If you have spent any time online googling potential ways to make money online then you may have come across niche sites. Niche sites are a way that some people are making large amounts of money.
What is a Niche Site?
A niche site is basically a site built around a niche. A niche can be anything – from a broad topic such as travel to a smaller topic such as screwdrivers. In the context of how niche sites are usually discussed as a money making concept online, it is usually a small niche with a site built to earn money via affiliate commissions or advertisements.
However, just because they are built to earn money does not mean that they do not provide useful content. Years ago, people used to quickly put up rubbish sites and earn good money. These days these sites do not last long and it is all about building quality content so that everyone wins – both the people reading the site and the person writing the content.
What Does a Niche Site Look Like?
These niche sites come in many shapes and sizes.
Blogs can also do similar things and have product focused content within their blog. An example of this is the article found here about the best vacuums. It can be surprising to people not familiar with niche sites that such small topics can still be profitable.
There are also big niche sites, an example is this site www.bestfitnessadvisor.com, which looks like it is targeting people who want to buy many different forms of exercise equipment such as rowing machines. It is not hard to find many other examples online.
Why Should I Care About Niche Sites?
There is definitely a learning curve when it comes to working out how to build profitable niche sites. However once you have learned how to do this, the earnings can become passive. What do I mean by this? I mean that you do not have to keep putting in effort to earn money. Once your site is online and you have helped it become successful, you do not need to do much else to keep earning potentially a very good income.
Does this sound inviting? It should!
How Do I Make a Niche Site?
There are several big steps to making a niche site:
1. Keyword research
Basically if you want to have a successful niche site, it is important to do quality research for keywords. These are the words that your site is built around. For example, for the niche sites listed above, the keywords might be hospital grade breast pumps and best safety razor.
To be successful, you have to find keywords that do not have competition but a reasonable amount of people are searching for these terms. There is no point building a site that no one is going to search for, and thus look at. There is also little point to building a site that has keywords that already have a hundred great sites ranking for them as it may be too difficult to rank high enough in Google for anyone to ever look at your site.
There are lots of great tools to do this for you, such as longtailpro, or you can check out services where people will find keywords for you.
2. Build the site
This is probably the easiest step – actually building the site. Even though it is relatively easy, a lot of effort should go into it. A successful niche site will have a quality look and feel as well as quality content. It is possible to outsource the writing of the articles, but make sure you outsource them to someone who can write native level english or your site may not be as successful as it could be. These niche sites need to provide value.
It is also worth investing some time into learning the best on page optimization techniques. Part of ranking well in Google is having good on page SEO. This means following best practises when it comes to using your keywords.
3. Build links to the site
Your site is only going to rank well in Google search if Google thinks it deserves to rank well. It calculates this by looking at how many other sites link to your site. If not many do, then Google may think it is not a high enough quality to rank high in their search results.
There are many ways to build links to your sites, but it is important to be cautious with your approach. A lot of easy ways that used to work no longer do, so do not follow any advice that is more than six months old. These days you really have to just have quality links to your site or you can possibly harm your rankings.
The best ways to get quality links is to earn them. Write great content and share with other sites in your niche and ask if the webmasters would be interested in sharing them. You can also ask other sites if you can write a guest post for them in return for a link to your site.
It is also a good idea to brainstorm link bait like ideas. What type of thing could you have on your website that might encourage people to share? Some possible ideas are a quiz or a list of the top ten sites in your niche. Often the latter approach will encourage the webmasters of those sites to either link back to you or share your content. Moz have a great guide to quality link building.
Niche sites are not for everyone. They take a bit of time and an initial investment of money and energy. However, over time they can be very profitable and have a great return on investment.
You can also make money from Amazon by selling your own items.