Niche websites are sites that focus on a specific topic, industry, or demographic. They are often created by people who have a passion for the niche, and they can be an excellent way to break into the online world. Niche sites can be a great way to build an audience and learn about a specific topic. But they can also be a great way to make money online. In this post, we’re going to explore how to create a niche website that will make you money as well as how to speed up the keyword ranking process.
How to create a niche website
As we spoke above, niche websites are small, focused websites that target a specific market or audience. Niche sites are often created around a single topic or keyword, and they typically have less content than more generalist sites. However, this content is usually of high quality and is targeted at a very specific audience, which can make niche sites more valuable and attractive to readers and search engines alike.
If you want to create a niche website, there are a few things you need to do.
Choose your niche
This can be anything from a hobby to a profession. Once you’ve chosen your niche, you need to create content that is relevant to your niche. This can be done by writing articles, creating videos, or creating products that are relevant to your niche. Once you have decided on what you’d like to write about we move on to the second and the most important step.
Search for relevant, high volume – low competition keywords for your niche
You must be aware of the 2 basic types of keywords which are short-tail and long-tail keywords. A niche website is generally heavily optimized with long-tail keywords which are relevant to your niche. This is because short-tail keywords have high search volumes which attract massive competition, whereas, long-tail keywords have comparatively lower volume and competition.
You can use several tools to find high volume – low competition long-tail keywords such as Ahrefs, SemRush, SERanking or Google Keyword Planner. Also check out this guide to become a PRO Keyword Researcher
Create a niche keyword database
A good practice is to identify your high volume – low competition long-tail keywords in bulk and create a database to store all the information which can be used to plan out a content strategy. I would recommend you to create a database of at least 50 keywords if you’ve just started or are planning to start soon.
You can simply use an excel or google sheet to store all your data. Make sure you include the keyword volume next to the identified keywords as well as the keyword difficulty in case you’re not using Google Keyword Planner.
Try to aim for minimum 20K search volume (accumulative) for all the 50 keywords.
Here is a tool I used to identify, shortlist and create a database of such keywords.
Niche Content Planning and Strategy
Planning a strong content strategy is very important as it will decide your position on SERP. Too many repetitions will flag your website as spam and too thin content (300-500 words) may signal Google that the quality is not at par.
In order to ensure a higher success rate on SERP, I would recommend you to look at clubbing the keywords in your database to create high quality content rather than writing 300 – 500 word articles on just one keyword.
Think as a reader, if you convey the primary information (main topic that you have optimized your article for) what else can add value to the reader? For example, if we are in the “pet niche” and writing an article on “German shepherds”, what else would the reader be interested in knowing?
It could be the kind of food this breed likes, the kind of activities they like, what is the meaning behind the gestures or the sounds they make, some feature which is unique to this breed etc.
The idea is to share enough of information to ensure most basic questions about German shepherds are covered in one article. This benefits the reader as well as the publisher as now, instead of a 300 word article, you now have a 1000 or more word article on SERP.
More the word count > Higher chance of ranking for multiple keywords > Also Quality Content.
More the word count > More Ad space = More revenue opportunities.
Also ensure you post regularly! If you would like to make money using your niche site then make sure you post at least 2 per week or between 7 – 10 articles per month.
SEO Best Practices – On Page
In order to be successful with your niche website, you need to have some basic knowledge of SEO best practices. Don’t worry, I’m not talking about backlink building, yet!
These basic rules apply to almost any kind of content on the internet.
1. URL slug – Ensure your permalink structure is user and crawler friendly and your main keyword appears in the URL.
2. Title – Ensure your title is within 60 characters and your primary keyword appears in the title.
3. Meta Description – Ensure your meta description is under 160 characters and again your primary keyword appears in there.
4. Sentence Length – Your sentences need to be short and crisp. Try to keep your sentence length within 20 characters for more than 80% of your content.
5. Paragraph Length – People DO NOT pay attention to the information if the paragraphs are very bulky (contains more than 5-6 sentences). Keep your paragraphs under 3 sentences as it’s easier to skim and look for relevant information.
6. Subheadings (H2-H6) – Make sure you have enough of subheadings on your article. A good practice would be to have minimum 4 sub-headings in a article which is 1000 words long.
7. Images and ALT TEXT – Using images helps the reader to take a break from all the reading and spend a few seconds appreciating the images in the articles. These images need to be relevant to the content and must have an “ALT TEXT” added. (Alt text helps search engines identify and rank images using keywords on SERP)
8. Add Internal Links – Internal links help readers to discover new relevant content on your website. Using the same example above for German shepherds, the reader might also be interested in knowing the kind of toys they like, high nutritional or premium foods specifically for this breed, instructions on how to give them a bath etc. Make sure you link to relevant content within your website to improve the content quality.
SEO Best Practice – Off Page SEO
Although there is minimal competition for such keywords but STILL there is “competition”. In order to rank high on SERP you need to have some domain and page authority. You can skip this step depending on your niche and the competition however, if you’d like to start making money quickly then continue reading.
The Domain and Page Authority is a concept developed by Moz which predicts how likely your domain or page is to rank on SERP. Lower the DA, the slower your website ranks and higher the DA, the more quickly it will rank.
Here is a guide on Domain and Page Authority as well as 10 useful tips to improve your DA
Remember NOT TO SPAM on these websites! Feel free to generate multiple backlinks from them but make sure you’re not posting the same URL over and over again (SPAM) on the same website.
This method is sure to work as I have tested it out with my own website on which you’re reading this article. For the first month, I only created content and was stuck at DA 1 (25 articles published). In the second month I started building links from these book marking sites and reached DA of 10 (34 articles published).
It will take sometime (minimum 2 weeks) to see an increase in your DA so make sure as soon as you’re done publishing content you visit these websites and generate your backlinks!
Since we are targeting high volume – low competition long-tail keywords, generating 29 backlinks for a post/page will ensure your quick entry into Google Top 10 (depending on your niche’s competitiveness) as well help help increase your PA which is a part of your DA.
The more Page Authority you collate, automatically your Domain Authority also receives a push.
PS – Guest Posting is another excellent way to generate some high quality backlinks and traffic but it is a time consuming process.
SEO Best Practice – Technical SEO
Most of the niche websites are built on WordPress. There is a very good chance that your website too is built on WordPress or are planning to build your niche website on WordPress. Here are a few good practices that can help you optimize your website for search engines, specifically optimizing your crawl budget.
A crawl budget is the frequency at which search engine bots crawl your website. The 2 main purpose of this activity is to discover new content on your website and refresh the older content. However, a bot such as Googlebot will NOT crawl your entire website every time.
This is to ensure that they don’t overload your server with requests which generally results in a 5XX error. To know your crawl budget go to Google Search Console > Settings > Crawl Stats
The report shows the number of times the crawler sent crawl requests over a period of 90 days. Simply divide the total crawl requests by 90 and that number is your average daily crawl budget.
Here is when it becomes a challenge:
- Your website has too many 404 pages
- You have too many plugins
- Auto-generated shortlinks (WordPress)
- Auto-generated Really Simple Discovery (WordPress)
- Auto-generated REST API (WordPress)
- Auto-generated oEmbed Links (WordPress)
- Ping back HTTP Header (WordPress)
- Auto-generated FEED URLs (WordPress)
By default WordPress will enable features on your website which maybe unnecessary for you. Since WordPress is an open source platform, it auto enables several features on your website which could be of use to you (makes an assumption).
By identifying such features you can start disabling them so that the crawl budget is well utilized. I personally use Yoast SEO Premium where I get the option to simply disable such unnecessary features for my blog website and ensure that the crawl requests aren’t getting wasted.
Minimize Plugins
Plugins come with their own set of rules and end up generating more URLs on your website. Such URLs are not visible on the front-end however they are created at the back-end which the Googlebot crawls. This eats up your crawl budget.
By default every plugin causes an addition directory in your root domain and those files also gets crawled, very frequently! Hence, instead of using several plugins to work on specific aspects such as “Reduce CSS, Minify HTML, Optimize Images etc”, it’s good practice to spend sometime and identify one plugin which is capable of all of the above.
Generally such plugins will come at a cost (Premium versions) of about $30 – $50 per month. I would highly recommend you to go for such plugins as it improves your performance which can be accessed from a single dashboard and ensures that the crawl budget isn’t severely impacted.
You can also use Ezoic Leap to speed up your website without having to rely on a plugin.
Reduce 404 Pages
Googlebot LOVES 404 pages! In fact these are the most favorite pages to crawl every single day!
404 pages are dead pages on your website which either were deleted or you missed to re-direct them when you changed something on your website. If you missed to 301 re-direct them to the new content source, you should do it right now!
However, if you have deleted those pages, then, Google will keep crawling such pages even though they no longer exist on your domain. This is because a cached copy still exists in Google’s database and they will keep crawling such pages.
The issue arises when Google crawls a 404 page and finds no other links to crawl. This is an absolute waste of your crawl budget. It’s like the bot enters the page and finds all doors closed so it exits out the same door it entered.
Here are the two ways to avoid such situations:
- Either re-direct the 404 pages to live (and relevant) pages on your domain, or
- Deploy a custom 404 pages with links to other pieces of content on your domain.
The idea is to either guide the crawler to the correct page (re-direct) or ensure there are several other doors open for it to crawl (deploying a custom 404 page with live links)
Monetizing your niche website
We’re finally at the part that you’re most interested in so let’s get started. There are 2 major ways a niche website generates revenue. Ads and Affiliate! Here is how you can get started.
Sign up as a publisher on an Ads Network
The most common ads network which you have heard is surely Google Adsense, however, it isn’t the most popular one in the niche site community. Majority of the niche sites are integrated with Ezoic, Mediavine and AdThrive.
These 3 are the MOST POPULAR ad networks in the niche community simply because they pay a lot better than Adsense!
As a beginner you should work towards getting integrated with Google Adsense since the rest of these mentioned ad networks have specific requirements usually between 10K – 50K monthly visitors per month. Recently, Ezoic removed the minimum requirement criteria and now they accept new publishers on their Ezoic Access Now platform.
Publishers switch from Google Adsense to other ad networks to double or tipple their ad revenue. Where Google pays a dollar for x number of visits, these other platforms pay between $2 – $5 for the same number of visits. This is because ad networks like Ezoic, Mediavine and AdThrive have tie ups with premium advertisers who are willing to pay a lot more to get their brands (via advertisement) out in the public.
My recommendation would be to start with Google Adsense and then move to Ezoic. If you are already on Adsense and want to increase your revenue by 2X then switch to EZOIC TODAY!
Sign up on an Affiliate Network
Again depending upon your niche, an affiliate network helps generate more revenue than ads. There are several affiliate networks that you can find online and register as a publisher with them. The process is really simple and when you have affiliate networks such as Amazon Affiliates you can be sure to get accepted rather easily and start marketing their products.
Going back to the example of German Shepherds we can have affiliate links for their food, toys, bath, snacks and more. It get’s easy to push and promote the products when your site has all the relevant information that a visitor is looking for.
All the quality content helps build trust which facilitates affiliate sales. Bundle it up with ads and now you have 2 sources of revenue. Building trust takes time so the ads will help motivating you to produce more quality content (revenue from ads) until you’ve build enough of trust to facilitate sales (revenue from commissions).
The Benefits of Niche Websites
Niche websites offer a number of benefits that can be extremely beneficial for businesses and entrepreneurs. When done correctly, niche websites can provide targeted traffic that is interested in what you have to offer. This can lead to higher conversion rates and more sales. In addition, niche websites can help to build your brand and establish yourself as an expert in your field.
Here are some more specific benefits of niche websites:
1. They Can Help You Target a Specific Audience
Niche websites allow you to target a specific audience with your content. This is because you are catering to a specific group of people who are interested in what you have to say. When you target your content, you are more likely to get the attention of people who are actually interested in what you have to offer.
2. They Can Help You Build Your Expertise
Niche websites can also help you build your expertise in a certain area. When you focus on a specific topic, you become known as an expert on that topic. This can help you attract more clients and customers who are looking for someone with your level of expertise.
3. They Can Help You Generate More Leads
Niche websites can also be used to generate more leads for your business. By providing valuable content that helps solve problems or answer questions, you can encourage people to sign up for your email list or contact you for more information.
4. They Can Help You Increase Your Sales
Finally, niche websites can also help you increase your sales. When you have a website that is focused on a specific product or service, you are more likely to make sales than if you were to promote a variety of products on your site.
Overall, niche websites can be a great way to grow your business and attract more customers. If you are thinking about starting a niche website, consider the benefits above and how they can help you achieve your business goals.
Niche websites are a great way to build a sustainable online business. By catering to a specific audience and providing them with high-quality content, you can build a loyal following that will support your business for years to come (influencer). If you’re thinking of starting a niche website, be sure to do your research first and choose a niche that you’re passionate about. With the right niche, you can build a successful website that will help you achieve your long-term business goals.
