Seasonality and Your Niche Website

A niche website is perfect for making extra money through affiliate marketing. The Stadium Reviews is a new website I’m working on to do just that.

 

A Little Background

The person who reached out to me had a good looking fishing website. On the fishing website, he had lots of great content around Fly Fishing and Bass Fishing to name of few items. He was still new to SEO, so there was a lot of on-page changes to be made, but he had the right idea.

To supplement his time and effort, he has Google AdSense ads along with Amazon Affiliate Ads. He had a pretty good daily passive income during the summer from these ads. His goal was to drive more traffic to his site, but a seasonality opportunity would be the primary way.

 

Use Google Trends to Spot Seasonal Trends

Google Trends is a free website from Google, where you can visualize search trends and interest in search terms and topics. You can compare terms, themes, and more against each other to see what yields a higher search interest. The number 100 does not represent that many searches, but the level of interest in the topic.

When I put in Fly Fishing and Bass Fishing into the tool, we saw a regular search pattern over a five-year time frame. April through August had the most search interest in these two topics, but the interest falls off when the winter comes along. With the seasonality drop in plain view, we began to experiment with winter terms.

By adding Ice Fishing into Google Trends, we were able to see the reverse pattern against Fly and Bass Fishing. My client did not have any topics around winter fishing, so this was a perfect topic to cover. Now this particular client can drive traffic all year around.

 

How to Find More Winter Terms to Cover

Now that we saw that ice fishing had interest, we spent time performing keyword research. The two free tools I use for keyword research include Keywords Everywhere and Answer the Public. Keywords Everywhere illustrate monthly search volume from a Google search while Answer the Public asks questions around a topic.

 

Using both tools above, we were able to scope out a significant amount of winter terms to cover on his site. Knowing that SEO can take months to drive performance, my client is in a great position to write the content in August to get ready for November and December. You can get in the habit of covering your seasonality material in the offseason so you can get ahead of the competition when the search interest spikes.

 

Don’t Niche Down too Far for Your Website

Niche sites are fabulous ways to make extra income. Running Google Adsense, Amazon Affiliate Ads, and more can bring in supplemental income daily. While you want to have a niche website to own and control a market, you don’t want to niche down too far.

The fishing website was the perfect example of a niche down too far website. Since the site was about fishing tips, forgetting to cover winter was something that came as an opportunity through the coaching session. Since my client was looking for supplemental income all year round, he was previously set up to achieve about a six month out of 12-month time frame to make serious money.

 

Taking my Advice

The Stadium Reviews was always supposed to be about baseball. Baseball is my favorite sport, but the domain is more generic by being about stadiums. When baseball went into the All-Star break, I too noticed my daily website traffic was down 50%. Seeing the impact that seasonality can play on a niche, I’m expanding my content further.

As we are entering August, baseball games are at the peak of interest from search. While I’m maintaining my MLB pages on my website, I’m already writing new content for the NFL. Football season interest will start to climb at the start of September, so I need to get ahead of this today.

 

Conclusion

Some topics may be challenging to niche down, but you should always look for ways to drive consistent traffic and revenue. The example above of a website not covering winter fishing was the perfect example of expanding upon a niche. Head over to Google Trends to see what topics you should cover on your site.