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SUMMARY:
Big brands have big budgets. And that can be hard to compete with. But there is always a way. For example, when a brand is big, it can overlook smaller opportunities. So if you want to compete with big…go small. Fill in the gaps. This article gives you some examples from your peers to spark your next big (small) idea – learn how to compete with big brands in niche markets, get ideas for successful SEO strategies, and see examples of leveraging AI for content creation. |
Action Box: Find your niche business opportunity
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Observation Hobbies is a niche website focused on astronomy, geology, and meteorology. And that niche isn’t random. Its founder was specifically looking for a niche that is narrow enough to target a specific audience, but that’s broad enough that he could create segments within that audience – and that he could quickly compete in.
“Competitive analysis is fairly easy, but it does require an SEO tool. I recommend either Ahrefs or Semrush for this – although they are both expensive, the data they provide is well worth it,” said James Oliver, Founder, Oliver.com (owner of Observation Hobbies).
Could your next niche site benefit from AI-driven content and a targeted product strategy? I asked Oliver about what worked best, and what he’d do differently if he were to launch a similar project today.
Oliver over-invested in manually coding silos and linking 500+ posts, a time-consuming task that a basic, automated process could have streamlined.
This was so time consuming that even with a cheap VA (virtual assistant) it cost him $150 since it took them a week of working full time to do this. Looking back, a more basic and automated internal linking process, which could have taken someone half a day instead of a week, would have sufficed. And it would have saved him $125.
He also learned a crucial lesson about the sensitivity of site structure. When he made slight changes to the silos, it resulted in a decrease in his traffic.
Creative Sample #1: Traffic decline after restructuring silos
This caused a monthly earning dip of $492.16, and he is having to put in a considerable amount of work in to get the traffic back to June levels.
He felt that Google’s Helpful Content Update (their September 2023 update, also known as HCU) which supposedly ‘killed niche sites.’ But Oliver still saw an opportunity. To him, HCU seemed to specifically target sites that have a small backlink profile (i.e. aren’t an established brand) and are purely monetizing their content as opposed to using their content to monetize a product/service.
So he focused on building a niche site focused on a product.
According to Oliver, creating a product quickly boosts authority in Google's eyes. “Google wants to show websites run by experts – how often do we hear about the importance of E-EAT (expertise experience authoritativeness trustworthiness) and Google currently seems to think that the ability to create a product or a service based around your niche is a sign of expertise.”
You need expertise and capital to create a product. So Google, seeing that you are promoting your own product rather than just creating content for advertising space, should increase your perceived E-EAT even if you have a poor link profile, he surmised. He thinks this is a big reason why he was able to outrank sites with much better link profiles so quickly.
Rather than selling the product he gave it away as a lead magnet. This allowed him to build an email list of 12,000 people. “For Observation Hobbies, I saw on Reddit that there was a lack of online maps for rock hunters to find obscure rocks, so I created my own rockhounding map which I keep updated and use as a free lead magnet (distributed via Gumroad) to get people on my email list,” Oliver said.
This was the first website where he heavily relied on AI content writing tools to create product reviews and write content.
He conducted keyword research to find commercial and non-commercial keywords. He filtered using words like ‘best’ and ‘review’ for commercial keywords and question words (‘who,’ ‘what,’ ‘where,’ etc) for non-commercial keywords. For example, when he filtered questions with the modifier ‘how’ he noticed a lot of questions following the structure ‘how much is {rock or gem} worth.’
“This then allowed me to get ChatGPT to give me as long a list as possible of gems so I could check this keyword pattern with every possible gem along with its search volume and competition,” Oliver said. “For the commercial articles I used Koala Writer. Koala allowed me to create 348 articles in three weeks for $90. For the non-commercial articles I used Cuppa.sh. This allowed me to create 214 articles in the same three weeks for $358.44.”
Even with the cheapest possible writer, Oliver estimated this would have cost him around $10,000.
“They both have good YouTube resources on how to use them,” Oliver said. But he did provide this piece of advice, “Always use GPT-4 turbo – this allows you to use far more custom prompts so your content will stand out from other AI content (if you’re in a small niche like this you are going to be competing against a lot of AI sites).”
“I was not sure if they would convert,” Oliver admitted. “But as you can see from my Amazon affiliate earnings, they haven't done too badly.” The June spike was due to the buildup after the launch of effective product reviews. The July dip was caused by the site restructure mistake.
Creative Sample #2: Amazon affiliate earnings growth chart
“I like to track my websites rankings using a combination of Google Search Console and SERProbot,” Oliver said. If an article ranks in the top seven or better on the search engine results page, he invests manual time to further improve it.
That isn’t to say he didn’t do any manual work for the artificial intelligence articles before he published them. He edited the content to redo the intros, separate any large blocks of text, and improve the CTA boxes.
Creative Sample #3: CTA box example in telescope review
Let have a look at the site’s earnings:
“These earnings are roughly 40% from Amazon affiliates and 60% from Mediavine display advertising,” Oliver shared.
The website currently has 578 pages and no links beyond citations (its Domain Rating is 2). Its highest traffic day in terms of traffic was 1,824, which occurred on July 2, 2024.
The upfront cost of the project was $456.12, with an ongoing monthly operating cost of $42.50. He estimates that if the site can hold its value for six months he will be able to sell it for around $50,000.
Oliver sees making his own products as an opportunity for further monetization. He is using the free rockhounding map to see if there is demand for digital products in this space. Early results look promising, so he might create maps for stargazing, or maps that go into more specific details on the most popular rockhounding locations. He may sell these on Gumroad in the future rather than only using them as free lead magnets.
Tigers Eye is a UK-based, female-founded sports bra brand. When its founder couldn’t find a comfortable yet functional bra for herself, she decided to make her own. “The University of Portsmouth’s Research Group in Breast Health played a crucial role in the development of Tigers Eye bra by providing expert insights into the biomechanics of breast movement during physical activity,” said Rebeka Polgar, Founder, Tigers Eye.
After three years of development, she was ready to launch the product. That’s where our marketing story begins.
The campaign started in the UK, US, and German markets with broad targeting: 25- to 55-year-olds with training-related interest categories. At the beginning of a product launch, without proper historical data, the team worried narrow targeting could hurt the brand’s ability to find the right audience segments because it builds only on hypotheses and not gathered data.
Ad messaging focused on ‘reinventing sports bras,’ ‘dominate the toughest workouts’ and ‘proper breast support.’
Creative Sample #4: Initial sports bra ads on Meta
The team sent ad traffic to the homepage, which had a split screen design with two headlines – ‘Intense Activity’ and ‘Military and First Responders.’
Creative Sample #5: Original homepage
Not surprisingly, the soft and hard KPIs were not good at all, but at this stage, it was not a requirement. CTRs were below 0.5%, and the team had hardly any sales. Despite these poor numbers, the cost of clicks was relatively cheap (€0.1 - 1.5) because the CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) was lower than we expected.
The website had a popup offering 10% off their first purchase and the team created an email welcome flow.
The welcome email flow had a 4.5% conversion rate and every email had an open rate of more than 60%. However, while the first email had a 24% CTR (clickthrough rate), the second one had only 3.4%. “From our experience with other brands, even the fifth email can convert those who subscribed. For this, we use Klaviyo as our email marketing tool,” said Zsolt Farkas, Owner, Evolut Agency (Tigers Eye’s agency).
When the team looked into the reason for the decreased conversion rate in the second email, they realized that the second email had too much text, and the call-to-action was placed too far down.
Creative Sample #6: First and second email in welcome email flow
After generating 1 million impressions and reaching 500,000 users, the team conducted an in-depth analysis of the data, reviewing hundreds of session recordings. “We compared metrics from the Meta Ads dashboard, Google Analytics, and Clarity heatmap session recordings,” Farkas said.
After reviewing screen recordings, the team realized that many users didn’t know where to click on the homepage and would leave the site without seeing the products or the shop section. So, the team used dedicated landing pages for the ads instead.
In the UK, the training-focused creatives received higher engagement. As a result, they decided to stop promoting the military line there and focus solely on the high-intensity training USPs (unique selling propositions). The team organized a photoshoot specifically to show lifestyle creative of women who train hard. For example, the below carousel lifestyle creative achieved an 18% CTR on Meta. As a result, the CPC (cost per click) was only €0.03 in the UK.
Creative Sample #7: Best-performing ad creative in the UK
In the US, military women were clicking through 10 times more than any other audience. So the team focused solely on this well-defined audience of 60,000 to 80,000. They used lifestyle images and incorporated jargon that only military personnel would understand, such as ‘PT’ (Physical Training). It resulted in a CTR between 6% and 10%.
Creative Sample #8: Best-performing ad creative in the US
In Germany, there was no real interest. This could be because they advertised in English, and Germans are used to seeing ads in their own language, given that the market is large enough to support this.
Besides the paid media activities, the team engaged in organic social media content as well. “At Tigers Eye bra, Instagram focused on educational, demonstrative, and testimonial content, primarily delivered through short-form videos and carousel formats,” Farkas said.
Within 40 days, the first 15 sales were made, and the ROAS exceeded 1. “At this early stage, having a ROAS greater than 1 indicates that the brand can scale, as profitability is not the main focus at this point,” he said.
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