How To Make Money Online With A Niche Website

Stuart Walker – Niche Hacks

Build something you care about. It’s so much easier to work hard on it and put the extra effort in when you genuinely enjoy the site. If you don’t care about the topic at hand you’ll only put so much energy in it and not go the extra mile to make everything you do really special. Obviously that’s the starting point and there’s a lot more to it than that. You have to make sure you pick something you’re passionate about AND is profitable otherwise it’s doomed from the start no matter how much effort you put into it. And then there’s traffic, content and building your email list aspect. Your content can’t just be good. It has to be some of the best in the niche. Bigger, better, more beautiful, above and beyond and packed full of data, stats, examples and backed up points. Links and quotes to experts and so on. You have to get your message in front of the right audience. It’s about knowing WHO your target audience is and WHERE they hang out online (blogs, social media groups, forums) and leveraging those sources, lots of ideas here.

The single most important thing you can do is focus on growing your email list as it helps build a strong relationship with your audience as well as trust, can be used to drive traffic back to your site, keep your audience notified of any updates or changes and email promotions give a better ROI than any other promotional type.

Content upgrades and “lead magnets” which solve your audiences core problems work best. I gave Matt Woodward some advice that helped him increase his blog’s opt in by 469% in less than 24hrs and there’s 34 different, effective methods listed here.

Stuart is a creator of Niche Hacks and helps people to find profitable niches and become an online authority – @NicheHacks

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Dom Wells – Human Proof Designs

There are a lot of different methods and processes for building a successful niche site, and most of them will work. The one thing that everyone needs however, is the belief in themselves and that particular process. A successful site takes time and effort, and the reason most people fail, is ultimately because they give up. Being too hung up on whether or not they will succeed has been too much for many a beginner, and I’ve seen some great sites with potential to be huge, get abandoned a couple of months in once the novelty wore off for the site builder and the doubt took over. If you can just have faith in yourself that you WILL succeed if you stick at it, then succeed you will. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t think there’s anything more powerful in this business, and it’s the piece of advice I give my customers over and over again.

Dom teaches others about affiliate marketing at Human Proof Designs – @Human_Proof

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Kirsty – Nerdy Nomad

My tip for running a successful niche website would be to make sure you’re the expert on the topic and keep striving to be better and learn more.
Kirsty is a passionate traveller and writes about about her internet earnings at Nerdy Nomand – @travoholic

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April Woods – Mama Loves Food

Engage your audience as a friend and confidant rather than a potential sale. Never say something to your readers online that you wouldn’t say to a friend in your living room.

April is the owner of Mama Loves Food where her hobby turned into something she could put on a business card – @MommyNamedApril

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James Blews  – Smart Idea Lane

My top tip for building a successful niche website is to devote much of your time to research. Research the niche to make sure that it is worth the effort. Research competition on the first page of the general keyword and industry, and then for long-tail keywords. Research long-tail keywords and start building those groupings based on what user intent will be (you’ll start ranking a lot quicker). Research linking and link building possibilities before you start creating this type of web entity. And, finally, research content creators to get good, quality content – Google is rewarding authority sites, over niche sites, so don’t make them look so ‘niche’. I also think the idea of a niche site is slowly going to evolve.

Earlier, I mentioned Google rewarding authority sites that might be niche site, but don’t look so niche. Before, we could create a site targeted to one long-tail keyword and then build a few pages each focused on related but different keywords and produce 400-750 words of content. Now, Google wants questions answered, fresh content that expands on previous needs and better quality. Now, Google and Bing, with Yandex and the rest to follow I’m sure, needs 1000+ words, media-richness, call-to-actions, internal linking beyond keyword bumping and citations of authority sources. Get people talking, too! Start debates, even in boring niches! Check out this comparison of Nespresso vs Keurig – a usually boring niche made interesting and engaging.

James created Smart Idea Lane in order to show people that business is not just about throwing money and perseverance at a problem – @JamesBlews

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Tung Tran – Cloud Living

1. Think bigger & long-term – The time when we could put together a 5 page website and expect it to earn money instantly is long gone. You’re building a business here. And every successful business takes time to build.

2. Provide value. My most successful websites are the ones that focus on providing valuable content to the audiences. Give people what they want and you will get the reward.

3. Do your planning well. Like building any other business, having a plan is crucial. It doesn’t have to be a 30-page long plan, just a short one with some basic elements (goals, financial, marketing, target audience, monetization, etc.) and some first steps you need to do to execute the plan.

4. Have a clear monetization strategy first. People often tell me that their biggest problem is getting traffic. But the fact is that traffic is everywhere. It’s how you make money from the traffic that matters. For example, if you spend $50 on Facebook/Adword/Bing/etc to get 1000 visits to your website, and you get $200 back from them either buying your products or buying affiliate products through your links, would you be willing to spend more to acquire more traffic? Of course YES.

5. Diversify your traffic sources. Don’t rely on a single source of traffic. I made a big mistake in the past when 100% of my effort was spent on SEO. Then my websites got penalized. My entire business is gone.

6. Pay more attention to paid traffic, especially Facebook advertising in 2015. This has been a big shift in my strategy. Google is unpredictable. And SEO traffic is not really free as people say. Paid traffic is different. You turn it on when you need it. Unless you stop paying, you consistently get traffic. The key is to get the math right with a good sales funnel.

Tung documents his entrepreneurial journey and shares his experience in order to help other people start building their own online businesses at Cloud Living – @OfficialTung

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Mallory Whitfield – Miss Malaprop

Use keyword research to give validity to your ideas, seeking out niches and themes with high search volume and low competition. But above all, only pursue a niche that you are genuinely passionate about and interested in. Otherwise you won’t be able to devote the same kind of time and energy to it as you will if you choose a niche you truly love. By choosing a niche that you are passionate about, it will also be easier to position yourself as an authority in that topic and build consumer trust.

Mallory is the author of Miss Malaprop – @MissMalaprop

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Amy Segreti – Live All of You

My number one tip doesn’t have to do with SEO strategy or marketing, it’s this—tell stories that connect deeply with your audience. Stop worrying about SEO when you write, because it’s always extremely obvious. Get into a flow state and write about what excites you most in your niche, and keep your Marketing Editor Brain out of it. Afterward, go ahead and make sure your backlinks are perfect. But during the writing process, hone in on what makes your heart soar about the topic you’re writing about and let it come through you—readers can feel that, and people naturally want to buy from passionate people.

Amy helps people communicate, expand and invite magic into their lives at Live All of You – @AmySegreti

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Frank Lam Sheung – Stealth Secrets

The insight you provide can be the determining factor between someone engaging with your content or your competitors.Your insight offers value to your readers, which can lead to ‘aha’ moments, ‘aha’ moments creates bursts of energy, energy creates action, and the right actions lead to sales. Insightful content cannot be created without going deep on a subject, but insight is very easy to achieve with the right thought process. Insightful content connects your readers to your message, and your personality creates the likeability factor. These two factors coupled together creates a winning combination.

Most folks have at least one subject that they can talk about all day long, whether it’s knitting, chicken recipes or brewing beer, and the insight they possess on these subjects, if correctly crafted into a niche website, could generate a sustainable income. Niche websites allow ordinary folks to create a targeted audience on stuff they’re most passionate about and earn an income doing so.

Frank helps ordinary for make money online on Stealth Secrets – @Affilicoach

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Sharon Gourlay – Digital Nomad Wannabe

My top tip is to not rush the keyword research phase. This is the most important part and you will save yourself a lot of time if you get it right in the beginning. Ensure you understand what constitutes a good buying keyword. Make sure you find lots of great longtails as well. Ideally, pick a topic that you know something about as it will make it much easier.

Sharon shares her knowledge and tips about blogging and building her first niche site at Digital Nomad Wannabe – @DigitalNomadWan

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Steve Rendell – Texfly

The first tip would be to ensure there is enough meat on the bone – One thing I see many people doing when building out amazon affiliate sites or niche sites in general, is really over estimating how much a site can potentially earn. They often just look at the headline figure of local monthly searches and build an entire site without doing adequate research. Let’s look at an example, building out a toaster oven review site. The two main keywords we’ll want to target would be buyer keywords, and would be something like “Best Toaster Oven” and “Toaster Oven Reviews” – we’d target both on a single page to get the most bang for the buck – and crafting a title like “Best Toaster Oven Reviews 2015” will kill several birds with one stone. Best toaster oven has 6,600 LMStoaster oven reviews has 5,400 LMSA quick research on Amazon shows that the price of these can go from $29 to $249 with the majority around the $50-$75 mark.

This Amazon Affiliate Calculator allows you to see an ‘estimate’ on what ranking this site will earn you.

Assuming $75 for an average order, and some other assumed CTR’s (use your own judgement) you can see the following:

First: $1800
Second: $590
Third: $415

Now of course this is an estimation, but it gives you an idea, if it’s actually worth chasing this particular keyword.

If you decide that it is worth it, only now should you carefully look at how difficult the keyword is before progressing any further.

Remember, it costs a similar amount to build a site (quality content, themes, plugins etc) whether the product costs $30 or $500. If the competition is similar, I know for certain which product I would be looking to promote.

Many people (myself included) often get over excited at finding a keyword with good volume and reasonably low competition – and neglect to consider a) Search intent and b) Monetization.

Looking at searcher intent, you need to carefully consider where in the consumer purchasing funnel they are given the keyword. Ideally you’ll be picking keywords that are towards the latter stages of the funnel.

Keywords in this section of the funnel (i.e. buyer keywords) will have modifiers such as ‘best’, ‘cheap’ and ‘reviews.

More informational searches (i.e. before the customer has actually decided to buy) usually lack specificity and will be search keywords such as ‘oven toasters’, i.e. you have no clear idea what specific reason they have searched for.

Monetization also ties in with the search intent and the purchasing funnel. Someone who is looking for ‘Toaster oven reviews’ is specifically looking for the best product. Close their search by providing the choices they need and you’ll make a sale.
Someone searching for “How to cure acne” want a solution to a problem – again, give it to them.

These are both searches where you will convert visitors into buyers if they make it to your site.

Informational searches such as “Salsa recipe” will have a much higher search volume, but will be incredibly hard to monetize.

The second tip for building niche sites is don’t limit yourself. Choosing a narrow domain name really can hinder your chances to grow the site in the future.

Going back to the toaster oven reviews keyword we looked at earlier. If you bought the domain “www.ToasterOvenCorner.com” it works really well while you only want to promote toaster ovens, but who knows in a few months’ time when the site is doing well, you might want to branch out into promoting “Slow cookers”. Having the product niche in the domain name means it will always look kind of odd, so my advise is to definitely choose a much more generic brand name over a partial match domain.

Something like “KitchenKit.com” would be much more appropriate and brand-able, without limiting your scope for expansion in the future.

Steve is a habitual line stepper and he shares his knowledge on how to save time and money by building your own website on Texfly – @rendesr

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Matthew Allen – Dumb Passive Income

Know your target market and create content that will answer their questions or solve their problems. If you do this, your monetization method will become clear. Produce a quality site that is useful and that actually helps people – a site that you can be proud of. Do this and success will be inevitable.

Matthew is a full time trucker – part time blogger and imaginary entrepreneur – @Matt76Allen

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Neil – Passive Marketing

The most important tip I can give someone, when building a successful niche website, is to take the time to do proper keyword research. This involves both time and leg work. So many people come to me with a set of 5 or so big keywords and immediately start building a site based around them. Once the site is built, they spend the next 6 months trying to rank it because of the competition.  However, what they failed to realize is that if they had spent the proper time picking out easier keywords, checking the competition, and analyzing link profiles, they could have picked out 50, or even a few hundred, keywords that would rank within months with minimal offpage SEO.

I, like many other people, have had niche sites hit by Google before because of aggressive link building. By minimizing offsite SEO, you are lowering the risk your site will get hit while increasing ROI with easy keywords that your competition is not targeting; a win-win situation. A caveat to what I mentioned above is to do the process manually. Sure, there are tools to help aid in your keyword research phase, but nothing will ever beat human intuition. This is why I spend so much time digging up keywords, because other people are not. If you devote the time, results will come.

Neil makes a full-time income from the Internet on Passive Marketing – @Passivemarketin

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Ian Schoen – Tropical MBA

With our process it starts with the market, not a website. Specifically what we look for are established markets that have not yet transitioned to online sales and marketing. Most of these niches are not sexy at all! But many of them are very well established markets with a strong sales history. We are making the bet that the majority of purchases in the future will either be educated, initiated, or made online. What we don’t know for some industries is if this will be tomorrow or 5 years from now. For some niches it can take time, but if you are patient and believe this to be true, you could find yourself with first-movers advantage online. This approach has helped us to be successful not only in building niche websites but entrenching ourselves in lucrative markets. Websites come and go with the Google algorithm, dominant market players are much tougher to unseat.

Ian is a business partner and a podcast co-host at Tropical MBA – @AnythingIan

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Greg Nunan – No Hat Digital

Think outside Google US and have a play in foreign markets where there’s still plenty of gaps in foreign SERPS. Big tip > when it comes to buying a domain name, although you often get a slight edge by having a country code top level domain (such as a .com.au), these will often require foreign residency to register so it can be a barrier to entry for you getting a site up and it also dramatically reduces the pool of potential buyers down the track if you want to flip the site. We’ve found that simply purchasing a generic.com domain and geotargeting via Google Webmaster Tools works fine and you’ll be able to rank in among and ccTLD domains in the serps just fine.

Greg is a co-founder of No Hat Digital – @nohatdigital

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Servando Silva – Stream SEO

Nowadays I recommend to pick up a niche that you really like and think of spending money to make it grow faster. If you want traffic, visits, sales and conversions, you need to treat your niche site like a business, and businesses require time and money. Money is the best way to shorten the time you need to wait to grow a website, and once you start seeing results within just a few days or weeks, you won’t ever go back to just writing and waiting for months to get ranked on a big search engine. So pick up a niche that you can enjoy (otherwise you’ll try to avoid writing unconsciously), save some money to spend on Ads (Facebook is a great choice to get started) and start writing content.

Don’t focus on things that won’t make a big difference at the beginning like website design and creating social accounts in every network. Just focus on what works and what’s going to bring you visits, conversions and revenue. If you don’t seem to get good results after a few weeks and your ads aren’t good, its either your content or there’s a lot of competition. Learn from them! With this strategy you can go from 0 to 4 figures per month in just a few weeks. Something that could take 6 months or more with SEO.

Servando is a young entrepreneur who publishes his journey and adventures related to SEO and social marketing techniques at Stream SEO.

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Steve Chou- My Wife Quit Her Job

The key to running a successful niche website is to pick a narrow topic where you can really stand out and provide value over the competition. Establish yourself as the expert in your area and then gradually expand.

Steve is a successful entrepreneur who is now teaching others how to replicate his success – @mywifequit

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Joel Runyon – Impossible Ventures

Find a niche in which you’d be willing to put in the work to speak at a conference. If you’re just trying to jump into a niche to make money and leave, your site will suffer and will likely under perform its potential. If you find a niche that you’d be willing to put in the work to become well known enough to speak at a conference on, you’ll not only build a “niche site”, but you’ll build an authority site – which has much longer longevity.

Joel is a founder of Impossible Ventures and helps start-ups scale their business through the use of SEO, SEM and content marketing strategy – @joelrunyon

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Alistair Gill – Alistair Gill

My top tip for building a successful niche site would be this: Create a content strategy based on competitive keyword research. The main thing you need for a successful niche site is traffic. In order to get traffic to your site there are a number of channels you can use, but the most rewarding in the long run is organic search traffic. That is why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is such a hot topic. The reason for this is that the other methods like social media and email marketing are labour intensive and have to be repeated again and again. Nobody wants to spend all day posting status updates over and over again! Social updates can work, but they have such a short half-life.Organic search is time intensive too, but it is also cumulative – it builds up over time.

The more content you produce and optimise, the more keywords you will rank for and the more visitors you will get. In order to rank well in the search engines you need to produce high quality, original content on a regular basis. We know the search engines are placing more and more emphasis on ranking high quality content. All of the algorithm updates like Panda and Penguin are efforts to ensure the best sites appear in the search results. So regardless of the industry you select, you need to make sure you are producing high quality content.

Freshness is also a factor in the ranking algorithm. So sites that publish new content more frequently have an advantage.

However creating original, high quality content on a regular basis is labour intensive if you do it yourself or expensive if you outsource it.

Therefore you really need to prioritise the content you produce to see the biggest wins.

This means identifying the keywords that give you the optimum mix between search volume and competition. You need to target keywords that your target market are using. You need to think like them and work out what they are typing into Google. You can then sort these keywords by popularity to identify the ones with the highest search volume.

However, that is not enough. You also need to factor in competition. You’re wasting your time trying to rank for highly competitive keywords like iPhone or Football or Lady Gaga! So you need to find the ones that have weaker competition in the search results that you can outrank. There are tools like Long Tail Pro and Market Samurai that help with this analysis.

Once you have a prioritised list of keywords you can create your editorial calendar. Start with the optimum keywords first and publish those posts. Then work down the list to fill out your niche site with relevant, high quality content.

Alistair is a freelance consultant that helps small businesses and entrepreneurs with WordPress, SEO and Web Analytics – @alistairmg

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Daniele Besana – Daniele Besana

My top tip is: go for quality. Don’t try shortcuts. In the last years a lot of cheap and poor quality content has been written, but nowadays to create a long lasting business I believe the way to go is investing in top quality content.Content that deliver real value that people enjoy spending their precious time consuming and recommending others to read. The second tip is to spend time marketing your content, reaching out other websites owners and influencers to let them know you’ve great material.

Of course this doesn’t mean that you don’t have to do a proper market / keyword research before starting. That’s still the basic of building a niche website, find a market and deliver quality.

Of course this doesn’t mean that you don’t have to do a proper market / keyword research before building a new website or buying an existing one. That’s still the basic for a niche website, you need an audience to deliver top quality to.

Daniele is self-employed web entrepreneur in Amsterdam – @danielebesana

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Jill and Josh – Screw the Nine to Five

Our biggest tip is to create your niche sites around brand and product name keywords where possible. One of the biggest obstacles niche site creators face is competing against the big authority sites when it comes to more generic “how to” keywords. And with the way Google is ranking sites these days it can be hard to out-rank the major players when it comes to topic-based keywords. However, if you stick to targeting the brand or product name keywords you will be able to out-rank most of the competition with some well written content and a few powerful back links.

Jill and Josh are the owners of Screw the Nine to Five and teach others how to replace their income and escape their 9-to-5 – @screwthe9tofive  

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James McAllister – Help Start My Site

Keep control of your business. Never put your business in the hands of another company. Many people rely solely on companies such as Google to drive traffic to their site. That is never a good idea. Even if your website ranks highly today, there is no guarantee it will remain there forever. Google updates its search algorithm regularly, and your website’s rankings could be wiped out overnight. Even if you believe you’ve been doing everything right, you can never be certain that Google will see things the same way. Do not be in the position of losing everything if your rankings are suddenly wiped out. Diversifying your traffic sources and keeping your business in your own hands eliminates this risk. Keep control of your business, or you risk jeopardizing all of the hard work you’ve put into it.

James is the owner of Help Start My Site

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Clare Swindlehurst – The Super Mommy Club

Get to know Pinterest. Make sure all of your posts include a Pinterest friendly image so that your readers can share your posts.

Clare is the blogger behind Super Mommy Club– @SuperMommyClub

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Larry Deane – Side Income Blogging

My top tip is: Pick a niche topic that you are interested in and passionate about. When building out and growing a niche site, you spend a great deal of time researching keywords, creating content, and watching for trends. If you aren’t passionate about the topic, your interest in spending time with the site tapers off pretty quick, as does your income. However, the opposite is also true. When you’re very interested and passionate about the topic, you love spending time working on the site, and it grows, as does your revenue.

Larry is a founder of Side Income Blogging. He is a software developer and a part-time blogger, web developer, and internet entrepreneur – @larry_deane

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Richard Martin – Smart Income Detective

When creating any niche site, never lose sight of the purpose of it. You’ve already narrowed it down to the particular niche, so stay super focused on it. Don’t go off in a different direction, instead give your visitor laser focused and highly valuable content that will help not only grow your niche site, but turn it into an authority site as well.

Richard is the owner of The Smart Income Detective Blog – @DetectiveSid

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Jeff Rose – Marriage More

My top tip for creating a niche website is to make your site THE authority in the niche. Niche sites are often associated with thinly produced sites with very little content. If you truly want to dominate in your space, then you need to be see as the expert. This can include high level blog posts, podcasts, videos and ebooks When a new visitor happens upon your site there should be no question what the site is about and that it can solve their problem.

Jeff and his wife Mindy own Marriage More and share their tips and tutorials on how to make money blogging – @marriagemore

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Our panel have revealed the secrets to success when it comes to building a profitable niche website.

Which expert do you think was the most helpful?

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