How To Make Money With Niche Sites [2024]
Reading Time: 10 minutes 
Because so many people are curious about how to make money with niche sites, I want to give a straightforward explanation. I’ve been earning from my niche sites for the past 7 years and have gained a ton of experience to share.
Owning an active niche site can be a fantastic way to make money. It’s not easy, but it is fun and fulfilling. So if you ask me, compared to a traditional job, working on niche sites has never really felt like work.
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Making money from niche sites doesn’t have to take you years. The truth is, if you have discipline and a plan, you can turn a profit in way less time than some other blogging advice websites would have you think.
In this article, I will be exploring how you can make money from niche sites now, and not have to wait a couple of years to become an established enough site to be profitable.
Can you really make money with niche sites?
The short answer is yes, anyone can make money with niche sites if they apply some basic strategy. The long answer is that most people who try to make money, won’t , simply because they give up too soon.
So if YOU intend to make niche site blogging your full-time revenue stream, listen up!
You’ll need to treat your niche site less as a hobby or a passion project and more as a business that has the sole aim of making a profit.
The first step to this is you will need a website. You can either start one from scratch or buy one that is already established.
EIther way, you will want to choose your niche carefully. One might think to choose a niche based on the things that you enjoy and are passionate about.
If you like writing about these things then, by all means, do it. But just know that it may not make as much money, as niche sites that are based on market factors rather than personal factors.
Ideally, you want to select a niche that combines both market profitability, and what you have interest and experience in.
Choosing A Niche Based On Market Factors
The truth is, the best bloggers are passionate. You need to be passionate if you want to sit down for hours and write about a certain subject.
However, sometimes the things that you are passionate about simply aren’t profitable niches.
You could be passionate about shoe laces and think that is the subject you want to write about. The problem with this is that there aren’t all that many people who share that passion, and you probably can’t monetize a shoelace blog that far.
If there is simply no market demand for something, no matter how much you love it, it will be hard to get rich from it.
I am not saying that you won’t be successful in making money off a blog about shoelaces, if you can write the right information and use the right keywords you can make money blogging about anything.
However, it will be much harder to make money writing about a subject like that.
When choosing your niche you need to think about it as if you are choosing something to sell, that means thinking about what the market needs and treating your blog as a business rather than a hobby.
Target Audience & Budget Potential
When creating a profitable niche, you need to be able to solve something for your audience, whether that is recommending a product or service for them to buy or providing them with a piece of information that they are looking for.
When you blog for a specific audience, you’ll need to understand what they want and what their challenges are.
It helps if you are part of your own target audience, or if you were part of your target audience but solved whatever your problem was.
In this scenario, you have some sort of expertise in the subject and it will shine through in your writing.
When looking at your blog as a business and not a hobby there is one important factor that you need to consider, which is how much your target audience is willing to spend on your expertise.
For instance, if you are writing a niche blog on the use of spreadsheet software, your blog topics will pull in a load of different visitors that are trying to find a good spreadsheet software to do their taxes, plan their weeks, etc.
And this would work, people will come to your blog to see how to use a spreadsheet to do taxes and you could then make money from affiliates, advertisements, and courses.
But what you want is a lucrative audience, normal people trying to do their taxes or students planning their week aren’t going to spend money on courses that will help them understand spreadsheets better.
However, if you target your spreadsheet expertise toward businesses, you’re going to make more money.
Businesses will have more money than average people and they also have money that isn’t coming from their own pocket, so they are more likely to buy your product.
Therefore you can raise the prices on the services you will provide in the short term and make better connections for affiliates in the long term.
Using Your Professional Leverage
Now that you’ve decided what your target audience is going to be and exactly what their budget potential is, you need to ask yourself, why should they listen to you?
You need to discover the advantages that you have over anyone else writing about this subject.
You need to look at the current level of professional experience that you have and what you have to back it up, whether it is a lot of experience in that field, or a degree in that field to back it up.
Looking back at the spreadsheet example, would you rather take advice on spreadsheets from someone who just owns Microsoft Excel or someone who has been an accountant for the last five years and has a degree in I.T.?
This will also come in handy when you are performing outreach, which includes building relationships with other professional bloggers and writing guest posts for them.
Outreach is crucial when starting a new blog, having guest posts will get your blog a high Domain Authority (DA) as the guest posts will link back to your blog.
These backlinks will give you a high Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is the best way for your blog to rise in the Google search rankings.
When you’re starting you’ll have very little traffic and not a lot of published content, so the only way other blogs are going to feature you is if you have some professional leverage.
Look at what you know, who you know, and how you can back that up, and choose your niche around these questions.
Market Demand
You know what professional leverage you have and you know what audience you want to target, now you need to find out if the market actually needs your blog.
This involves quite a bit of market research and finding out what keywords you can put in your article to make them the most lucrative to your audience and get those clicks.
The two main posts that you need to focus on to get as much traffic as possible are ‘hot-to’ guides and ‘best’ list posts.
These types of posts have the most monetizable value as these keywords are searched more than anything else.
How-to guides are articles like the one that you are reading now, they give people information and guide them on how to do certain things.
For example, ‘how to multiply percentages on excel’ could be a question that is searched often in your spreadsheet niche.
On the other hand, best-list articles are review-type articles that give people the best products or services in a certain field and will have honest recommendations.
Best articles will run along the lines of ‘best spreadsheet software for taxes’ and are brilliant for joining and promoting affiliate programs.
Now you need to research keywords that will make sure that your articles are being searched frequently and don’t have too much competition.
You can do this by using a keyword research tool. You need to find keywords that fit into the ‘how to’ and ‘best’ templates that have search volumes of around 5k.
This will confirm that there is sufficient interest in the topic.
On your keyword research tool, there should be a keyword difficulty score, this will be a number ranging from 0 to 100 that tells you how difficult it will be to compete alongside other articles with this keyword.
If the difficulty score is more than 80 then it will be difficult to compete in that area.
You want to look for keywords that have a difficulty score under 50 but monthly searches of over 2000.
Making Money Quickly From Your Niche Site
You have your niche, you have researched it intensely, and know exactly what your market needs, what your target audience is, and now it is time to write your blog.
Read: How to write articles people actually want to read.
Building Relationships And Guest Blogging
As mentioned earlier, you have some sort of professional leverage in your subject that will make you an asset to other, bigger bloggers in your niche. For this step, you need to know exactly what that professional leverage is and use it.
You’ll need to target similar sites to yours that have a bigger audience and internet traffic, start a simple spreadsheet that has the Website, name, email address, etc. of the people that run these sites.
To start building this database of relationships, look up websites with the most monthly site visitors and high DA using SEO tools, try and look for blogs with a DA of around 50+ as the higher the DA the more you can get from the relationship.
Reach out to these people and ask if you can write guest posts for them on their website, this is where your professional leverage comes in as you have the expertise to write about the topic that they want on their blog.
There are some things you need to remember when guest blogging and proposing to write an article on someone else’s blog.
Firstly, you need to know if the content you are going to write already exists on their blog. A great way of doing this is by searching “site:blog.com topic” on google and if the topic that you want to write about is on their blog, it will come up.
Your topic also has to have target keywords and SEO value, you can see if this is the case the same way you would come up with articles for your own blog, using keyword tools.
You then need to make sure that the topic falls under your expertise and also the audience’s interests, look at their blog posts and how they are written, and try to match their blog style.
The more guest posts that you do, the more backlinks your blog will have, not only will this increase its traffic massively by having audiences from those blogs visiting your blog, the more backlinks an article as the better the SEO is and the higher it ranks on Google. Meaning you will get even more traffic.
How To Monetize Your Niche Site
You should always continue to do guest posts. They are the best way to ensure that your content gets the most amount of traffic it can get.
Now that you have a rising amount of traffic then you can start to get involved in affiliate programs and advertising that will help get a passive income to your blog.
Your niche site should be proof to go alongside your degree or experience that you know exactly what you are talking about, your end goal should be to sell a product or service to your reader.
Consider selling a digital product, membership, or offering a service.
Every good niche site has a quality sales funnel
Your sales funnel should look something like this:
- A user reads your blog content and then opts-in for an email list signup. This will usually come with one page of ‘free’ advice to entice them into signing up. Or, they might buy right from your sales page.
- Have an automated welcome email that will tell a story and sell them on the next paid offer in your funnel.
- When they buy the paid offer, it introduces them to the next paid offer.
Every page of your blog should be made to drive traffic to your sales or opt-in page. Make sure these pages are full of keywords that will help your clients get to it through searching on Google.
You need to also make sure that this page has your picture and contact information, and make it look professional, yet friendly.
How To Make Money With Niche Sites – Conclusion
Using this and targeting the right people, you will be able to get a list of clients and a steady flow of money within no time.
If you also keep writing guest articles and have your blog up to date with information and content, then the seeds that you have planted for your traffic will grow and soon you can really ramp up affiliate marketing and advertising efforts to make the most out of your blog.
Within a year, you could sell your niche site for up to 40x its monthly profit!
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