Leave Your Cubicle Behind

Besides running this site, and numerous travel sites, I have a SEO client in Bangkok run a guitar site. In the 8 months I’ve been helping him with his website, I’ve come to realize one thing: not all niches work well. Everyone wants to turn their passion into a website so you can live wirelessly. Everyone wants to have a successful website with lots of visitors, readers, and sales. But as it turns out, some niches work better than others and some don’t work at all. There’s a million active finance, technology, mommy, food, garden, baby, and travel bloggers out there. We blog passionately. We interact with everyone. We go to blog conferences. We love it. We have big RSS feeds, we guest blog, we socialize!

In the music niche? No one seems to do that.

Many of the niches out there have a few dominate blogs. A few blogs are bigger and more well known than others. In the music space, there’s no one dominate. I have yet to find a website with an Alexa rank better than 400,000. Moreover, many of these sites are simply run by musicians and guitarists putting up songs or videos as sort of a hobby. Yeah, they have a few blogrolls. Yes. someone comments here or there. But for the most part, these blogs are a silo and there’s no community like there is elsewhere on the internet. Even on Twitter, most of the guitar or music twitters tweet about their music. There is a noticeable difference between that niche and other niches.

This makes it real hard to attract readers, advertisers, and grow a site’s traffic. Moreover, music is very auditory and thus makes blogging a poor medium to convey its meaning. In other niches, you find it much easier to grow traffic because you can rely on other blogs and sites to help you out.

Which leads me to my point: If you are going to create a successful web business, make sure that there is a community around what you are doing that can help support you. If you are just creating an online store, then you don’t need that community. You can simply use SEO to move your site up the search engines to get traffic But if you are creating anything that requires members, users, or any time of interaction, you must have people in that niche that can become those users and members. The music niche does not have that. It’s news I have to break to my client that his passion is not profitable. But music isn’t the only niche where that happens. There are plenty out there. Make sure you know what you are getting into and do your research.

Otherwise, you are just wasting your time and money.