Long Game Online Launch

Welcome to the first edition of the Long Game Online newsletter.

In this week’s email:

• 💡 The most interesting thing I saw online this week

• 🍔 A breakdown and strategy of a niche site idea: Hamburgers

• 🚀 Highlights from the Long Game Online Launch

Coolest Thing I Saw Online This Week

Aggregators buying up eCommerce / FBA brands is nothing new. Thrasio has been doing it for years.

The reason I thought this post was kind of interesting is that it summarized OpenStore’s strategy for growing a brand from $1M to $10M revenue in ~18 months after acquiring it. In a nutshell, OpenStore:

• Optimized the brand’s paid social strategy

• Experimented with video creative

• Added more messaging around how to find the best fit (the brand is in men’s athleisure)

• Launched some new products

For all of the amazing tech, processes, and systems that aggregators can theoretically bring to the table, it turns out that the things required to 10x the business all fall into the category of basic blocking and tackling.

This is a good reminder that if you’ve gotten a business to $1M sales, it might be worth the effort to make sure you’ve really exhausted all growth avenues before exiting.

Half-baked niche site idea: 🍔Hamburgers

If there is one thing I love doing, it’s brainstorming about different online business ideas. For everyone 100 ideas I come up with, I might pursue one. So, rather than let these gems go to waste, I thought I’d share them with you.

This week’s idea is a niche site dedicated to… Hamburgers

There are tons of great food blogs out there. There are even great grilling sites. But, if you focus only on burgers, you might be onto something.

Think it’s too narrow? I actually own a cookbook dedicated exclusively to the humble burger.

It includes recipes for turkey burgers, pork burgers, bison burgers, veggie burgers, chicken burgers, sliders, and about 30 different traditional beef burgers.

(Side note: if there are lots of books on a particular topic, it’s probably fertile ground for a niche site too)

📝 The Content

Naturally, recipes would be a core part of the site. But, you can also have posts dedicated to the best burger grilling technique, best technique for cooking in a skillet, and perhaps a few others.

You could also do a select number of product reviews. Things like skillets and burger flippers come to mind.

Rounding things out, you might throw out posts on fun burger related topics like:

• Best fast food burgers (obviously In-N-Out)

• History of the burger

• Best movies about burgers (The Founder)

• Most popular burger in every state

• And on and on. There’s more here than you might think

💰 Monetization

I would expect advertising to be a core part of your monetization strategy.

But, there would be room for affiliate commissions on the products you review. Some online butchers like Crowd Cow have affiliate programs as well. So, affiliate commissions would be a solid contributor.

If you’re really ambitious, you might even come out with a burger focused cook book of your own.

🚦 Traffic

There would absolutely be organic search potential, and your topical authority would be off the charts with a site like this.

But, this type of content would also work really well on Pinterest, and even YouTube.

For what it’s worth, I won’t build a site these days unless there are at least two really good traffic sources. It’s just too risky to rely only on organic search.

Long Game Online Launch

This is the very first edition of the Long Game Online Newsletter. So, it’s early days.

So far, I have done a limited amount of advertising on Twitter and have gained some organic subscribers as well.

I also published a post called The Wrong Way to Build Niche Sites (And What You Should Do Instead) on the Long Game Online website. This is my view on the best approach to operating the niche site model in 2023.

From time to time, I’ll publish longer form posts like this one, and will mention them in this newsletter when I do.

In the coming weeks, I plan to advertise a bit more both on Twitter and on Facebook to grow my audience. I’ll share updates when I have something noteworthy to share, and will also be open about what tactics are working / not working.

Thanks for joining me on this journey. Until next week…

Regards,

Ryan