your site on the right platform, on a platform that's going to be solid. The platform I use is WordPress, and WordPress is just built for online publishing. Google really likes WordPress.

WordPress takes care automatically of a lot of the technical stuff behind the scenes with your site. There are other platforms too, but WordPress is free and it works perfectly. You want to combine that with a quality theme. The theme kind of gives the site the look and feel and some of the surface level or the functionality that your audience is actually going to see. I love, I think the theme is called Cadena. That's kind of my favorite theme right now. I think it's Cadena.

But if you have a good, strong platform like WordPress combined with a nice theme, you're going to have the proper foundation in place. Your website is going to look really good. That's important because the way that people interact with your site, Google is actually tracking that, and Google can see how long people are staying on your site. Are they clicking around or are they leaving quickly? Those factors kind of tie back to the reasons you need a clean website that's built properly. So that's number one.

The second thing is you need to be targeting the right keywords. We talked about this a little bit earlier, but if you're going to go into, say, 'how to care for cocker spaniels' or 'how to train cocker spaniels', you don't want to just try to think about, "Okay, what do I think my audience wants to know about?" You want to actually do keyword research, and there are tools for finding keywords that are optimal to target with your content. Semrush is probably my favorite. There's another one called Ahrefs, which is really good. Those are premium keyword tools that will tell you if your keyword is one that you want to be targeting.

You want to look for keywords that aren't too competitive but also get a lot of traffic, so low competition, meaning they're easy to rank for, but they also get a lot of searches. You want to pull those out and target those specific keywords with your content. What I mean by target is when you go to write your content, you actually want to embed those keywords in the content at a specific keyword density. So keywords is number two.

Number three is content. You want to have quality content, content that people want to read, content that's comprehensive, that's really well rounded, that covers every article that you write, should cover that specific keyword in a lot of detail.

You ultimately want a good kind of mindset to have when you're creating your content. Try to create just the best content in the niche. You won't always be able to do that, but just try to do that. Try to create content that's better than the number-one ranked site in your niche for that keyword. If you kind of set that standard, then you'll be setting yourself up for doing really, really well. That's probably the most important thing, actually, is quality content.

Then the final factor would be backlinks. So that's basically other websites linking to you and that's kind of the rocket fuel that's going to get your site to really take off and start ranking really well. Those four things.

Aidan

That's awesome. I mean, this is just a real treasure trove of information here. If you're listening to this episode today, this is a topic that I'm going to be delving into a lot deeper and a lot more in the weeks ahead. So we're going to be able to dive down more into some of the different things that Adam is sharing here.

I do want to ask you a few more questions, Adam, just about challenges, setbacks that you've had, not necessarily just specifically to this model that we're talking about here today, but in online business in general. If there is anything that you think is a really common mistake that people tend to make when they're starting online businesses, then I'd love to hear about that as well.

I'll give you an example of mine. It took me about two or three years to start building an email list, and I had these websites that were getting all this traffic and it was just such a huge lost opportunity for me. So if I was recommending someone to get started with a niche website now in this day and age, I would say absolutely from the get-go, build your audience, because otherwise you're going to be leaving money on the table. It's a massive lost opportunity. Any challenges setbacks or common mistakes that you can share with the audience here?

Adam

Yeah, that's a really good one. The challenges kind of change over time the longer you're involved in having your own online business. I guess in the beginning, I would say shifting gears too early, not sticking with any one model long enough, I didn't have as much patience as I should have, and if something didn't work really quickly for me, I just bounced to something else.

Whereas I think if I'd spent more time and had a little more patience and just taken the time to learn a little more, learn the nuances of the model, then I might have had more success earlier because yeah, it took me three or four years actually, and I went from making nothing after overture to suddenly making really solid money really quickly.

But that was kind of painful how long it took. Then I would say nowadays, maybe a lesson I can share that I've learned is there's kind of this mindset I think people can fall into, that the grass is always greener than what you're doing right now. Even if it's working well, you want to try to find something even better.

I've learned that can be a negative mindset to fall into. The more I've kind of gone on, because I've been implementing this model for 15 years now. There have been times when I've been like, "Well, I'm kind of bored of this. I want to do something else." But I always have been reminded in different ways that this is an amazing model. It's so solid, it's so consistent, the income is super passive. I've struggled whenever I've kind of gone off the path and searched for other things, I always come back to it and realize, like, this is a real gem of a system. And so I valued it more and more over time for what it can provide.

Aidan

There's a lot of buzz around right now, around AI, artificial intelligence, using the likes of Chat GPT. It's a hot topic for a lot of people. How do you think that is going to impact what we're doing with these niche websites? Is this something that you've put much thought into?

Adam

Yes, definitely. I'm glad you brought that up. I think Chat GPT is a game changer for this model in a really positive way. It doesn't change the fundamentals of the model, but it's a tool that we can use that makes content creation so much easier. I almost get like goosebumps when I think about what's possible with Chat GPT because in the beginning, for many years, I was writing each article myself, sitting down at the computer and researching and writing and I enjoyed it.

But then I kind of over time stopped enjoying it, just turned into work. Some people enjoy writing, some people don't enjoy it at all. So it's just work and it's a grind. Then I got to the point where the model was producing really well for me financially, so I was able to outsource all the writing to other people and obviously that was a huge thing.

But this chat GPT is changing the game because there's still a place for outsourcing content. But chat GPT is close to where you can just have it create the content for you basically in a matter of seconds. I don't know how deep we want to go into that.

Aidan

I think it'll be a topic for an entire podcast episode and more, but I like the fact that you're positive about it because I'm really positive about it as well. I think with these types of things, what we've always seen is that if you're able to provide good content and provide value to people, then over time, if you're patient, you can kind of rise to the top and do well. I mean, you always tend to get rewarded when you are providing value. If going back to what you said earlier about choosing a niche based on either passion or pain, fear, there's lots of ways that we can provide value there and there's lots of ways that we can use Chat GPT and other AI technology as a tool to aid in that. So as long as we're using it, I guess you could say, for good and not for evil, then I think we're going to be on the right side of the equation there and we're going to be able to profit tremendously.

It's going to work as rocket fuel for some businesses, content businesses that are reliant on content and not just spitting out content, that's handy, but also developing frameworks for content and ideas for content. There are a gazillion different ways that you can do that. So that's definitely a topic for another episode here.

I wanted to sum up on some of your nuggets of wisdom here that you've sort of shared with us here today. So passion and pain, I think this is a good one. Passion and fear are a great way to think about niches. An old-fashioned way that I've found a lot of good niches over the years is browsing the magazine stand. That can be if I'm going through an airport or if I'm doing it virtually through a website like Amazon. If there's a magazine about it, then there's got to be a passionate niche there or it must be an important topic in some regard.

The foundations haven't changed. I think that's really exciting and important. If you're thinking about diving into niche sites nowadays. Amazon as a validation tool and also a research tool, it's free and everyone knows how to use Amazon. You can go in there and just start searching and you can navigate through different menu items and you can see prices of products, how many reviews products have got, how products are selling comparatively to other products in a niche and other niches.

You mentioned about not going too broad and also not going too narrow, so finding that happy middle ground. Then in terms of the sort of success ingredients of these websites we spoke about, you need a good platform and a good theme and how WordPress is a great solution there about targeting the right keywords and not just choosing them haphazardly but going after them with intent. That's how you end up getting the right kind of traffic that actually makes you money and then aiming to be number one with the content that you create.

That doesn't mean that you're creating thousands of the very best types of content. I mean, you might double down on ten really good pieces of content on your website and that's enough to make you four or five figures a month from a small, lightweight niche website. Then finally, backlinks. We spoke about how these really are the rocket fuel that will accelerate results there.

This has been fantastic, Adam. I've been a big fan of everything you've done over the years. You've helped thousands of students. I really look forward to hearing about the next journeys that you are going to be going on in the decades ahead because I'm sure you're going to be doing interesting things and I'd love to be able to follow along there and have you back on in the future to talk about new projects and pick your brain More about niche marketing. So thank you so much for being here today.

Adam

Absolutely, it's my pleasure. Yeah, really enjoyed it. I'm happy to come back anytime and talk more with your audience. That sounds great.

Aidan

Awesome. Okay, guys, well, this is a wrap. This is episode number 64 of The Growth Booth. As always, you can find us on YouTube, just go and search for The Growth Booth. Or you can go to TheGrowthBooth.com, navigate to the podcasts section, and come down to episode number 64 to get the transcripts, to watch the video, to get important links to other bits and pieces and so much more. As I've said a couple of times on this show here today, we are going to be diving deep into niche marketing a lot more over the months ahead because I see it as a huge opportunity, especially with the advancements of the AI technology that we are all just so excited about.

Stay tuned to hear more about how you can leverage and build your own money-making autopilot niche website and participate in what I think is the niche website site, Gold Rush. Thanks very much for listening here today, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of The Growth Booth. Bye.