A Content Site for Colorado Trail Thru-Hikers
A gear-and-logistics resource for people planning to thru-hike the 486-mile Colorado Trail.
- Model
- Affiliate content site
- Who it’s for
- People planning a Colorado Trail thru-hike and day hikers researching gear and logistics
- How it makes money
- Outdoor-gear affiliate programs (REI, Backcountry, Amazon) on every gear recommendation; guides and GPX downloads later
- Effort to launch
- A few weekends for the core planning guides, then seasonal updates
- Time to first income
- Seasonal — traffic and commissions spike Jan–June before hiking season
Outdoor gear is one of the best affiliate niches there is: the products are expensive, people research obsessively before buying, and a single thru-hiker’s kit runs well into four figures. A focused content site that helps someone plan one specific, demanding trip can earn a real commission on every pack, tent, and pair of boots that trip requires. The Colorado Trail is an ideal target because it’s famous enough to have steady search demand but specific enough that no big outdoor publisher owns it.
Why this niche has room
The Colorado Trail runs roughly 486 miles from Denver to Durango, through eight mountain ranges and six wilderness areas, topping out above 13,000 feet. It’s serious enough that people plan for months and buy carefully, but it’s not so obscure that there’s no audience. Every year a new wave of hikers searches the same questions: when to start, which direction to hike, how to handle resupply, and what gear actually survives the altitude and weather. Those are high-intent, buyable questions, and the current answers are scattered across forums and a few dated pages. A clean, trustworthy site that pulls it together wins.
How it makes money
Every gear recommendation is an affiliate link — REI, Backcountry, or Amazon — and a thru-hiker’s gear list is long and expensive, so the commissions per converted reader are far higher than most niches. Beyond gear, the site can sell its own lightweight products later: a printable resupply plan, a GPX track, a day-by-day itinerary. The seasonal pattern is a feature, not a bug — traffic and buying intent surge from January through early summer as people prep, which means you can do most of the work in the off-season and let it earn when the season turns.
What it would take to launch
Start with the handful of pages people actually search for: a trail overview, a when-and-which-direction guide, a resupply guide, and a gear list broken down by category. Write them from real planning knowledge, link every piece of gear, and keep them current each season. It’s a static site, free to host, and the content doesn’t go stale quickly — a good resupply guide is useful for years with light touch-ups.
The honest part
This one is seasonal and niche, which cuts both ways: the audience is small, so this won’t be a traffic monster, but the buyers are so committed and the gear so expensive that a modest number of readers can still produce meaningful commissions. It rewards someone who actually knows or loves the trail, because the authenticity shows and it’s what separates a site hikers trust from the thin affiliate pages they scroll past. If a long-distance hiking site sounds like a chore, skip it; if it sounds like fun, it’s a niche you could genuinely own.
Want help shipping it?
Reading the plan is the easy part. In the Launch Accelerator I spend an hour a day with you and turn an idea like this into a live business in 30–90 days — five people at a time.