I recently learned of a simple affiliate site that’s on track to earn $200,000 in its first year. The owner spends very little time on it.

Amazingly, it has just 19 pages indexed in Google!

And perhaps most astonishing, it appears unaffected by the recent Google updates:

Many of the ups and downs in that chart don’t align with any update, and are therefore due to general ranking fluctuations.

The site is routines.club.

It publishes the “daily routines and rituals of interesting people”. People such as Andrew Huberman, Joe Rogan, and Tim Cook.

You’d think routine keywords would be highly competitive. But apparently not. Routines Club has a DR of just 19, yet ranks #1 for “andrew huberman routine”.

According to the founder of Routines Club, the site is on track to earn $200,000 in its first year:

And that revenue comes through affiliate marketing.

Note that the site was getting 40,000 visitors per month in January. At the same time, Ahrefs estimated around 10,000 visitors per month. I always find it insightful to see how much traffic a site actually gets vs. what Ahrefs estimates. Ahrefs typically underestimates, as is the case here.

As Hamza (the founder) mentions, the site earns through affilite links (brand partnerships). Here’s a screenshot from the article about Andrew Huberman. As you can see, there are affiliate links to Athletic Greens and LMNT.

The audience is highly motivated. Readers are looking to replicate Andrew’s routine - or at least draw inspiration from it. And, they probably trust Andrew’s product recommendations and are therefore very likely to convert.

It’s honestly a brilliant strategy. Routines Club is essentially borrowing (and cashing in on) the authority of the people they cover. They don’t have that authority and trustworthiness on their own.

How I discovered Routines Club

I actually first heard about this site through another newsletter I follow called eBiz Insider.

eBiz Insider shares fascinating success stories every Tuesday and Friday. Some of the recent emails include:

So if you like emails like this one I’m sending, you’ll love the ones from eBiz Insider.

Diving deeper into the “routines” niche

While the routines niche is quite uncompetitive, Routines Club does have a few small competitors targeting some of the same keywords.

Meanwhile, there are thousands more “morning routines” keywords. And tens of thousands of “___ routine” keywords.

Routines Club has just 19 indexed pages bringing in 40,000 visitors/mo.

If you enter the routines niche, I’d recommend picking a different angle. There are tons of high-volume, low competition keywords you could target without competiting directly with Routines Club.

Untapped niches still abound

I’m continually amazed at the opportunities still out there for new websites. I wonder if any of my readers remember 10Beasts (.com). Glen Allsopp covered it way back in 2017, which spurred a huge growth in “best of” style content. 10Beasts had just 8 pages at the time and generated 6 figures in its first 8 months.

You’d think the internet would be so saturated by now, that opportunities to make big bucks from a simple website would be all dried up.

But that’s not the case. It’s 2024 now, and untapped opportunities still exist, as evidenced by Routines Club.

I find incredible opportunities all the time when I browse through Site Stats Database. I share some of these untapped niche ideas in my community, Website Growth Mastermind.

Such as this less-than-2-year-old site in a very interesting, huge, yet untapped subniche of travel:

The above site gets 8,500 visitors/mo (probably a lot more), and has a DR of just 0.6. It also earns some nice travel-related commissions.

I share the URL of this site and an overview of the niche in Website Growth Mastermind.

Different topic: the March Core Update finally concluded!

In case you missed it, Google announced the March Core update finished rolling out a week ago, on April 19th. Google had their earnings call yesterday, which is probably why the announcement was delayed. But who knows.

Pretty big letdown, as no sites that were hit by the September HCU (or the March Core update) have seen any bit of recovery that I’m aware of (and I keep close tabs on 20,000 sites, so yes, I have data to back this up).

We can hope a future update will actually reward all good websites, but I wouldn’t count on it. Now’s a great time to pursure alternative traffic sources if you aren’t already.

And that concludes today’s email. Hope it was inspiring in some way. Thanks for reading!

Ian

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