Mega Guides or Informational Products?

[Nonbeardedman]

I'm a bit conflicted nowadays. I've been building out a huge topical map for creating some proper structure for my site and have mapped out some of the categories I want on my site.

Here's the issue tho. There are some high-level topics which I could write in extensive detail about, like 3000-5000 words mega Guides, that will get newbies, intermediates and professionals within my niche on the right track.

Personally, I think this'll be great for SEO as I've done this previously on certain topics before and was able to rank my DR 7 site higher than the likes of Wikipedia and Britannica covering the same topics. However, at the same time, I feel as if this isn't a very profitable route.

The topics don't have a lot of search volume (More than 1k a month and less than 5-10k) so even if I get them ranking in the 1st position and also get the snippet I won't be able to generate a lot of traffic and thus revenue since my main monetization is ads and affiliates and since these topics are purely informational in nature - I'll mostly be making money on ads.

An alternative route I've thought of is to create these mega Guides into an EBook and slap a $14.99 price tag on it so I could diversify my income sources a bit and see some revenue coming in. I could then make brief 800-1000 words articles on certain sub-topics to promote my eBook. This of course would lead to lesser search traffic and also a poorer site structure as I won't have this guide which I could've interlinked to and from other topics creating a nice structure and smoothly flow link juice across the whole category.

What's a good way to go about this and how do I choose? One of my goals with this site is to move away from ads as a primary source of income to making money from courses, ebooks, and affiliates - and thankfully, the data seems to point in that direction too. People in my niche are ready to buy these, but hate ads (From my observation)

Let me know if I should provide a bit more background. Thanks in advance!

 

[Ryuzaki]

These mega-guides don't perform like they used to ten years ago in the SERPs, mainly because they're too broad in topic and too long to be helpful to searchers (who are tending to look for summarized information). They can work as good link-bait. The best bet has been to break them into multiple articles on each sub-topic, stuff the details in there, and then create a hub-page targeting the main keyword that basically has a quicker summary then directs the users out from that page.

It sounds like to me you already know what you want to do. You want to sell e-books and get away from ads. All of the info in the e-book can be repurposed in the course, etc.

This idea of it being "one or the other" doesn't have to be the case either. You can "have your cake and eat it too" simply by publishing the guide and spreading it out across multiple pages. For the e-book you could rewrite it and format it differently, and get the best of both worlds. You could promote the e-book from those pages.

A lot of people will pay for books and courses simply to save time. They want someone to have organized the info for them. People like me will learn all of the information in your book and course from 100 different websites on 1,000 different articles and videos. Others would gladly cough up $300 to not have to do that. So I don't think the guide vs. e-book concepts are mutually exclusive.