Niche Pursuits Podcast: Find Your Next "Niche" Business Idea!

As you may know, I recently published a blog post sharing my recent success on Amazon. Today, Perrin and I sit down and have a more in-depth discussion on the subject. The overall content is very similar to my last blog post where I share the fact that my new Amazon FBA business just clocked in at $40,639 in sales.

I'm excited to bring to you another podcast interview with Matt Paulson! If you recall, I had Matt on the podcast about a year ago and he delivered tons of value. As a result, I thought it would be great to catch up with Matt and have an update on his business at MarketBeat.com. Not only does he give an update on the astounding revenue and income numbers of his business, but he also shares some great advice for email marketing. You can follow along with Matt on his blog at MattPaulson.com. In addition, I HIGHLY recommend that you check out his new book that was just released, Email Marketing Demystified: Build a Massive Mailing List, Write Copy that Converts and Generate More Sales.

Today on the podcast, Perrin and I discuss 6 examples of successful websites using long tail keywords. In general, if you are interested in building websites that get traffic from long tail keywords (and often really long tail keywords), then this podcast will give you some ideas and get you motivated. Overall, if you are interested in learning more about how to apply these long tail keyword strategies in your own websites, please check out Long Tail University (our keyword research training course).

Today, I am sharing a discussion that I did with Travis Jamison from Supremacy SEO and AMZtracker.com. Travis is someone that has really figured out how to rank his products well for tons of long tail keywords in Amazon. During the interview, he dives into how he finds keywords, how he strategically uses keywords in his listings, and how he gets reviews. In addition, Travis is also the created of a software tool called AMZtracker.com.

Today, Perrin and I discuss SEO. Can you believe it already been a year since the big PBN update? This PBN update had a big impact on aPennyShaved.com (the Niche Site Project 2 website) and other niche site we were working on. As a result, we have drastically changed how we do SEO and link building. We haven't talked about these strategies too much, but we definitely are still actively doing keyword research, creating content, and building links for our sites. In fact, I've gotten emails and comments from people asking if we would ever talk about SEO again (rather than my recent Amazon FBA frenzy). So, I felt like it was finally time for an update on what our current strategies in 2015 are for search engine optimization, external and internal link building, content, and so much more.

Today's guest is not just selling a private label product. Zach Vohries from Zackees.com has created a truly original (and patented) product and brought it to the market. Zach had a unique idea and was able to go from idea to selling in about 2 years. I love the story that Zach shares because he has reached the point that all of us should be striving for (at least I know I am). He's created something unique and defensible; he truly is "the one" for his product category. So, what is the product that Zach created? The product is Zackees LED Turn Signal Cycling Gloves; and you can see his product on Amazon right here. In addition, they also sell the Zackees Rechargeable Coin Cell Charger here.

The time has finally come for me to reveal how well my new Amazon FBA business is going. I’ve shared a bit about how I got started selling physical products on Amazon; including the fact that I made about $4,400 in my first 40 days. I’ve also been busy interviewing others for the NIche Pursuits podcast and just generally digging into the Amazon FBA business because I saw so much potential. Today, I want to discuss the revenue of my Amazon business over the past 30 days. In addition, I want to touch on my “authority” site project and why shifting my focus away from it was clearly a good move.

We’re super excited to have an absolutely killer guest today: David Bryant from ChineseImporting.com. Some people, though, are just so far ahead of the game when it comes to important products from overseas. David is one of those people. Just how far ahead is he? You might want to sit down. Starting in 2008, David built a business that now sources over 300 products from China and generates over $1 million in annual revenue. The crazy part? He’s only 30 years old! That’s what you call a whiz kid. David’s here to school us in the importing arts. So check it out and listen up.

Perrin and I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Scott Voelker from TheAmazingSeller.com and discuss his FBA business. He has been able to build up his Amazon physical product business to revenues of $35,000 per month since starting in October 2014 (about 9 months). In the interview today, Scott shares what has worked in his business, and how other can go about finding great products to sell and hopefully replicate some of the success he is having.

We’ve got another (much more exciting) update about our Amazon FBA business. It’s been a week, our products are live, and we’ve finally got some hard numbers to report.

It’s been a while (about a month to be exact) since we’ve recorded a podcast on our Amazon FBA business. And believe me, we’ve wanted to talk to you guys about it. But we couldn’t because our business was at a total stand-still (more on this below). But today, we’re back at it, and we’re ready to fire up another podcast episode about our Amazon FBA business. And you’re going to love this one. We’ve got a lot to share, a lot to be excited about, and a lot of big dreams to chase. How’s it all come together? Check it out.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Arial",sans-serif; color:black;} Welcome to Episode 64 of the Niche Pursuits podcast. Today we welcome Steve Chou. Steve and his wife own the ecommerce store, bumblebeelinens.com. Steve also has a blog and training classes on starting ecommerce stores on his other sites, mywifequitherjob.com and profitableonlinestore.com. Steve gives us the story of how he and his wife started their store which sells a large product line of personalized handkerchiefs and linens. Since its inception in 2007, the store now has earnings in the high six figures.

We are excited about today’s episode which will be part 1 of a 5 part series on howto bootstrap a software business. Along the way, we will look at my software company, Long Tail Pro and how it became my most successful venture and we’ll also tell you, the listener, how to go out and start your own successful software business.

Perrin and I are excited to bring you the income reports for the authority site and my amazon product. We also discuss a pivot I am making in my business based on these numbers. The details of these income reports can be found in this blog post from last week. Here's a quick rundown of what we discuss on the podcast today: Last month our authority site brought in $912.70, mostly from Kindle books, and some Adsense revenue. However, at this point we’re facing a bit of a reality check: we’re now 10 months in to this project, and the traffic is not growing like we had hoped. Currently we’re spending $3,000-4,000 per month on content creation and marketing. Over the past several months we’ve spent $15,000-20,000 and only realized $7,000 revenue. On the other hand, my Amazon product launched March 28 and saw revenues of $4,400 in the first 30 days. This started as a very casual side project, but we sold out of the first batch of 105 units in 40 days for an initial revenue of $6,000. Looking forward we’re planning to increase profit margins through lower freight costs and lower price per unit due to economies of scale with our manufacturer. The difference in momentum between these two projects is allowing for a pretty clear decision in our business focus.

Today’s episode of the Niche Pursuits Podcast is a Q&A session with Perrin and I talking all about selling physical products on Amazon. A few of the questions covered are: What are your thoughts about going outside of Amazon? Another common question we get is Why Not Go Direct? A few people have been asking about selling through Amazon’s FBA program in other countries. Can you estimate costs associated with a product? Where and How do you get samples? Can you source from the US? What due diligence can you do around suppliers on Alibaba? and others

Today, Perrin and I get behind the microphone and discuss how to start and grow your own business through Amazon’s FBA program. By following several key steps, I was able to sell $4,399 in product in just 30 days. Perrin and I share the process and answer some questions taken from the blog. This is a very real business, which I hope to scale and see monthly earnings quadruple. The potential rewards are, in my opinion, much greater than a niche website.

Today, I share a discussion between Perrin and I on the importance of being unique with your business. In particular, we have a more in-depth discussion about being the ONE, as I wrote about in my last blog post here. This is an interesting topic that may seem pretty obvious to some people, while others may be completely oblivious to the subject. In my opinion, to build a defensible business that can stand the test of time, that business needs to be doing something unique.

Perrin and I have launched a couple of books on Amazon Kindle and we have been surprised by their success. In this episode, we discuss the latest earnings and other successes from both our authority site and our kindle books.

In my podcast episode today I interviewed Claire Smith that is doing VERY well with her niche sites. She is making over $10,000 a month with her niche sites. However, what makes Claire's story interesting is that she has NEVER built a link to any of her sites. In her words, "I just never got around to it." Because she has never even tried to build a link to any of her sites, she doesn't have to worry when Google changes how the value links because well she doesn't have any!

Today, I would like to introduce you to Travis Ketchum of ContestDomination.com. In this episode, Travis shares a bit about his own story and why he created Contest Domination (software that helps you run and manage successful contests online). In addition, Travis shares some really amazing success stories of clients that have used Contest Domination to grow their business. One of those companies was able to generate over 190,000 email opt ins from just one contest!

During the podcast, Brian provided a ton of very actionable tips for anyone starting a new blog or looking to attract more traffic and links to their existing sites. Some of the most interesting takeaways that I had are related to how Brian was able to grow his blog so much in the past year. He did this by blogging LESS. By focusing more on quality posts rather than quantity, and then working actively to promote those posts, he's been able to become a widely recognized expert. We discuss the exact tactics Brian has used to grow Backlinko.com and how you can do the same.

When it comes to link building experts, Jon Cooper of PointBlankSEO.com is right at the top of the list. For that reason, I wanted to bring Jon on the podcast for a second time to discuss link building tactics that are working right now. In particular, Perrin and I got a chance to ask about our authority site and actually get some personalized advice for how we should approach our link building.

Chris Guthrie and I have known each other for a long time. Back in the day Chris was out building Amazon affiliate sites and I was building Adsense affiliate sites. I'm not sure where we first crossed paths, but we've been in touch now for probably close to 5 years. I had Chris on my podcast over 2 years ago. However, now his business has evolved so much that I wanted to have him on to discuss his latest business venture. Chris is now actively involved in selling physical products on Amazon through the Fullfullilled by Amazon (FBA) program. In his first few months with his very first product, Chris has built his monthly revenue to over $12k per month with this business! (Profit is about 50% of that). I know that sounds almost too good; however, Chris has been kind enough to privately show me his Amazon account with earnings and the product that he is selling on Amazon. It's a legit business.

About a month ago I was able to attend a conference called Rhodium weekend. While I was there, I got to meet lots of really interesting people, including Jock Purtle from DigitalExits.com. I asked Jock to come on the podcast and discuss some of the insights that he has on buying and selling websites. You see, Jock has been buying and selling websites for his own portfolio for a long time. In addition, he is a website broker selling websites for his clients through his company, DigitalExits.com. This interview definitely focuses on buying and selling more established websites. The type of sites that Jock and his team work with tend to be valued at $100,000 to $5 million.

Today, I’m excited to share with you the interview that Perrin and I did with Shane Melaugh of Thrive Themes. Shane is someone that has been involved in the internet marketing space for a number of years and has seen a lot of success. In fact, he’s been entrepreneurial his entire life and by his own admission is probably “unemployable” at a traditional job. Not only has he found a way to bring money in the door, but he’s become very good at creating products and building great businesses.

Podcast 50! I started my podcast a couple of years ago almost as an after thought, but today I'm hitting a major milestone with 50 episodes! For now I'm excited to share an interview I did with Justin and Joe from EmpireFlippers.com. These guys are well known for their website marketplace where all sites are listed for sale at 20 times monthly income.

Perrin and I were able to sit down and record a podcast based on our last blog post, How to Mange Writers Effectively. When it comes to starting and running an online business, having great content is so critical. If you are not writing the content yourself, hiring and managing writers becomes extremely important. Because of this, Perrin and I felt like we wanted to share some of our best practices for finding, hiring, and motivating writers.

In this podcast, we discuss 2 of Steve's sites: SteveScottSite.com and DevelopGoodHabits.com; and of course his Kindle publishing business. In fact, he was also kind enough to share a link to his author page on Amazon, so you can see a list of all his books! Check them out at HabitBooks.com. Steve's advice and story is quite impressive as he is only started publishing on Kindle about 2 years ago and is now making anywhere from $30,000 to $60,000 a MONTH! He reveals regular income reports and has great business tips over at SteveScottSite.com.

I'm excited to bring you another podcast today! Perrin and I were able to recently sit down with Gael Breton of AuthorityHacker.com to discuss all the important elements of building an authority website. Gael knows what he is talking about. You'll like this interview because he not only shares very actionable tips, but also gives the URL of his website that is making over $10,000 per month. I always love having an example website that I can look at and try to replicate.

Wow, apparently my article from earlier this week really rocked the boat! I made the firm stance that I will no longer be building private blog networks (PBNs), and it garnered A LOT of attention. In fact, my article was mentioned on SERoundtable.com, SearchEngineLand.com, tweeted by Rand Fishkin, and even Matt Cutts tweeted about the news articles (that I was in). Then of course there have been plenty of other blog posts, online discussions, and overall a major buzz around the topic of PBNs getting deindexed and whether or not to use them going forward. The day of that blog post was the highest traffic day this site has ever had, and there are already over 400 comments on that blog post! To say the least, I've hit a nerve that lots of people care about. As a result, Perrin and I only felt like it was appropriate that we record a follow up podcast to dive a bit deeper into the risks vs. rewards of private blog networks. As you can see from the podcast title, I still think you should NOT build a PBN. Listen to the podcast for all my reasons why.

A few days ago I shared the monthly income report for a few sites that I purchased this year. The site buying case study is one that I've learned quite a bit from and has helped expand my business. In total, I've now bought 4 sites this year, and as you can see from the what I've learned from spending $37,100 on buying sites, I've been able to do pretty well! Today, I'm sharing a podcast that Perrin and I recorded to review our monthly earnings from just a couple of sites along with a discussion of what else we have going on in our business.

Perrin and I had the chance to interview Neil Patel of QuickSprout.com. Neil is very well known for the products he's built (Kissmetrics, CrazyEgg, and others) and for the traffic strategies he's implemented on large websites such as TechCrunch.com and Amazon.com. When it comes to content marketing and traffic experts, Neil is right there near the top of the list. So, I hope you enjoy the interview as we discuss his entrepreneurial background, traffic strategies, infographic strategies (that still work), and much more.

Last week, I finally broke the silence about what happened to my survival knife site, from niche site project 1. As revealed in that post, the site appeared to have been hit with negative SEO. And then when Penguin 2.1 came out in October 2013, the site finally tanked in the rankings (the spammy links obviously being the reason that it was affected by Penguin). I tried several tactics for over 9 months trying to bring the site back from the dead without much success. However, last week some interesting things started to happen: the site started to rank for keywords and the traffic was increasing rapidly. Perrin and I discuss what's going on.

One of the hottest business ventures right now, is publishing books on the Amazon Kindle platform. I've personally been curious about the prospects of publishing Kindle eBooks, but have never taken the leap. As a result, Perrin and I jumped at the opportunity to have Jonny Andrews of AudienceHacker.com on the podcast. We recently interviewed him and had the chance to dig into how he's been able to build a substantial business using the Kindle platform.

Perrin and I were able to sit down recently and interview Rand Fishkin of Moz.com! If you have been in the SEO world for any period of time, you are likely well aware of Rand and the company he founded, Moz. He is one of the most well-known and well respected entrepreneurs in the SEO space. Perrin and I really relished our opportunity to pick Rand's brain for an hour on SEO, marketing, and his story.

Recently Perrin and I were able to sit down and interview Dre Baldwin of DreAllDay.com. I'm excited to bring this interview to you today, because well, its different! Dre is not your typical niche site builder or affiliate marketer (like almost all of my previous guests). Dre is actually a professional basketball player! I'll let you read or listen to his entire story below, but he worked his way from basically not playing much in high school to eventually playing professionally overseas. However, the moment he decided to put one of his highlight VHS tapes from a training camp onto YouTube changed everything for him. People started to find his videos and he continued to add more, until eventually he decided to start adding daily basketball tips and training videos.

Our guest today is Dhanish Semar (those of you in the League of Legends community probably know him by his IGN: DiffTheEnder). Dhanish owns Cloth5.com, a site he built by making great connections, writing premium content, and putting it in front of his audience using the platform that was most important to them. The result? Cloth5 now gets over 1,000,000 visits per month.

Recently, Perrin and I were able to sit down with Matt Paulson of MattPaulson.com for a podcast interview to discuss his amazing business. Matt is an unassuming guy and you would have no idea how extraordinarily well his business is doing unless you asked him. Well, we had the chance to ask about his business and the numbers he shares will blow your mind (at least it did for Perrin and I). Matt owns a financial network of sites including AmericanBankingNews.com, AnalystRatings.net, and a few others that combined get over 2.5 MILLION pageviews per month! The earnings from those sites is even more impressive than the pageviews in my opinion.

In the podcast, Perrin and I review the income report from last month, discuss the business potential of buying and selling websites, and then go into more depth in our new authority site project. While we do cover similar topics to my last blog post, we also have a chance to dive quite a bit deeper and throw in a few other interesting topics as well. Overall, if want our most up to date thoughts on buying and selling websites, building out niche sites, building large authority sites, and more, then I hope you'll give it a listen.

I recently interviewed Andrew Youderian of eEcommerceFuel.com. Perrin and I were able to have a great chat with Andrew to talk about his business and the great success that he has had with a couple of his drop shipping/ecommerce sites; including selling one for $170k at the beginning of 2014.

I started the NichePursuits podcast just over 2 years ago. The most popular episode since the inception of my podcast has been episode 9 with Hayden Miyamoto recorded just over 2 years ago. At the time, he was making over $30k per month from his small niche sites. However, a lot has happened in the past 2 years and his strategy has changed dramatically. Today I am publishing an interview I did just a few days ago with Hayden Miyamoto from NoHatSEO.com. So, why did I bring Hayden back for a 4th time on the podcast? Well, not only have his episodes been the most popular, but a lot has changed over the past year or 2. In fact, Hayden has changed up his strategies a bit and is focusing more now on building out larger sites. One of his sites is now doing over $10k per month! So, I wanted to bring him back on to discuss what has changed and what’s still working for him.

Perrin and I discuss what passive income is all about and whether or not people actually stop working once they achieve their income dreams. In addition to sharing the early influence of our fathers, we also discuss some of the wealthiest people in the world and how they spend their work lives. Finally, I share my own day to day schedule as an internet entrepreneur.

Perrin and I had the chance to sit down and discuss in detail our new business Vylo.org for Episode 33. We dig into the story of the product, how Perrin generated initial buzz, and plans going forward. The story of how Perrin came up with the idea and how he got over 6,000 people to express interest in the product and get on his email list in 24 hours is pretty remarkable. So, this episode is all about the story of Vylo from idea to launch (which happened about 12 days ago).

Perrin and I discuss the May income of 2 niche sites that I purchased in January 2014. We also discuss whether or not I should sell one of the websites; and share our thought process behind making this decision.

Perrin and I discuss when its time to stop creating new websites and when to just focus on your existing portfolio. I discuss my own website portfolio, specific traffic stats, and the decision I have made to stop building new sites for the foreseeable future.

When it comes to building a niche website that you hope to rank at the top of Google, you could potentially make hundreds of mistakes. As a result, there is no possible way that I could cover every possible mistake that someone might make when trying to build and optimize their site for SEO. However, I do believe that there are some very common mistakes that many newer people might fall prey to when building niche sites. As a result, Perrin and I cover the 9 most common mistakes that people make when building niche sites and doing SEO.

Perrin and I just finished recording a new podcast, episode 29. During this episode, we discuss the April income report from my last blog post, and share some additional thoughts and nuances that I didn't have a chance to cover. Overall, I hope you enjoy the episode! If you find any value in the podcast and have a chance to leave a rating or review on iTunes here, that would be great.

I recently wrote a blog post titled, "Wh you Should NOT start a podcast". This was an opinion piece that I wrote based on some of the frustrations of my podcast. However, after taking a look at the data and hearing some feedback from others, my opinion has evolved a bit in regards to podcasting. Listen in to hear what the future of the Niche Pursuits Podcast will be...along with other interesting stats about my business.

One of the things I did to grow aPennyShaved was to reach out to a bunch of other bloggers in the shaving community, a process I outlined in one of my previous posts. It was a super fun process, the response was spectacular, and I ended up making a bunch of cool friends. One of those friends was Douglas Smythe, who founded Howtogrowamoustache.com. We exchanged emails about shaving, discussed blogging strategies and ended up collaborating on a guest post, which was a ton of fun. The more Douglas and I chatted, the more I became absolutely fascinated and blown away by his success in the very same community I was working to succeed in, especially because his site wasn’t just a simple ad-supported site. Douglas was leveraging his traffic to expand his shaving site into a larger, product-driven business.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of sitting down and interviewing Doug Cunnington for the Niche Pursuits podcast. He's had some impressive results with one of his newer niche sites that I wanted to share. Does the name Doug Cunnington sound familiar? You may recall hearing about Doug because I shared his success story just a few months ago! At that time he was earning over $1,000 per month from the site already, and he's come back to tell us how well its done since November. Overall, Doug basically took the techniques that I've shared from Niche Site Project 1 and Niche Site Project 2 and applied it to his own new sites. And of course, he has tweaked the process and strategies a bit to make them work well for him. In fact, he's done so well, that his site earned over $6,000 in December alone!