Great Wines of North Carolina is another good example of a Blogger doing his thing by focussing upon a niche market. I’m not seeing too many obvious income streams on the blog – but its an interesting focus and one where he has a good change of capturing a large segment of the market that he’s writing about.
Brent explains his blogging strategy.
‘I aim to drive it to the top of the search engines for every major keyword associated with wine in North Carolina and the Yadkin Valley.
For example, when you type in “Raffaldini” as a search term on Google, I show up #2….someday this will overpower their site and show up #1…same with all the vineyards, and all the more common terms like “Yadkin Valley”, “North Carolina Wine”, etc… It will take some time…the funny thing is that I have not started yet! The rankings and traffic today are solely from my initial work, so watch and learn…I’ve done this a thousand times.
I’ll keep you posted as the progress unfolds. Last week traffic increased about 20%, every week it gets a little bit busier!’
If he indeed reaches his goal of dominating Search Engine results for his key words he’ll be in a great position to run some well paying private advertising of local wineries and perhaps run Adsense on his site (if there is a big enough stock of good ads).
Hi, thanks for the plug! I do run adsense on many of my other sites and blogs, but this one is sort of my baby. I’m not sure adsense would deliver a value-ad to my customers as of yet, although I’m sure it would help my pocketbook!
My strategy is surprisingly up in the air. I am in the process of building out my own vineyard, so someday I might capitalize on the traffic and rankings to sell my own goods. If I decide not to build out a commercial winery, I might sell the site to another large winery here in the region. Who knows…
It’s a realtively small niche, but I am reaching beyond north carolina to try and develop a site into a resource for growers everywhere….there is simply no solid meeting place for growers, outside of a few forums on yahoo.
We’ll see where it ends up, until then I keep writing… :-)
Good luck with your endeavors!
Brent
http://www.greatncwines.com