Making money with niche sites isn’t all that easy. Firstly you need to choose your niche. There are millions of niches to choose from but your best bet is to choose something you know about and are passionate about. That way you can continue creating content and building the site for a good, long time. If you expect to throw up a slim website and keep ranking, think again. This is much harder than it used to be. There are thousands of websites competing in almost every niche so unless you have a very unique niche, you will need to work hard.
Making Money With Niche Sites – Choosing Your Niche
There are a few ways of making money with niche sites. All of them require getting traffic, and this means either paying for traffic, creating content or a combination of both. Monetising your website can be done with Google’s adsense program which lets you place adverts on your site or by selling affiliate products from your site. Choosing your niche is probably the most important decision you can make if you are making money with niche sites.
Take a look at some successful niche sites for a few ideas.
Paid Advertising
If you choose a topic which is too competitive you will struggle to get on to the first page of Google. This means you are relying on paid advertising. Paid advertising can work but only with the right products, it doesn’t work if you only use Google’s adsense programs. Google’s adsense program lets you place code on your website. The code is turned into adverts which reflect the topic of your blog and Google pays you a small commission for each click. However, the amount you will be paid for a single click won’t cover your advertising. So you need to use organic traffic if you’re monetising with adsense.
Writing Content For Your Niche Site
Once you have chosen a topic which interests you and which you can write about, you can start building your website. Content is kind and you need to choose your keywords in order to get the most exposure for your articles. Choose short chain competitive keywords and you will struggle to get your articles ranked on Google. Choose the longer tail keyword combinations which get fewer views but which are also much less comprtitive.
It’s much better to rank on the first page of Google for a keyword which gets 10 views a month, than on the 10th page for a keyword which gets 1000 views. The simple reason is that no-one will scroll to the 10th page in order to find your listing. One or two views a month per article is much better. So don’t get greedy with your keywords and go for the most competitive keywords. Stick to long tail keyword research and write your articles accordingly. See keyword research for niche sites. If you are making money with niche sites, this is the key to generating traffic. Traffic is the key to making money, unless you go down the paid traffic route.
Paying For Traffic
If you’re going to pay for traffic you don’t really need a website in the first place. Simply join an affiliate program and pay to send traffic directly to the pre-made affiliate landing pages. You can do this with advertising platforms such as Facebook and Google’s Adwords programs. However, it’s still well worth building your website up using content as this is a much cheaper method of building a long term sustainable flow of targeted traffic to your affiliaite products. See how to get laser targeted traffic to your website. Making money with niche sites can also be speeded up by using retargeting. Retargeting can allow you to ‘follow’ your website visitors around the web with adverts and remind them to return to your website. More on this in The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing.
Why Must Traffic Be Targeted?
You can write about anything on your blog. It’s your blog after all. However, another thing to consider when choosing making money niche sites is the product you will be selling. Choose something you, yourself want to buy, then you can see the value in it. Try the product out and then you can talk about it with some knowledge. The content you write on your website will directly determine the kind of visits you will get.
If you sell tractors you don’t want to write about cars, for examples. Your content should attract buyers and not browsers. Writing your content to answer the questions which are asked before a purchase is a good way to do this. Review sites are good at making money. They offer some insight for people who already know what they want. They just need a final bit of information before they buy. Your site should offer this information and then a link to the product.
Niche Blogging For Profit
Once your site up and you have created a few articles, don’t expect a tonne of traffic. For every article you write, someone else is writing one too. Make sure you promote your articles as far and wide as you can. Share on social media using a great tool called buffer.com. This lets you share with one click and your article is shared throughout your social media platforms. So you don’t need to log into every platform to do it. You should build links to your articles from other related blogs.
You can do this by blog commenting and guest writing articles for other bloggers in exchange for backlinks to your articles. I use fiverr.com to help with my link building so if you’re lazy like me then you can use this tool. Remember though that your content is king. Unless you offer something unique, useful and entertaining people are less likely to share it freely. Use an SEO writing tool too which will help you get your keyword balance right without being too spammy. Write for people though and not for the spambots. Just make sure you use your keywords in your copy for maximum effect. Get my ebook Niche Blogging For Profit for more details on this.
Making Money Niche Sites
Remember if you expect to get all your traffic for free, you need to work hard at creating the best possible content. It can take 6 months to a year before you see any results in terms of traffic, depending on your niche. You need to blog every day or it will take longer. Results aren’t guaranteed either. If you want to make money faster online the paid traffic route is the faster method. Paid traffic is like turning on a tap. You get instant traffic to your website. Learn more about paid traffic methods in my ebook The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing.