Using Niche Sites to Make Money Online

What is a Niche Site?

In order to make some money using niche sites, it would only make sense that you know what they are.  Well, first let’s discuss one thing that bugged me to no end when I first started investigating these things – the pronunciation.  If you head over to dictionary.com, you’ll find that the word is pronounced like the word “itch”.  Say itch with an “N” in front of it and you’re on track.  Now that you know how to pronounce it properly, let’s talk about what a niche site is – click Read More below to find out more.

A niche site is typically a site created with useful information that targets a very specific user want or need.  For example – “How to Raise a Chihuahua” might be a niche that someone would fill.  The primary purpose of the niche site should first be to provide the user with what they’re looking for.  So if we are taking the Chihuahua niche as an example, you’d want to provide information such as the types of food that are good for them, methods for potty training, how to leash train, where to buy leashes, collars and other accessories, etc.  Essentially, you want to help people out as much as possible for free, and in return, you’re hoping they’ll trade a click through on an ad or a purchase of an affiliate product, such as a “Guide to Raising Chihuahuas” (just an example – if it exists, I’ve not researched it) because they feel you’ve provided them such great information for free.  Generally speaking, people feel the need to repay people when they’ve been provided a quality bit of information or a service.

So the first part is to provide quality information, and the second key component is finding a way to turn that traffic into money.  There are a number of ways to do this but the two most popular methods are using some sort of ad company such as Google Adsense and selling affiliate products through sources such as ClickBank.  These are just a couple of the sources for income on a niche site – there are many more but I’ll touch on those a bit later.  The key here is once you get a site up with some valuable information on it, you’re going to want to find a way to make some money off the traffic coming to your site.  That’s when you’ll start looking into placing ads on your site, listing affiliate products, selling advertising, etc.  It’s exciting to think about, and in reality isn’t all that difficult to do.

Are Niche Sites Easy?

Before I go on here, I have to address that last statement I made.  “Isn’t all that difficult to do”.  Does that mean it’s easy and you’re going to be an instant success?  NO – There are a couple of things I want to touch on here because I have a good friend who said, “Well, if it’s all that easy, why isn’t everyone doing it?”.  Let me go ahead and address that first – The reason not everyone does it is because it requires quite a bit of work, the willingness to learn and personal sacrifice.  One thing that I’ve learned about people (and I’m not excluding myself here) is that people generally don’t like to give up their personal time to work some more.  You get home from a long day at work and the last thing on your mind is typically firing up the working coals again.  Most people want to watch their Monday Night Football (it’s on right now as I type this – hopefully Drew Brees will have a horrible night against the Giants so I can win my fantasy football matchup), or turn on Dancing with the Stars, or fire up Call of Duty on their favorite console.  Believe me, I know – I’ve been guilty of all that.  But if you want to know the real reason most people don’t do this stuff is because it requires your time.  It requires that you give up some of your video gaming time, or your football watching time, or your True Blood time.  It requires that make personal sacrifices and most people just aren’t willing to do that.  The next reason why people don’t do this is because they’ll get a few steps in and then give up.  It’s really easy to buy some software to create some sites or to spend a little bit of time putting together a few articles, but then you don’t see results in a week or two and you just don’t want to push forward.  We are a society that is driven by instant gratification and without that immediate earning, most of us will give up and look back in a year or two and wonder where the time and motivation went.  This is definitely not a get rich quick thing, and not understanding that it can take several months to see your first dollar can destroy your drive before you even get off the ground.

Now that I’ve discussed some of the psychological things you need to overcome before you can even start down this road, let’s quickly discuss some of what you need to get started creating niche sites.  I’m going to list out what’s needed in order to create a niche, and if you don’t know what these are, don’t worry.  I’m planning on putting together detailed posts on each bullet point below and will also be doing some videos to help walk you through some of these steps.  None of this is rocket science, but not knowing and understanding each piece will make the task incredibly daunting.

Creating a Niche Site Step by Step

1. Niche keyword research – identifying keywords that generate enough traffic in popular search engines (pretty much focusing on Google) and have the potential to earn yourself a bit of money for the efforts
2. Finding a domain name for your niche – a “domain name” is nothing more than the “dot com” that you associate with a website – so, my domain name is www.untetheredincome.com – if you’re not familiar with purchasing a domain name, it may seem mystical now, but I promise you, by the time we walk through all this step by step, you’ll feel like a seasoned pro
3. Finding a place to host your website – think of hosting like renting space to live in.  All you’re doing is renting some space on a computer to save your webpages to.  I use Bluehost for many of my sites because they’re inexpensive, reliable, and their customer support is excellent.
4. Creating content to put on your niche site – if you’re just starting out, you can write the content or articles on your own or you can hire them out – the key here is you want to create quality content that will help people out and keep them coming back
5. Creating your website – this is where a lot of people lack confidence because having a website seems like it must be hard to do.  Well, the truth is it’s not as difficult as it once was and it can actually be quite easy, especially if you’re using a hosting service such as Bluehost and you go with a platform such as WordPress – as a matter of fact, if you’d like to see how easy it is to set up a website on Bluehost using WordPress, check out my video here – How to Create a Website on Bluehost using WordPress in 8 Minutes
6. Creating content to put on article directories and other social media sites and link them back to your site – this is a subject all it’s own, but the important thing here is that you want to leverage sites that are already popular in Google and other search engines and create links back to your own website because it makes you look more important in Google’s eyes.  It’s the same thing as if you were to show up to dinner with the President of the United States – just being associated with him will make other people think you’re important – by creating that association with the high ranking websites out there and linking back to your site (with quality content in both places) you are increasing your value in Google and other search engine’s eyes.
7. Monetizing your site – this is where you’re going to put Google Adsense or affiliate products or any number of other items on your site to help turn your website traffic money for you
8. Tracking and analyzing your site’s traffic patterns – once you get your site set up and established, you’re going to want to find out how people are getting to your site, what they’re searching for, where they’re coming from, etc.  All this will help you increase (hopefully) traffic and target keywords more effectively