How’s this for a niche?

May 5th, 2006 by Chris

Restaurant corn on the cob is always so much better than the stuff I make at home, or the stuff my mom used to make. Determined to find out why I searched on Google for “How to cook corn on the cob” and this website came up second.

This site immediately struck me as useful. It is more or less optimized for a single phrase (the phrase I searched for) and it answers the question that is my phrase in a simple and straightforward manner, with lots of pictures.

Obviously, to my trained eye this site was made for commercial reasons, not a love of corn, but it is still really useful, mostly because the owner follows the KISS attitude. There is no superfluous navigation, the text is large and easy to read, and there is a plethora of pictures. I consider simple & instructive content like this to be obvious link bait, and I’m sure that is one of the reasons this site is ranked well.

I do not agree with everything this webmaster does. If you scroll to the bottom you’ll notice links to similar sites and if you browse around his network for a while you’ll see some obvious duplicate content with the same instructions on different domains. However he does have what looks to be a simple successful little system setup.

I’m sure none of these sites gets very much traffic by themselves, but considering they were easy and cheap to make, easy and cheap to maintain, and actually are useful to the end user, I’ve no doubt they are profitable. Any of the adsense experts reading this will of course tell you that he could undoubtedly increase his revenue with better ad placement, and maybe include some additional “for further reading” type ads for cookware or cookbooks, however just because his site isn’t perfect, doesn’t mean its not good.

One thing that really gets on my nerves is the sheer number of lazy people out there who try to make a buck online by either producing nothing of value, or just copying other people. This site is an example of how easy it can be to make a successful site. How hard is it to write a page on how to cook corn and take a dozen pictures to go along with it? My point is, its not as hard as the spammers seem to think to make a useful site & make money off of it.

I also like this site because it is an example of something I posted about previously, optimizing for a question.

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Posted in: General »  by: Chris

3 Responses to “How’s this for a niche?”

  1. Ken Barbalace  Says:
    May 8th, 2006 at 4:51 pm

    I’ll answer your question about how to make good corn on the cob. Simply add sugar to your boiling water when boiling your corn on the cob. This will help sweeten the corn. Also make sure your corn is really fresh. The sooner it is eaten after it is picked, the sweeter it will be.

  2. elnas  Says:
    May 17th, 2006 at 4:33 pm

    I dont see the site second in Google results. Which google did you use?

  3. Bill  Says:
    May 25th, 2006 at 7:03 pm

    This really got me to thinking. I have several presentations that could be turned into web sites like this. Time to get moving. Thanks for the blog…

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