Podcast 39: How to Generate 1,000,000 Views Per Month by Engaging Your Audience with Dhanish Semar

Hey NichePursuits!

Perrin here, and today, I’ve got an awesome podcast for you. As you can probably tell, we at NichePursuits have been expanding our focus from simple, small niche sites into larger, more authoritative sites.

When you do that, you often end up treating your niche site like a full-blown business with the aim to scale and diversify. Last week, Matt Paulson told us how he grew one financial site into a large media network that now generates over 2.5 million pageviews per month.  A week before that, we discussed the business model of buying websites for cashflow.

In other words, we’re thinking big. As we dive into the proverbial deep end of true authority sites, one thing becomes increasingly clear: the bigger a site becomes, the more ways there are to truly diversify, well, everything — from traffic to revenue to linkbuilding. Matt Paulson, for example, says his tactics include everything but SEO. Hayden Miyamoto, in his last podcast with us, mentioned he was combining traditional organic traffic with Google News traffic.

Today, we’re going to be chatting with someone who uses yet another traffic-generating strategy (and it’s something you’ve seen yours truly use before): Reddit (specifically, the League of Legends subreddit).

If you’ve been following the Vylo case study, you’ll know that Reddit is one of our primary marketing platforms, and we’ve generated up to 17,000 visitors in one day from Reddit.

Our guest today used similar (although much more sophisticated) tactics to build an entire business around his authority site.

Our Guest: Dhanish of Cloth5.com

Our guest today is Dhanish Semar (those of you in the League of Legends community probably know him by his IGN: DiffTheEnder). Dhanish owns Cloth5.com, a site he built by making great connections, writing premium content, and putting it in front of his audience using the platform that was most important to them.

The result? Cloth5 now gets over 1,000,000 views per month.

Lessons I learned from Dhanish

My conversation with Dhanish was super enlightening, and I learned a ton. Really, he’s one of the only people I’ve ever heard of to have this level of success with these kinds of growth tactics.

I won’t babble too much longer, but I did want to give you some of the key takeaways from this podcast. Check it out.

Content can really be a key differentiator.

I know firsthand that there are tons and tons of League of Legends blogs. And I bet you can guess how many of them get a million visitors a month. So what sets Cloth5 apart? Well, a lot of things, but mainly content. Dhanish says that he wants every piece of content to be so good that no one else in the world could have written it.

And it shows. His articles are so long and in-depth, professional gaming organizations started looking to him and his team of analysts for consulting – on a video game!

Build relationships early, leverage them later.

I’m not saying you should build relationships just so you can leverage them, but Dhanish had definitely worked hard to build some friendships with influential people. He did this by being super generous and helping people out – and not necessarily for business reasons; he’s just a nice dude.

But it did pay off: when he launched Cloth5, Dhanish had the help of a bunch of influential gaming personalities to really give the site an initial boost.

Dream big.

This is something I’ve been talking about a lot with my mastermind group. Too often in this business, I think, we restrict ourselves to small dreams. We create a couple 15-page sites and shoot for $500/mo profits. Not Dhanish.

When I asked Dhanish what his initial plan for Cloth5 was, he said, “We want to be the ESPN of competitive video games.” I’m not sure if you guys know, but that’s a really, really big dream. The audience Dhanish is going after includes tens of millions of people.

Finding the right place to engage your audience is key.

One of the most important things Dhanish did was to figure out where his audience hung out and started engaging them on that platform. But he didn’t just blast his content out there and hope for some traffic; he figured out what worked on that platform, he talked to people, and he asked for feedback.

In doing so, he became an authority not only on his own site, but he also became an authority within the biggest community for his particular audience. That’s some serious brand-building!

Reddit is powerful… IF you use it right.

I can vouch for this, having used Reddit almost exclusively to market Vylo. However, Reddit is kind of like a light saber: it’s incredibly powerful, but if you’re not careful, it’s really easy to cut your own arm off. It’s just a very smart, critical crowd.

Dhanish cracked the code. By offering fantastic content that truly provides value to a specific (but big) Reddit community, Dhanish tamed the beast. His reward? An ultra-loyal, ultra-active audience of people who visit his site regularly.

Your thoughts…

All in all, I think this is a super interesting way to grow a business, and I’d really love to hear what you guys think.

Do you think this could work for niche sites? Are you using similar tactics to grow your business? What’s the value of these tactics for small sites vs big ones?

Take a listen, and let us know in the comments!