Lori, you’ll appreciate this: One of Bill Alexander’s family is in Authority. That’s what brought him back onto my radar — I very fondly remember watching him on PBS way back in the day. 🙂

You can’t really make anything work in any business until you truly understand who you serve and how you serve them.

I don’t fault any business for focusing on revenue models — we’re in business to bring revenue in, and that’s totally great. But you have to keep that balance, always. The audience is where all the good stuff comes from.

I especially like how you bring the biology definition of niche into the post.

Those are four possibilities, but you can always come up with new ones. 🙂

If you’re not getting shares or other reactions, it sounds like it’s not working well for your audience. Find some members of the audience you want to serve and get to know them better.

Your content might be thin or generic, or it may not be solving a problem that your audience cares much about.

What i want to ask is, if we create a free content how do we know what we create is good for our audience? What will be the judgement for it? I have create something that has a lot of viewer but less shared or none at all, how to deal with that kind of situation?

It’s ferociously hard to rank for any remotely competitive keyword without a more robust content strategy than this. If the keyword is long-tail enough, it’s easier … but typically that means there’s also less opportunity for revenue.

If it’s working for you, I wish you well with it, but I don’t recommend it to anyone starting today. Not to say it can’t work, but I’ve seen a lot of attempts crash and burn.

“Back in the day, creating a “niche website” meant building a compact site around an under-served keyword phrase, pulling out all the SEO stops to get it to rank, then loading it up with affiliate offers. That was tidy, and some did very well with it, but it doesn’t work today.”

How can you say that doesn’t work today, and what’s your rationale behind this particular statement?

That’s not my personal experience, and as an individual and business have a large portfolio of websites already working, and more in progress that do exactly this.

Is it your own research or just comments others have made on social media that made you state that? I just don’t believe it’s true that this strategy doesn’t work anymore and have multiple examples of it doing so.

Just my two pennies 🙂