You often hear webmasters wanted to get into a specific niche, then someone else saying “oh, don’t do that… it’s too saturated.” There are plenty of niches out there that have tons of competition (make money online blogs, myspace resource sites, online dating, xbox sites, etc.). The trick is to provide someone unique that the other websites don’t offer. That’s the best way to succeed in a niche that some will say is “too saturated.”

Plentyoffish was able to climb to the top of the online dating niche by providing the visitors something different. Youtube wasn’t the first video site on the web, but it let users easily upload their own created content. John Chow wasn’t the first “make money online” blog out there, but he was able to creatively take advantage of sites like Digg to drive traffic by the thousands.

Remember, some of the most “saturated” niches are the most popular searched niches. So if you can find something to separate yourself from the competition, you will be able to get traffic coming back to your site. There is always a way to attract new visitors to your website, you just have to be creative. And once you get good rankings in a “saturated” niche, you’ll be reaping the benefits of thousands of unique visitors every day.

Those of you who follow my network of websites (which can be seen in the sidebar to the right), you will know that most of my websites are sports related. That’s because I studied sports in college and follow it passionately. Sports is something I know a lot about. So I decided to expand a little bit on my sports network and added two new websites this afternoon (the sites may still have a few minor updates left).

I’d like to introduce everyone to Jeremy Maclin and Michael Crabtree. Most of you are like “who?!” Unless you follow college football then you’ll have no idea who these guys are yet. Both are the top wide receivers in the game, but they don’t play for major powerful teams like the Gators, Dawgs or Trojans. Jeremy Maclin is a sophomore at the University of Missouri and Michael Crabtree is a sophomore at Texas Tech. Both of these players are Heisman Candidates.

They may not get as many searches as some of the top athletes out there like Peyton Manning or Derek Jeter, but if I played my cards right, these two will be in a lot of the magazines and sports news shows come November 2008 during the Heisman talk. And if they continue to perform, they’ll be top draft picks in the 2009 NFL Draft. By then, these two new websites will be established amongst the fans and sports community.

My goal for both of these sites is the same as my Tim Tebow fan site. Get to page 1 for the search term of their name. I will continue to update the site regularly with blog posts and statistical updates. With fan sites, there is not a high ceiling for revenue. Maybe a couple bucks a day if you’re lucky and get a good player with a lot of searches. I’m up to 5 of these type of fan sites now, so even at a couple bucks each per day come football season.. that’ll be like $10-15/day. And that money will be coming from sites that I enjoy working on!

I was looking through the list of top 100 “Make Money Online” blogs and failed to see my blog on the list. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting it to be in the top 100, but the site 45n5 actually lists 346 blogs on their rankings. Not being in the top 346 is quite said, especially when you click through and look at some of the blogs and notice they haven’t been updated in months. And some of the blogs they listed don’t even exist anymore?

Why doesn’t make blog rank? For awhile I considered this blog a “make money online” blog. I posted tips on how to improve rankings and gain traffic. I gave my opinions on top Wordpress and Vbulletin plugins. I did just about everything most “make money online” blogs do. However, lately, I’ve steered away from doing that. This site has turned into just a regular blog where I write about anything. I mostly just post about how my network of websites is going. I can’t remember the last time I actually wrote a long “how to” post or gave tips on doing something that can help you.

The truth is, it’s not really worth it for me to do that. There are so many good “make money online” blogs out there, that newbs don’t need my advice. It’s best for me to just keep this site as a journal of my progress in the internet world. I enjoy helping people and mentoring other aspiring webmasters, but I don’t necessarily have the time to write long “how to make money” posts every day. I work a full-time job, am married, and run these websites on the side. It’s much easier for me to give my advice via email or IM on a personal level. If that means this blog suffers and never gets to 1,000 RSS subscribers, then so be it.

Those of you still reading my blog do so probably because you’ve been there since the beginning when I was making $0.50 a day and you like to keep tabs on what my websites are up to.

Maybe I’m just crazy, but I could have sworn like 2 or 3 years ago you could actually go to a webmaster forum like Sitepoint, Namepros, or Digitalpoint and find a quality site for sale. Now, Sitepoint does have a Premium site sale section, but either the websites are $70,000 or they’re scammy sites anyways. Where have all the quality websites for the little man gone?

I have a few theories. One, webmasters who build quality websites just aren’t selling them anymore. Or sites are being sold privately. Seeking out private buyers and sellers ensures that the visitors to the website will be unaware of a sale. This is ALWAYS a good thing. I sold a site once, and as soon as the members found out, they all started spamming the forums cursing me and saying that I’m a sell out. So, now I firmly believe that they less a visitor to your site knows, the better.

Quality sites are extremely hard to build from scratch, so I can also understand why webmasters might be reluctant to let them go. That’s why all you see for sale on webmaster forums are proxies, made for adsense sites, auto blogs, image uploaders, and other crap.

If you’re looking for website ideas. Come up with a way for buyers and sellers of websites to be connected for quality site sales, and for people on the outside to not know what website is being sold.

Since I was murdered by Google, my traffic has been shot on my two biggest sites. In the past, these sites each required their own dedicated server (each dedicated cost me $150/mo). I’ve kept these servers for 6 months now just in case my rankings came back. But this morning, I finally canceled my two dedicated server subscriptions and have moved those two sites each to their own $50/mo VPS.

I made this decision because I now believe that my rankings will never come back. I wouldn’t have spent the hours and hours needed to move this sites to a new host if I still had hope. And the move isn’t entirely bad. By doing this I go from paying $300/mo for the two dedicateds to only $100/mo for two VPSs. That’s a monthly savings of $200! And who knows, maybe by moving my sites to a new host/IP… Google will un-penalize me?

Just like every other business in the world, it’s all about downsizing and improving the bottom line. You need to find ways to cut costs, whether it’s new hosting or doing work yourself (instead of outsourcing it). Also, it’s time to trim the fat and sell of websites that don’t produce for you. It’s pointless to spend time on a website that doesn’t give you anything in return.

Check your network out for yourself. If you have excess diskspace/bandwith on your server, try downgrading or selling off some of the extra space. Don’t leave anything for waste.

For those of you wondering… I now have 3 VPSs all hosted with Servint. They are an awesome company. Have super fast servers and the best customer support I’ve seen. If you’re looking for a VPS, check them out. Put my name down on your order form and I’ll get a referral discount!

Google recently updated their Pagerank a couple of days ago. Not that page rank means anything, but some webmasters still like to use it as a means to buy/sell links. That’s really all it’s good for. SERPs and traffic are what matter the most. Anyways, I just wanted to post a quick update on several of my sites that saw PageRank changes.

Sports Highlight Videos - PR0 –> PR3
Knowshon Moreno - PR0 –> PR3
Xbox 360 Games - PR0 –> PR3
Fred Taylor - PR0 –> PR2
Philip Rivers - PR2 –> PR4
Fight Music Ringtones - PR0 –> PR3

Those are pretty much the only changes worth mentioning. I think it’s funny that my Fight Music Ringtone site got a PR upgrade when it is in the Google Sandbox. This site has 0 SERPs and gets 0 traffic from Google… when just a month or so ago it had awesome SEPS and got 50+ uniques/day. So how does Google reward the site with a good PR, but slap this shit out of it in the SERPs?