How To Make Money With Niche Websites

With the help of some cool tools and the ease of creating new websites, using niche marketing to make money has become easier over the years. So here is how you can go about creating niche websites to make some extra money from.

Note: This blog post is an expanded version of this original blog post I did at the beginning of the year.

How niche marketing works in this sense is that you have to find a good niche to go into, then create a site with content on that topic, find some advertisements that you can promote on the site, then drive targeted traffic to that site. So let’s begin…

Step #1: Research what niche to go into.

There are thousands if not millions of different potentially good niches that you can target with your new site, but deciding which one is best can be a bit tricky, and you won’t truly know if it’s a good one until you have your site online and running. But to help find a niche, one of the best ways is to find keywords that people are searching for in that niche and narrow them down into the amount of competition and traffic there is for that topic.

Two good niche keyword tools are Google’s Keyword Tool and Market Samurai.

Google’s tool is free to use, but it can take a little longer to do all of the research using it. For basic keyword research though it is good. Market Samurai on the other hand is the best tool for all around niche research as it will go into a lot more detail about the niche to allow you to better understand the market before you enter it.

Use either one of those tools to find several keywords that have around 50-100+ searches per day (or 1,500 – 3,000 per month). The reason we are looking for that number of searches is to make sure your site will get a decent amount of traffic. Of course though, all niche markets are different and depending on which one a lower number might be ok.

The other important number to look for is how many competing sites are there for those keywords. If you are using Google’s tool, then take one of those keywords and enter it into Google.com with quotes like this, “example keyword”. With this example I can see that Google shows almost 35,000 other results for this quoted keyword. The reason we use quotes is to target which sites are specifically using that keyphrase on their site, the two words together and not just the two words somewhere on their site separate from each other.

We want to find keywords/keyphrases which have less than about 50,000 results, or even lower than 30,000… the lower the better. But again, sometimes you might want to go higher if the amount of traffic is a lot, and it also depends on the niche as well.

If you are using Market Samurai, then it will automatically give you the Google competition numbers without you having to manually go search and check them all. Just another reason why I like Market Samurai

At the end of this step you should have 5-10 keywords ready to go with ideal traffic volumes of about 3,000+ a month and less than 30,000 competing websites.

Step #2. Create your niche website.

To make this step the easiest we will build a WordPress blog/site. There are so many web hosts these days which can automatically create a WordPress site for you in just a few minutes… it’s almost ridiculous how fast a new site can be built these days. There are two hosting services which I use and strongly recommend that you try out, and both have that auto-install WordPress feature, Ultimate Marketing Center and HostICan.

But first you will need a domain name for your website. Using the best keyword that you found in step 1, go to NameCheap and try to get a domain name using that keyword. The chances are that it will not be available as a .com (try to stick to .com if possible), so either try to add dashes in between some words or add an “s” to the end of a word or include a filler word like “the”, “a”, “blog”. Then when you have found one and have ordered it, make sure to change the nameservers to meet your web host specifications.

If you are new online than I would recommend UMC, as it contains A LOT of added features. HostICan is amazing, but mostly for those that need their own server or more specific hosting features. If you want to learn more about using this quick install feature, my friend Doug Champigny made a great video about it, you can watch it here. Note: This auto-install feature does not always install a very secure version of WordPress. So you might want to install WordPress manually, but that still doesn’t take a lot of time. Check out WordPress.org for all of the install information.

So now that you have a basic site installed, the next part of step 2 is to have content on your site. I guess this could be a separate step, but since it’s a part of creating a site, I included it here.

What you want to do is write an article of at least 400 words about each of your chosen keywords, and make sure to include those specific keywords in 2-3% of the article so that the search engines will be able to tell what the topic is of that article, and therefore hopefully rank you higher in the search engines for those keywords.

There are two ways that you can get this content written, either write it yourself or pay someone else to do it. If you are familiar with the niche topic than you could probably write better content than you could pay for, since you already know the topic and wouldn’t need to research it. But if you don’t know anything about the niche, than outsourcing it might be best way to go, unless you want to spend the time to research and write it.

If you want to outsource it, here are a few freelance sites that you can check out. They are listed in no particular order and each are a bit different from each other.

With the content you will want to post 3-5 of the articles upfront at the beginning, then over the next week or two upload the others that you have, making sure to always title your articles using your keywords. Over time you should also write more quality content to add to your site using the same and more keywords.

So now that you are finished step 2, you have your new site online with it’s own domain name and hosting, along with some good content, it’s time for the next step.

Step #3. Find products that you can promote.

This is where the money comes into play… without advertising nothing on the internet would exist, so don’t feel bad about promoting products, but also don’t promote anything and everything. Only use quality targeted products which your visitors will be benefited by.

Depending on your niche topic there are hundreds of different affiliate sites and marketplaces to find products to promote. One easy way to find them is to search Google for your main keyword along with the word “affiliate”. So for example, widget affiliate (search without using quotes). When you do that it should give you a bunch of sites which sell your product that also have an affiliate program.

Another place to look for physical products is CJ.com, and for digital products, ClickBank.com. Physical products tend to have lower commission amounts, but they can be very expensive, and digital products generally have 50%+ commissions rates. So it’s important to know your niche and which type of products they purchase.

The other source for advertisements is Google Adsense, where Google will pay you a few cents every time a visitor on your site clicks one of the ads on your site. This can be a good alternative if you can not find many good products as an affiliate. The best thing to do is test which advertising stream works best for your site and your niche.

Step #4. Drive traffic your site.

This is probably most important thing you can learn, because without traffic there is no point to having a website.

I can’t go into detail about each different kind of traffic method there is, as that is a huge product in itself. But here are several ways that you can drive traffic to your niche web site;

Pay Per Click (PPC). This is paid traffic that can result in a lot of targeted visitors to your site, mostly via Google Adwords, but you can also try Yahoo and Microsoft AdCenter. Watch your money and track how much advertising revenue you bring in, as PPC can get expensive quickly.
Article Marketing. This is when you write and submit articles to article directories so that visitors to those directories will see your article, like it, and click to visit your site. This is best done by also including your keywords in the article to help with search engine optimization (SEO). The biggest article directory is EzineArticles.
SEO. The reason you needed to pick good keywords and write content around those keywords is so that the search engines will rank your site high (hopefully on the first page) when someone searches for those keywords. You will also want to optimize your site as best as you can for your keywords (not just in your articles). You can check WordPress.com and search Google for more information about SEO.
Use social media. Sites like Twitter and Facebook can be a great way to drive traffic to your niche site, but make sure to not spam these sites. Always participate and be friendly, with just a few messages about your website. Speaking about Twitter, why don’t you follow me here!
Forum marketing. There is a forum out there for just about any niche. Everyone likes to find others interested in the same topic as they are, so forums are a great place to hang around and find targeted traffic. Link your forum signature box to your website and give them a good reason to click the link.
Important: Always drive targeted traffic to your website. Targeted traffic are visitors who are interested in your niche topic. There is no point to have visitors who are not interested in your site as they will not stay long and will not purchase anything.

Those traffic ideas should help you to start bringing in some traffic, but over time you will want to search for other ways to bring even more traffic. There are countless traffic methods, in fact Willie Crawford and Doug Champigny recorded a teleseminar about the many ways that they drive traffic to their sites, you can get access to that information here.

Once you have targeted traffic coming to your website, now you just have to sit back and watch what happens. This will be a good time to track the results to see what keywords are getting the most traffic, where you can add new content, what ads are working, and what you can do to make more money!

Step #5. Repeat steps 1-4.

Yes, now that you have this site done you can move onto another website. This is where the real power comes, because one website itself will probably not make you rich, but over time with 10, 50, or 100+ websites your income can really grow!

Of course, it will take time to reach the level where you have 100 websites, but the more you put online the faster you can get to that number. Since your income will grow with each site, that means that you can then afford to spend more money on site creation/outsourcing and on driving traffic, which will all lead to bringing in more and more money.

Invest the money you make to make more money in the future.

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I hope that the steps shown above will help you to get started on building your niche websites. It will take some time to get started, but once you have built the first one they will only get easier and easier to build.

Written by Joel Osborne