I was mighty pleased to see that some affiliate income was starting to be generated by one of my niche sites. The reason for this satisfaction is that this particular site had taken much longer to put together than my others - let me explain.

In deciding on a niche I’m very often persuaded by the quality of the site I’m promoting, together with the available data on ClickBank, such as popularity.  I don’t think that there would be any niches I wouldn’t tackle, if it met my criteria. So using my rules of engagement led me to the ‘Anxiety & Depression’ niche. I made an early conscious decision that visitors to my site would perhaps ‘more vulnerable’, shall we say, than your average visitor and I was going to make it the best resource I could to help these people. Sure I wanted to make money, but I wasn’t going to take advantage. I’ve seen some really shit sites dealing with sensitive issues and it only makes you wonder at the stupidity and ignorance of the site owner that they ever thought it would make them money.

For example, I put up an Amazon carousel widget, but instead of promoting the most expensive books, I researched and found the best selling books and visited forums and authority sites to find out which books had made a difference to peoples’ lives. It didn’t matter to me if they were the cheapest books and I would make less commission - it was all about quality.

After a couple of weeks or so I noticed some traffic was coming through from an unexpected source - a forum for sufferers of depression. In a post, a woman had referenced my site saying how useful it had been to her and recommending it to others. Well, I can’t tell you how good this made me feel and the additional traffic was a welcome bonus.

So now the sales are starting to come in, rather than just leave the site on auto-pilot, I’m updating it to ensure that it stays the best resource it can be. I’m beginning to empathize with my visitors, particularly as you learn the issues through the search strings (usually stated as questions) and the monetization becomes an almost self fulfilling prophecy. The other interesting thing about this site is that visitors stay on it longer and view more pages than my other sites.

Just goes to show that to be successful you have to give your targeted audience quality information that will make a difference in their lives. As Mark Twain said,

Always tell the truth, then you won’t have to remember anything.