Side Hustle Growth Lab - Project: Genesis

For me, one of the best ways to apply your energy in building out a side hustle business over time is to create an information-heavy niche website. It requires a variety of skills and perseverance, but the opportunity to create an asset that generates income and becomes saleable over time is still exceptional, even in 2023.

Start Date: Late March 2023
End Date: June 2024

Current Status: In Flight

The question I’m trying to answer here is pretty straightforward - can you successfully build a niche website in 2023 that is information-heavy and monetize it in a reasonable period of time and potentially sell it?

Niche websites are selling at a rate of 36X monthly revenue and that’s been consistent for the last few years - for someone wanting to start a side hustle, that’s an interesting proposition.

I’ve been building niche websites in various forms and styles for over 15 years and I have a skill stack that fits:

  • I can research and write content at scale

  • I have SEO skills

  • I am good at building systems and processes

The market for building niche sites is very different than it was five years ago when I last spent time in this kind of side hustle, but I don’t think it’s any less lucrative - in fact, I think there is more opportunity… it’s just harder to find.

I think it’s worth testing out.

I stumbled onto a market that I’m personally interested in as a hobby and that I think is underserved with respect to web traffic - that’s a bit of a plus. That means the competition in this market is mediocre which is good for this experiment.

I’ve set for myself the following targets to achieve by June 2024:

  • Monthly traffic of ~20,000 page views

  • Affiliate income should be around $500/mth

  • The site’s newsletter will have over 1000 subscribers

  • Sponsors will begin to show interest in sponsoring the newsletter

  • We will be able to sell the site for over $25,000

I think I’ll be able to achieve those targets and maybe even exceed them - particularly the sale price. If I have 1000 engaged newsletter subscribers in this market with the ability to promote affiliate offers via the newsletter and get sponsorship revenue, the multiple will be closer to 50X and so the sale price will go up considerably.

I hypothesize that by June 2024, the site will be attracting purchase offers.

Before I go into how I’ll be conducting the experiment, it’s probably worth talking a little bit about the background of the domain and how I’m going to handle the analysis.

  • This is an entirely new domain and I made this choice intentionally

  • I’m going to track the expenditure closely including my own time so that there’s a legitimate “cost” side to evaluate

  • I will be transparent about my processes but WILL NOT be disclosing the domain or the niche

The decision to not disclose the niche or domain is easy - this is a “business” experiment and I don’t need people ripping me off or artificially inflating views with traffic that isn’t interested in the content.

At the end of the experiment, I’ll be disclosing the market and domain if I’m able to depending on what the outcome is - sometimes when you sell sites, you have to sign NDAs. I’ll try to make that part of the deal to avoid it, but money talks.

With respect to how I’m going to build the site out:

  • I’ll do most of the content myself initially

  • I may outsource some of the support content writing

  • There will probably be 20-25 pieces of core content at launch

  • I’m looking at publishing 2 additional pieces of content per week

  • No backlinking activities are planned at this time

This should be a good representative approach to how someone that’s committed to building out their own niche site could do it as a side hustle with under 10 hours a week of time committed to operating the site once it goes live.

Update 28/04/23

The main site structure is being established and built now.

The initial keyword research for pillar content is complete and that content is being written at the moment.

Supporting content to build topical authority is planned but not yet commenced and I’m considering how best to do that from a time/cost perspective.

I expect the site to go live around the middle of May 2023.

The first full update should arrive towards the end of May 2023.

To be determined at the end of the experiment.