How Backyard Chickens Makes Money

Big regrets laughing when I heard my friend’s Dad was feverously researching how to keep his own chickens…

Because when I found out that this site, dedicated to teaching people how to do this very thing, was making an absolute killing online with 100,000+ uniques a month I felt like the out of touch one. My bad!

But wow, was I happy to hear it, because it confirms once again, that just about every niche on Earth is full of passionate people that yearn for information and will pay good money for it.

Backyard Chickens has the classic business model for making passive income; it has a ton of information rich articles on keeping chickens and within these articles (and throughout the site, email autoresponder series etc), there are of course affiliate links, sponsored ads and of course, ebooks for sale.

Since most people visiting this site are after information, obviously ebooks are a great passive income stream to pursue.

But what makes ebooks even cooler for this niche is that most visitors will be looking to start their chicken project this weekend and they will need advice on how to do everything from step 1 (fertilized egg buying) to step 33 (getting chicken and hen to knock boots to a lil Sinatra – they’re classy like that, them there chickens).

So what they are crying out for are step-by-step guides.

ie although the little Google-friendly bite-size blog articles on Backyard Chickens aren’t enough…the visitors need more, they need structure!

Think about what other niches are like this – where someone needs to complete a project, achieve a goal etc, within a limited space of time and needs to get moving.

Everything from passing the LSAT exam to creating your own urban balcony garden fits into this. Go nuts!

The Backyard Chicken website also has a gargantuan online store. They’ve put it under a different brand name, but link to it from the main site’s navigation bar.

They also have a highly trafficked forum, which obviously helps to attract that huge amount of monthly unique visitors. Maybe as good a time as any, to consider how you could build a forum component into your site and thusattract 1000s of words of free user-generated content (hello, free SEO…that also keeps growing without doing anything…passssssive love!).

Creating a relatively popular forum gets easier the more underserved your niche is (eg machine knitters) or the more sub-nichey you go (eg pre 1950s knitting machine aficionados).

Visit Backyard Chickens or check out Steps to Passive Income where case study originally spotted