Viral Content Sites: Should You Go Niche?

Hey everyone,

Welcome to another episode of my VN Experiment. It’s been quite a long time since I updated my blog. You can blame it on laziness.

Anyone, back to the topic at hand. Should you go niche or general with your viral content sites?

I have set up my VN clone like any other WordPress site. I have use the Socially Viral theme for the look and set up the basic stuff like plugins and the like. I will write a different post on the plugins I have used. Today, I wanted to address the issue of content.

Should you go niche or go for general content with your VN content?

Going either way can be profitable depending on how you approach it. Here are the pro and cons of going niche or going general.

Niche Content for Your Viral Site

If you choose to build a niche viral site content, your main asset will be the audience you will have. Since the audience is niche, it is easier to promote or sell items related to the niche. Apart from this, you can get higher ad dollars from advertisers when it comes to monetization.

You can monetize your audience by selling affiliate products, your own products, email ads, and so on.  It will also be easy to connect with advertisers since you are a niche content provider with a niche audience. There are a number of viral sites that are niche focused doing this already.

The downside with niche viral sites is that you may not get a large enough audience to attract advertisers. Most adverstisers will pay you based on the amount of traffic  your site gets. If you are not attracting huge amounts of traffic, it will be difficult to get ad revenues.

However, you can still do well with other monetization avenues such as affiliate and your own products.

General Content for Your Viral Site

The next option is to create a general viral content site. This means you go the ViralNova route, posting content in a variety of niches such as animals, nature, people, celebrities and so on. The good news with building a general content viral site is that you can get floods of traffic since you are targeting anyone who loves sensational content.

Apart from this, generating traffic would be easy since you are covering multiple niches.  The multiple niches means you can go after different audiences. This essentially means your site would be like a conglomeration of multiple smaller niche sites. With the large traffic, getting ad dollars is likely to be easier especially if you are monetizing through Adsense and similar programs.

However,  you will need to segment your audience if you will want to go for some monetization routes like email advertising or affiliate marketing.

Which Route Should You Go?

Either of the above routes can earn you significant income if you take the time to put the work.However, going multi niche will be more profitable both in the short and long term. Since you want to make money as quickly as possible, you can drive huge loads of traffic to your viral site from different avenues.

Moreover, you have multiple avenues of driving traffic to your viral site if you are covering multiple niches. For instance, a viral health article would be good to promote in health related niches while a series of dog pictures can be put before audiences that love dogs on Facebook through boosting posts.

For my site, I am going multi niche. It’s a numbers game with a viral site.  With a large audience, even articles that may not have gone viral when targeted to a niche audience will have a chance to get viral.

In the next post, I will write about my content strategy for the viral site.