We may earn commissions if you shop through the links below. I’ve devoted much of my life to paddling. Started when I was a kid, guided sea kayaking, had a sea kayak guiding business, sold paddlesports equipment at the retail level, was an ACA L4 Open Water Coastal Kayaking Instructor, been a columnist for print paddling magazines, published my photos in a canoe load of magazines and calendars, and have been blogging on this website for over 15 years (it used to be called Nesmuking). During my time blogging, I’ve witnessed the death of great paddling websites and blogs and the rise of crappy affiliate marketing niche websites. And crappy niche sites are getting top results in searches and giving people bad advice. If you’ve never heard of a niche website here’s the primer. These websites are built by internet affiliate marketers and designed to get Google traffic. Once they get enough traffic, they generate revenue through affiliate links. Most of the time, the information they provide is thin and if the marketers have any paddling experience it’s minimal. PaddlingLight does use affiliate links to make money, but the website isn’t designed like a niche site specifically to make money, otherwise I’d be writing articles with titles like “Best Kayaking Accessories” and “Best Kayak Anchors” or other simple titles based on what people search for. This article would never be on an affiliate marketing niche site because it would dilute the marketing potential. Join REI and Earn $30 towards your next gear purchase. The problem isn’t that people want to make money. The problem is that people want to make money using paddling as a topic when they know little or nothing about paddling. The stuff they write is terrible and sometimes deadly and mostly wrong. Take this as an example of how bad the writing can be: The stroke depends on multiple factors. Your strength is one of them, but the blade construction and design are just as important. This model comes with asymmetrical blades. They are high angle, so they’ll provide a solid stroke. They measure 18 inches in length and just over 7 inches in width. Moreover, the blades are slightly spooned, so you have to hold the paddle accordingly. Basically, the writer is just throwing in terms like “high angle” and “spooned” and “stroke.” It’s obvious to anyone who has experience with learning or teaching strokes that blade construction and design have nothing to do with how good your stroke is. Blade style and design might have something to do with what type of stroke you use. A high-angle blade has nothing to do with how solid a stroke is and you don’t have to paddle any differently with a spooned blade than you would with a flat blade. It’s complete gibberish. But, if you are a beginner, it might sound authentic. Even if it doesn’t sound good to a beginner, it gamed Google and got the beginner to click. If that beginner clicks any of the links and buys something, the crappy website made money. All they have to do is get on the front page of Google and they win. PaddlingLight gets pinged by these websites often. We’re also get lots of comments with links back to these niche websites and we’re getting lots of requests from internet marketers to write paid articles for PaddlingLight. The key to affiliate marketers is to get links back to their websites, and because PaddlingLight has been on the internet for a long time and has lots of links back to it, Google views it an important. These niche sites want PaddlingLight to link back to them, because then Google will look at them as more important. On volume of requests, this website could pull in $500 to $1000 a month in paid posts if I wanted to lower the quality of this website. I could write more niche-style articles and boost the income significantly as well. Back when I was trying to make more money from the website, we were on pace to bring in $30,000 a year. But, I’m more concerned about quality and don’t have the time lately to build quality articles about gear to compete with the niche websites. I could start trying to counter these niche sites by writing more articles targeting searches, but I also don’t want long-time readers to get turned off and sometimes on good searches I wouldn’t have much to say. For example on kayak deck bags, I could write an article called “Best Kayak Deck Bags.” That would be a good article as far as searches. Here’s what it would look like if I wrote it: Kayak deck bags suck! Don’t buy one. They get in the way. In waves, they throw water into your face. During rescues, whatever is in them gets smashed. Seriously, why do you need to carry that much stuff? Just put a map and spare paddle on your front deck and call it good. And then I’d be like, go buy NRS’s Taj M’Haul Deck Bag if you want one. It’s sweet cause it’s name is “M’Haul” and your high-angle stroke depends on it. Seriously, if I was going to clutter my deck it would be with Watershed’s Aleutian Deck Bag. I sort of feel like PaddlingLight has an obligation to the paddling community to fight these niche sites by providing real info while targeting the titles they use. I used to write for content farms, so I know how to do the SEO targeting that would work to get ranked above them on Google. What do you think? Should I go full-on anti-niche website by targeting the titles in an attempt to get real information out to people searching for information and getting only crappy affiliate marketing niche websites? What are your thoughts?