Ok, I recently read an article about the popularity of "horizontal content sites." Now, we've been told to focus on one niche market, but horizontal content sites seem to be gaining momentum. Personally, I also thought that sticking with one "niche" was limiting, but I followed everyone else. I believe you could have a "horizontal content site" for travel writing if it's properly executed. Any thoughts on this...
Horizontal content sites
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Hi Duchess
You can certainly give it a try, but I doubt you'll get any traction, and by that I mean high ranking in search results or traffic.
The reason is that there are already MANY sites out there in the travel niche that offer an enormous amount of well-written, highly-SEO'd, content on a variety of travel destinations and topics (which is what they mean by "horizontal content"), and many of those sites are long-standing, high google PR, heavily trafficked sites like TripAdvisor, Travelociy, Yahoo Travel, etc., that already rank highly in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
Trying to compete against such tough competitors will wear you out, and to get noticed you'll likely need to pay for advertising, which can get expensive - especially since many of those sites have a large budget and will quickly knock you out of the game.
Unless you have some jv partners with deep pockets, and are trying to become the next Wikipedia for travel (and there are already folks with very deep pockets doing just that), I'd advise against it.
Right now you're hearing noise and reading articles about "horizontal content" because it's a 'buzz word' and folks in the internet marketing business are all trying to sound intelligent by using it. That doesn't make it good advice. I still think, in my humble opinion, that the best way to get noticed is to stick with a niche, know it better than anyone else, and dominate your niche.
Good luck! I'd love to hear back from you if you decide to try it, and how it's working for you in say a year or so!
Posted 2 years ago #
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