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So I have a niche dating site that is about 2 years old and a yt channel with about 10k subs and a small email list of around 250ish subs. My audience loves my content but they don't want to open their wallets. In fact, this was the reason why I stopped posting new content on my site a while back. I used to get a tonne of emails from site visitors asking me for dating advice, yet not a single one of them ever gave me a cent. In fact, after coaching one particular person with several back and forth emails, I told him if he wanted more help he should pay for coaching. I never heard back from the guy. I thought that if I gave my readers value by helping them out they would return the favor and become loyal paying supporters. Boy was I wrong.
Once I put up a notice on my contact page saying if anyone wants personal dating advice then they need to sign up for paid coaching along with my coaching price, all of the emails stopped after that lol. I still occasionally had a few people emailing me trying to bum off free coaching, but I was firm on my stance that they needed to pay me for my time or there would be no coaching and I never heard back from them. I got really annoyed with this to the point where I had to put down a notice on my contact page saying either pay up or get lost. Not in those exact words but you get the picture lol and the emails stopped coming in. This really got on my nerves with the readers just sucking value but not reciprocating anything back.
I tried to promote affiliate offers but only made around 1k max and tried to put ads on the site through ezoic but only made around $60. It also slowed my site down and caused my rankings to drop. That along with algorithm update wiped out 80% of my traffic. I got rid of the ads but the site never went back to the previous traffic levels.
I also stopped my newsletter as it was costing me too much money and I hadn't made anything off of the email list and I also didn't feel like writing anymore content for free for these people.
In addition, I didn't really post much anymore on my yt channel as I can't film any new footage for my videos and had to rely on stock footage but the views are abysmal once I switched over.
I did manage to get 2 coaching clients after I implemented the change (1 just a few days ago), however Its not good enough. I also added in a buy me a coffee button and a donation button on my free newsletter + a patreon. I got a few patreon signups but nothing major and they soon left. I got like only 2 donations.
I'm considering turning the site into a paid membership/paid newsletter site with the convertkit plugin but I don't know if this is a good idea. Prior to this about a 1.5 years ago, I had the idea of writing a dating ebook product, however I scrapped the idea as I only had about 50 opt-ins on a landing page for a pre-sale and I also didn't like the idea of spending months creating the ebook only to make like $20-30 off a sale and that would be it. Instead, I think to make it more sustainable I would need to find out a way to make income recurring and that led to me thinking about a paid newsletter/membership site. Also with a paid newsletter/membership site, the time to write a newsletter/article is way less than an ebook. The paid newsletter/premium articles of course would be very niche specific. I became very wary later on to sharing really good tips and how to's once I realized people didn't want to pay so I didn't share any of these info with the readers. I actually had someone tell me that they love my current content but wanted me to give more practical advice in my free newsletter articles (yeah right pal) after which I told him I was saving that for a paid member section. Never heard back from the guy.
In addition, recently after doing some research, I learned about tripwires. One of the reasons why I stopped my free newsletter was because of the cost. Now with tripwires, I can at least recover some of the costs. This got me thinking that maybe I should make a few of these low cost products and try to sell them to my email list.
I'm also considering looking for other quick ways of developing digital products like maybe a dating template of some sort or mini ebooks. I used to create lead magnets from canva that looked very professional and now I'm thinking instead of giving those away, I can sell them at a very low cost like $5-7.
Lastly, after my recent coaching session with a client, it made me realize that I was going about coaching wrong. Rather than charging per a session, I should have focused on long term results via a coaching package through a set period of time eg. 3-6 months. This way I would have made more money and also would have helped the client achieve their goals instead of just giving them advice for a one off coaching session.
I'm thinking going forward, maybe I should create several tripwires. Next create several lead magnets and use it on my site and youtube channel and then redirect new signups to a page with my trip wire and then on my welcome email sequence, I pitch them my paid newsletter as well? Later on, I pitch them my dating templates/mini ebooks as well along with my coaching packages? Also any new articles that I publish on my site would be paywalled and asking the reader to pay for access.
What do you guys think about my plans for monetization? I am still very much a newbie when it comes to monetization. At this point I'm pretty close to giving up and lost all motivation to create anymore content if its only going to be given away for free. What do you guys think? Am I wasting my time with this dating site? Should I pivot my content to travel? I had several videos on my yt channel that did very well on the topic of travel. I'm seriously contemplating spending 3 months going traveling and filming a tonne of content based on content gaps. I did my research by looking by questions and comments left on my own yt channel as well as competitors. I think I could do well here, especially now that I have a lot more experience making yt vidoes but of course there's no guarantee.
Also I should mention while I stopped working on my dating site, I shifted towards creating a website in the baking/cooking niche and also worked on a new baking/cooking yt channel. Unfortunately I quickly realized that the cooking/baking niche is super saturated and highly competitive even if you niche down. Growth has been much slower than my dating niche, however I'm starting to see a little growth now. I'm currently around 900ish subs and get over 1k pageviews on my website and starting to see traffic increase a little bit. I only have around 29 videos on yt (23 are long form) and it takes me a while to create the videos so I don't post often and when a video flops, it really stings and makes me question whether or not to continue. It's not that my content is bad, in fact, I get a lot more views than my subscriber count with several videos in the 5 figures now despite being in a highly competitive niche, but its just that yt's algorithm screws up suggesting my content to the right audience. I've been suggested alongside, video game videos, marriage and divorce videos, hair cutting videos, movie trailers, foreign language content that has nothing to do with my content. Naturally this causes a very low CTR and AVD and then my videos don't get pushed out. However, once the video does start being recommended alongside similar recipe videos then I can see an uptick in views and my CTR and AVD increases. It just happened recently with one of my cookie videos. The video flopped when it was released and after a year now, it has started to climb in views again. I predict sometime in the future, I will see a big uptick in views on a lot of my older videos as the algorithm starts suggesting it to the right audience. The yt channel unfortunately isn't monetized yet, but I'm confident I will reach 1k subs within 1-2 months, and potentially reach the 4k watch hours in 2-4 months.
I haven't posted a lot of articles on the new site as I was focused on youtube, however now I'm starting to shift my focus more on my blog, hoping to publish more articles so that I can get into a premium ad network like mediavine/adthrive. I don't have an email list yet for the cooking blog as the traffic is still tiny and I don't want to spend money paying for an email service provider if I can't recoup the costs. However after learning about tripwires, this made me curious about the possibility about using that to recoup my email service costs. I know some cooking websites use tripwires like mini ebooks/ grocery shopping lists/ meal prep templates which I'll probably implement as well as another avenue for monetization. The cooking niche to me seems a lot easier to monetize and is "advertiser friendly" compared to the dating niche but at the same time is way more tougher to break into. Based on my research, most of the cooking websites on average need somewhere between 100-150 articles to reach the required traffic levels to get into these premium ad networks. I'm currently at 29 articles so far and I figure if I were to drop everything and just focus on my blog, I could potentially pump out between 10-15 articles a month. So in less than 10 months I could potentially hit the required traffic levels. Now this is of course, if I don't get hit with any google algorithm updates. However to mediate this issue, I'm going to diversify my traffic sources through pinterest, and also my youtube videos. My yt videos seem to be bringing in decent traffic (around 15%) to my site automatically without me doing any promotion. Later down the line, I will add in instagram, tiktok, and IG as well. I did try tiktok and instagram very early on with shorts but got nowhere.
What are your thoughts guys? Am I beating a dead horse with the dating niche website and yt channel focused on dating? Should I give the membership/paid newsletter idea a try? Should I pivot my yt channel to focus on travel content specifically? or should I just focus on my cooking website and try to get into an ad agency asap + add in digital products?
Option 1: Turn dating site into paid newsletter/membership site. Use lead magnets from my site plus youtube to generate leads. Then redirect them to a tripwire offer right after the signup for my lead magnet and then run them with a welcome email sequence funnel and pitch my paid newsletter offer to them. Also look at developing some more quick low cost digital products to sell to the audience.
Option 2: Abandon the site, and shift towards focusing on my youtube channel targeting more travel related content which did well in the past. Save up some money and go on a multi-month trip and film a tonne of content (60+ videos) targeting unfilled content gaps in the market. Not sure how else to monetize this. Make a new travel website and funnel traffic there through yt and sell traveling guides? Post more articles to bump traffic levels up and then apply to mediavine/ad thrive?
Option 3: Abandon the old site and channel completely and focus exclusively on new website and yt channel. Try to pump out as much content as possible on my blog to get traffic levels up to get into mediavine/Ad-thrive. Diversify traffic sources to meditate google algorithm updates and build backlinks through recipe sharing groups. Also create an email list and add in trip-wire offers later on.
Sorry if this has been posted in the wrong section. I wasn't sure where to post it.
Once I put up a notice on my contact page saying if anyone wants personal dating advice then they need to sign up for paid coaching along with my coaching price, all of the emails stopped after that lol. I still occasionally had a few people emailing me trying to bum off free coaching, but I was firm on my stance that they needed to pay me for my time or there would be no coaching and I never heard back from them. I got really annoyed with this to the point where I had to put down a notice on my contact page saying either pay up or get lost. Not in those exact words but you get the picture lol and the emails stopped coming in. This really got on my nerves with the readers just sucking value but not reciprocating anything back.
I tried to promote affiliate offers but only made around 1k max and tried to put ads on the site through ezoic but only made around $60. It also slowed my site down and caused my rankings to drop. That along with algorithm update wiped out 80% of my traffic. I got rid of the ads but the site never went back to the previous traffic levels.
I also stopped my newsletter as it was costing me too much money and I hadn't made anything off of the email list and I also didn't feel like writing anymore content for free for these people.
In addition, I didn't really post much anymore on my yt channel as I can't film any new footage for my videos and had to rely on stock footage but the views are abysmal once I switched over.
I did manage to get 2 coaching clients after I implemented the change (1 just a few days ago), however Its not good enough. I also added in a buy me a coffee button and a donation button on my free newsletter + a patreon. I got a few patreon signups but nothing major and they soon left. I got like only 2 donations.
I'm considering turning the site into a paid membership/paid newsletter site with the convertkit plugin but I don't know if this is a good idea. Prior to this about a 1.5 years ago, I had the idea of writing a dating ebook product, however I scrapped the idea as I only had about 50 opt-ins on a landing page for a pre-sale and I also didn't like the idea of spending months creating the ebook only to make like $20-30 off a sale and that would be it. Instead, I think to make it more sustainable I would need to find out a way to make income recurring and that led to me thinking about a paid newsletter/membership site. Also with a paid newsletter/membership site, the time to write a newsletter/article is way less than an ebook. The paid newsletter/premium articles of course would be very niche specific. I became very wary later on to sharing really good tips and how to's once I realized people didn't want to pay so I didn't share any of these info with the readers. I actually had someone tell me that they love my current content but wanted me to give more practical advice in my free newsletter articles (yeah right pal) after which I told him I was saving that for a paid member section. Never heard back from the guy.
In addition, recently after doing some research, I learned about tripwires. One of the reasons why I stopped my free newsletter was because of the cost. Now with tripwires, I can at least recover some of the costs. This got me thinking that maybe I should make a few of these low cost products and try to sell them to my email list.
I'm also considering looking for other quick ways of developing digital products like maybe a dating template of some sort or mini ebooks. I used to create lead magnets from canva that looked very professional and now I'm thinking instead of giving those away, I can sell them at a very low cost like $5-7.
Lastly, after my recent coaching session with a client, it made me realize that I was going about coaching wrong. Rather than charging per a session, I should have focused on long term results via a coaching package through a set period of time eg. 3-6 months. This way I would have made more money and also would have helped the client achieve their goals instead of just giving them advice for a one off coaching session.
I'm thinking going forward, maybe I should create several tripwires. Next create several lead magnets and use it on my site and youtube channel and then redirect new signups to a page with my trip wire and then on my welcome email sequence, I pitch them my paid newsletter as well? Later on, I pitch them my dating templates/mini ebooks as well along with my coaching packages? Also any new articles that I publish on my site would be paywalled and asking the reader to pay for access.
What do you guys think about my plans for monetization? I am still very much a newbie when it comes to monetization. At this point I'm pretty close to giving up and lost all motivation to create anymore content if its only going to be given away for free. What do you guys think? Am I wasting my time with this dating site? Should I pivot my content to travel? I had several videos on my yt channel that did very well on the topic of travel. I'm seriously contemplating spending 3 months going traveling and filming a tonne of content based on content gaps. I did my research by looking by questions and comments left on my own yt channel as well as competitors. I think I could do well here, especially now that I have a lot more experience making yt vidoes but of course there's no guarantee.
Also I should mention while I stopped working on my dating site, I shifted towards creating a website in the baking/cooking niche and also worked on a new baking/cooking yt channel. Unfortunately I quickly realized that the cooking/baking niche is super saturated and highly competitive even if you niche down. Growth has been much slower than my dating niche, however I'm starting to see a little growth now. I'm currently around 900ish subs and get over 1k pageviews on my website and starting to see traffic increase a little bit. I only have around 29 videos on yt (23 are long form) and it takes me a while to create the videos so I don't post often and when a video flops, it really stings and makes me question whether or not to continue. It's not that my content is bad, in fact, I get a lot more views than my subscriber count with several videos in the 5 figures now despite being in a highly competitive niche, but its just that yt's algorithm screws up suggesting my content to the right audience. I've been suggested alongside, video game videos, marriage and divorce videos, hair cutting videos, movie trailers, foreign language content that has nothing to do with my content. Naturally this causes a very low CTR and AVD and then my videos don't get pushed out. However, once the video does start being recommended alongside similar recipe videos then I can see an uptick in views and my CTR and AVD increases. It just happened recently with one of my cookie videos. The video flopped when it was released and after a year now, it has started to climb in views again. I predict sometime in the future, I will see a big uptick in views on a lot of my older videos as the algorithm starts suggesting it to the right audience. The yt channel unfortunately isn't monetized yet, but I'm confident I will reach 1k subs within 1-2 months, and potentially reach the 4k watch hours in 2-4 months.
I haven't posted a lot of articles on the new site as I was focused on youtube, however now I'm starting to shift my focus more on my blog, hoping to publish more articles so that I can get into a premium ad network like mediavine/adthrive. I don't have an email list yet for the cooking blog as the traffic is still tiny and I don't want to spend money paying for an email service provider if I can't recoup the costs. However after learning about tripwires, this made me curious about the possibility about using that to recoup my email service costs. I know some cooking websites use tripwires like mini ebooks/ grocery shopping lists/ meal prep templates which I'll probably implement as well as another avenue for monetization. The cooking niche to me seems a lot easier to monetize and is "advertiser friendly" compared to the dating niche but at the same time is way more tougher to break into. Based on my research, most of the cooking websites on average need somewhere between 100-150 articles to reach the required traffic levels to get into these premium ad networks. I'm currently at 29 articles so far and I figure if I were to drop everything and just focus on my blog, I could potentially pump out between 10-15 articles a month. So in less than 10 months I could potentially hit the required traffic levels. Now this is of course, if I don't get hit with any google algorithm updates. However to mediate this issue, I'm going to diversify my traffic sources through pinterest, and also my youtube videos. My yt videos seem to be bringing in decent traffic (around 15%) to my site automatically without me doing any promotion. Later down the line, I will add in instagram, tiktok, and IG as well. I did try tiktok and instagram very early on with shorts but got nowhere.
What are your thoughts guys? Am I beating a dead horse with the dating niche website and yt channel focused on dating? Should I give the membership/paid newsletter idea a try? Should I pivot my yt channel to focus on travel content specifically? or should I just focus on my cooking website and try to get into an ad agency asap + add in digital products?
Option 1: Turn dating site into paid newsletter/membership site. Use lead magnets from my site plus youtube to generate leads. Then redirect them to a tripwire offer right after the signup for my lead magnet and then run them with a welcome email sequence funnel and pitch my paid newsletter offer to them. Also look at developing some more quick low cost digital products to sell to the audience.
Option 2: Abandon the site, and shift towards focusing on my youtube channel targeting more travel related content which did well in the past. Save up some money and go on a multi-month trip and film a tonne of content (60+ videos) targeting unfilled content gaps in the market. Not sure how else to monetize this. Make a new travel website and funnel traffic there through yt and sell traveling guides? Post more articles to bump traffic levels up and then apply to mediavine/ad thrive?
Option 3: Abandon the old site and channel completely and focus exclusively on new website and yt channel. Try to pump out as much content as possible on my blog to get traffic levels up to get into mediavine/Ad-thrive. Diversify traffic sources to meditate google algorithm updates and build backlinks through recipe sharing groups. Also create an email list and add in trip-wire offers later on.
Sorry if this has been posted in the wrong section. I wasn't sure where to post it.
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