Niche Website Builders Review & Success Story

What do you do when you have a portfolio of sites, and you want to bulk order content (say 20k words at once instead of a few articles a month)?

Or what if you have neglected link building for a few months, and you'd like to ramp up the number of links pointing to your site in a short period of time?

Not only are these 2 situations that I find myself in quite often, but these are the problems that Niche Website Builders is trying to solve for it's customers.

Mark Mars and Adam Smith are the 2 co-founders behind Niche Website Builders and they been building their own portfolio of sites for a long time.  However, through the years they ran into issues ordering content from a US-based and well-known content agency.  The agency was really slow and just couldn't deliver the quality content they needed in a timely manner.

As they looked around, they could see that many others felt the same way.  As a result, they launched the Niche Website Builders agency less than a year ago.

In just 7 months, there are now 22 Niche Website Builders employees and they're expected to hit $600k to $800k in revenue in their first full year of operations!

The best part?  Their primary marketing strategy has been to build 2 Facebook groups and provide great content there with lots of interaction.  The 2 groups have a combined following of about 6,000 people, so not huge, but clearly valuable!

Does Niche Website Builders Know How to Build Niche Sites?

I know this might seem picky, but I wanted to know if Mark and Adam really have experience building a portfolio of sites themselves.  If they've been able to build successful sites, this means they know a bit better how to manage clients that have a portfolio of sites.

I was able to find a few things and Mark was able to share some of their successes with me.

Here's a recent screenshot from their public niche site case study:

And here's the link growth after they ran a couple of shotgun skyscraper on this site:

But What About Results from Clients?

Here's a quick client case study in Mark's words…

So, on to the client case study. You have to bear in mind that the agency is only 7 months old so we only have so much data. This client has used all our services, a Done For You website, content, and shotgun skyscraper link building and we have 6 months of data for him as the site launched in early February.

The site was launched on an existing domain but was pretty weak with only 18 referring domains. This client purchased a DFY site from us with 100k words of content. He started the shotgun link building campaign at the end of March. Here are the results so far:

As you can see the graph above shows that the number of sessions last week was 1,544 with an estimated this week of 1,981 next week based on the first 3 days this week. So, on the current trajectory, he's not far from 10k sessions a month in just 6 months. He's also not added any more content since the original batch back in January but now he can see that the site is taking off, he's just about to start a 30k per month content subscription.

Link building has definitely helped with this growth. Here's what ahrefs look like. He's now up to 123 referring domains and is a DR22:

How Niche Website Builders Can Help?

Niche Website Builders as an agency, does a couple of things that could help your business.

First, they offer content writing services. Because they are experienced at building affiliate sites, they know how to conduct keyword research, write Amazon affiliate review content, and much more.

In fact, their price includes Keyword research, content creation, Review templates, and they upload and optimize the content for you.

You can order smaller packages or bulk order 50k, 100k, or even 150k words at once.

Grab 10% bonus content when you place an order with Niche Website Builders here.

Shotgun Skyscraper Link Building

They also offer Link Building Services.  They do the shotgun skyscraper technique to try and land the best links possible.  How does the price of link building compare to other agencies?

Check out this handy price comparison chart:

This is what a typical campaign results might look like after 3 months.

You can get 10% off the listed price for link building services.  You can grab the Niche Pursuits exclusive discount for link building services right here.

Mark Mars from NicheWebsite.Builders – In His Own Words…

I asked Mark several questions about his entrepreneurial journey and how he started Niche Website Builders.

I left university in 2002 with a computer science degree. I decided to travel the world for a year with my now wife and we spent time in South America at conservation reserves, New Zealand, Australia and eastern Europe.

Upon returning home I started a career at Microsoft in having been offered a job when I worked there in my University placement year. This meant moving to Reading in the UK which is around 30 miles West of London where the Microsoft UK head office is situated.

I worked there as a developer consultant for around a decade. However, whilst I worked there I used to build websites for friends and family in my own time and then help them rank them in search engines. Whilst at Microsoft I developed a piece of SAAS software with 2 friends that provided online testing.

The initial plan was that it was to be used for technical testing in the recruitment process. However, the testing platform was so generic that it got used for lots of weird and wonderful purposes. It seems hard to imagine now but back in 2006 there were not any good tools offering this kind of service. We managed to get investment to launch, market and sell the product and our company called ‘The Test Factory’ was formed.

Over a period of 6 years the fantastic company grew to around 40 people and was sold to a huge corporate in 2014 for high 7 figures and the technology we had developed along with the people were rolled in to that company. Sadly, I did not see a huge percentage of that money in the end as we’d taken a lot of investment along the way which was not always my preference for various reasons. It was very nice but not life-changing.

During this 6 year period, I decided to leave Microsoft and start a traditional digital marketing agency specializing in building sites, content marketing, SEO, and anything else important in the marketing industry. I did not have much input in the day-to-day running of The Test Factory but had gotten a taste for entrepreneurship and loved how much our employees seemed to enjoy working for us. So I started the agency with the goal of replicating the great environment we had created..

This grew pretty slowly over a six-year period and was REALLY hard work 60-70 hour a weeks. I worked long hours for not much reward. After 6 years I was approached by a long-standing client of mine who had a great database of clients who we felt we could market the agency services to.

He became a partner in the business but that turned out to be a disaster. He wasn’t the nicest of people and immediately went back on his commitments to the business. After a year of hell barely paying myself at all and watching the business I was so proud of in decline I was left with no option to walk away from the agency that I had started.

However, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I spent the next year building a portfolio of affiliate sites, discovering the blogs and podcasts of Pat Flynn and yourself whilst working as a consultant for other digital agencies. For the first time, I was building and ranking sites for myself and I was left wondering why I had not done this before.

In around Sept / October last year, I heard my now business partner Adam Smith on the flipping websites podcast with Richard Patey and I got in touch with him to say how much I enjoyed the interview. We had a lot in common so I decided to take the drive to Wales to meet with him and that’s when our idea for Niche Website Builders was born. We were both utterly fed up with constantly trying to find good writers for our portfolios and employing substandard affiliate services.

So we figured we’d start the affiliate marketing we wished existed. That way we could train our team to be specialists in what they do and work the way we wanted them to. We wanted to offer completely hands-off best in class affiliate marketing services. And this goal now ripples through all the services we offer from DFY websites to content creation and link building. As an example, our content creation service is so much more than just writing content. We also include all of the following:

How successful is your business today?

It’s going pretty well. We launched in December last year, and we’re currently at 22 people with no signs of things slowing down. It's hard to estimate what year 1 earnings will be because of the accelerating growth but we estimate anywhere between $600k – $800k year one. We currently have 12 writers which means that we have the capacity to deliver 1 million words of content per month.

Adam and I bought different things to the table. He had previously worked at digital agencies, had one year of additional experience in affiliate marketing than myself, had made some good connections in our industry, and had some good exits already with websites he’d grown.

I had previously run my own digital agency, exited on the sale of another services based business, had around 16 years SEO experience and had a built community around a facebook group (and don't miss our list of the best SEO Facebook groups).

What failure did you experience that perhaps made you doubt your future as an entrepreneur?

Two failure stories that made me doubt everything.

The first was when I had my traditional agency and had to leave the business I started 1 year after taking on partners. I was so mentally exhausted from working so hard to get where I was and to give it up was really demoralising.

In hindsight and on reflection, I don’t think I’ll persevere with something that clearly wasn’t working for so long but it was hard to give up especially when employees were involved. It ended up costing me a lot of money holding on for too long.

The second time to a less extent was when starting Niche Website Builders. We originally planned to outsource the writing to an external company – a popular US-based agency but it went terribly wrong.

They took too long to deliver and the quality was some of the worst I’ve seen. When we launched, we got a lot of content orders in week 1 and continued to do so for the next 4 weeks before we got any content back from the agency.

We had used them before ourselves and were happy with their work.

However, despite them saying they could handle our demand, it turned out they couldn’t and they ended up outsourcing to non-native english speakers (which wasn’t why we went for a US agency in the first place) and so we ended up with about 300,000 words of content that was unusable.

We stopped taking orders for 4-6 weeks while Adam and I proofread and edited every single article heavily. So month 2 earnings were only $1,500 while we tried to rectify the nightmare.

That’s when we decided that the only way was to go in-house where we could train the writers to do it the way we wanted it and had full control over quality and a timely delivery.

What are 1 or 2 strategies that have made your business successful?

Content and community.

It of course sounds like a cliche but it’s the truth, great content works. Niche Website Builders started with an affiliate site case study blog and a facebook group for people to follow along. I love a good case study and I think it’s true for most people, so I tried to be as thorough as possible with the blog sharing whatever I could on the journey.

I used the facebook group to build a community initially around the case study but then it became more of a general ‘digital assets builders’ group.

The first group has grown to nearly 4,000 people and we also started another group focusing on website flipping as these are all people in the same sphere. This second group now has over 2,000 members too.

This now means we have two engaged groups of people that are likely to be interested in our services and …until recently we did not use any other sales or marketing techniques to acquire clients. They have all come through our group or word of mouth.

Where do you hope to take your business in the future?

Main areas of focus will be growing our reach as we believe we have a great product for people new to our industry as well as seasoned portfolio pro. We just need to get our name out there. We already know from the feedback from existing clients that they will love the service we offer.

Around ⅔ of our revenue comes from portfolio owners who want to place large one-off orders for content production. We believe that we excel in this space with an in-house team being able to deliver a lot of content in a timely fashion. We believe that if we can get known by more portfolio owners we offer a very attractive proposition.

We’ve also launched a new service in which we source powerful expired domains for our clients for them to build their niche websites on. This has proven very popular.

Buying expired domains can be a bit of a minefield if you don’t know what you are looking for but the right domain can be a great foundation for a niche site that can start ranking really quickly.

We got the idea because we’ve seen some horror domains that people have purchased at auction that they want us to build a site on. We end up politely advising against doing so and of course the next question is “how can I find a good domain?”.

We find domains that pass our due diligence that we feel have the right backlink profile to work as a niche site and sell them as a complete package with a site build plus 100,000 words of content.

This is enough content to see if the site has legs in the coming months and should it take off we recommend continuing to invest in this site. Using this model on our own portfolios we found that the worst case scenario at this point is breaking even. Some sites do ‘okay’ and earn a few hundred dollars a month whilst others really fly. We then either decide to sell or retain the ones that are doing okay for cashflow and reinvest heavily in those that really start to take off.

Why did you create Niche Website Builders?

Both Adam and I love this industry, and we quite happily talk about it day and night. But we also really enjoy helping others find success. When people buy services from us, it’s more than just a simple transaction we offer as much help and recommendations as we are able to do. Ultimately we want our clients to be successful.

We also started the agency so that we could develop the kind of services we wished existed for selfish reasons. We wanted to build a team on tap that can deliver for our own portfolios allowing us to forget about recruiting and training more people again and again.

Why should people use Niche Website Builders?

We offer full end-to-end services so that our ambitious individuals seeking help building profitable digital assets can have as much or as little as input as they would like. They could literally go on holiday for a year and come back and find their site filled with content and have hundreds of quality links built.

Also, when you sign up to Niche Website Builders, we are more than a faceless delivery arm. Adam and I are fully invested in our client's success.

We track their Google Analytics and Search Console and make ongoing recommendations. For many of our clients that run their own portfolios, they have become friends too and we chat on messenger regularly. Again because Adam and I just love talking shop. We’ve very lucky to be in a business that we love.

We are also pretty unique in that we offer link building at scale using the shotgun skyscraper technique for our clients which results in a very low cost per link. Link building is usually either time consuming or expensive (or both!). Most agencies charge you hundreds of dollars of a one guest post on a single authority site.

We offer to build hundreds of links to our clients sites using the shotgun skyscraper technique which means on average our clients pay less than $50 per link even for DR70+ links. Whilst it’s not cheap for us to run a campaign because of all the work that is involved at the end of the day the value is second to none.

Who is Niche Website Builders the best fit for?

Genuinely, anyone that wants to build a digital asset and invest in websites but possibly for different reasons.

For those that are just starting out we are giving them the security of knowing that they have an experienced team guiding them through building their first asset, whilst for portfolio owners we offer the ability to deliver a lot of content in a short period of time to a very high editorial standard. We can take some of the load off the time consuming process of running multiple sites.

What final tips do you have for anyone hoping to replicate your success?

Although our product is a service-based business you can use a lot of these learnings and apply them to niche websites. Try to think beyond Google, SEO and affiliate links which is often where most people stop.

Think what could be possible if you developed a community and built a brand around your affiliate site. Just imagine the profits in health and wellbeing services.

This is where you can really see earning go to the next level. Build an email list, create a facebook group, start a YouTube channel. All these things can really help drive more revenue to your site if you are playing the long game.

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