Some 8 years ago, I heard the saying “the riches are in the niches” for the first time.
Not knowing what exactly that meant, I went about building my first ever website (with the hopes of making money with it) and failed miserably.
It was only after realizing the power of niching-down that I’ve started making money online and since then, I’ve built multiple affiliate niche websites that make me money every single day.
Today, I am going to show you how to do what I do, better yet – I’m going to show you how to build a niche website, and how to use it to make money online.
If that’s what you’re here to learn, be sure to read this entire guide as the following ~8 minutes might save you 8 years of failures.
Table of Contents
What Is A “Niche” Website?
Building a niche website means building your own website around a very specific topic for a very specific audience.
One niche-site I’ve been built (and recently sold) is a simple website doing where I publish informative guides regarding buying a portable air conditioner.
Sounds weird right? That’s because it is! This is what makes “niche websites” so incredibly valuable, the lack of competition because they are such obscure topics.
How To Build Your First Niche Website
Ok, let’s get into the meat of this guide and start talking about how to actually get started with a niche website.
It starts with…
Picking Your Niche
Niche sites are sites created with the sole purpose of selling specific products by providing information on a topic related to the product(s) you intend to sell.
But how do you know which niche/topic you should be in?
Start by asking yourself these 4 questions:
- What do you like?
- What are you currently learning about?
- What topic do you know more about than the average person
- Is there a product that can be tied to this niche?
Any topic that comes to mind by answering the first 3 questions + a “yes” for the fourth one is the perfect niche for you.
Just to give you an example, let’s say, you’re currently building a garden shed for your home.
A website discussing the different types of garden sheds, what you need, what permits are required, etc is exactly the “niche” website you should create.
Here are some examples of niche sites you can build:
- Smart Home Appliances
- Ice makers
- Baby Monitors
- Lawn Mower Reviews
- Outdoor Heating
These are just examples I came up with literally while writing this post but I can tell you already that these products would not be cheap (you always want to go for $100+) and also, it’s highly likely people will be looking for information about online.
Now while I believe every niche can make money, there are some which would be harder than others…
Here are some bad examples of Amazon niche websites (& why):
- Books
- Keychains
- Smartphone covers
- Kitchen novelty items
While these items do sell well online, these are not things that people would be looking for information on before they buy. Also, they are not that expensive meaning even if you do manage to get an audience for them, you won’t be earning much.
You are in the business of information (not products) so always look for items people are likely to look for information about online before they buy.
Building Your Niche Website
A niche website requires you, of course, to have a website. Yes, a website is a must.
Next, you are going to need a domain name and hosting. I get free hosting through my membership in Wealthy Affiliate, but you can get a hosting package from BlueHost for about $5 a month.
- Don’t get too fancy with your website (use WordPress)
- Black text on a white background and a sidebar is all you really need.
- Don’t add too many bells and whistles to your site, at least not when starting out.
You are going to want to keep the site as clean looking as it can be as any fancy stuff happening will take away the attention off the content, which is where you want your user-focused.
How To Get Traffic Your New Niche Website
Once you have your niche website set up and ready to go, you are going to need to get traffic to it.
Taking the time to learn and then building out a website will all be in vain if you do not learn how to drive targetted traffic to your content. Note the emphasis on “targetted”
With a niche site like I had (portable air conditioners reviews), I can safely assume that nobody is looking at portable air conditioners reviews just for fun. I may not convert all of them into buying, but I’ll bet my last dollar that whoever is reading is seriously considering buying one.
That is where SEO comes into play as with a bit of assistance from my favorite keyword tool, I can immediately figure out what information people are looking. The tool I am talking about is AnswerThePublic.com.
This site is a goldmine and a well-guarded secret by many doing Amazon niche websites as it works best the fewer people use it (and take ideas from it). Here’s how it works…
By simply entering the niche I am considering, it gives me all that I need to know as to what people are “asking” on Google:
Note there’s no “competition metrics” or “keyword search volume” (monthly traffic), but I really don’t care about that and you shouldn’t either.
Your job now, (the hard part), is to write content (or hire a writer) to answer some of the questions the tool suggests.
This is how you will get traffic.
The posts you will write will give you the fuel you need to move towards the second part of the process, and that is creating reviews and comparison posts.
How To Sell Niche Products on Your Website
To make money, I like to focus on review posts. These are typically the blog posts that we’ll make you the most money. Here are the two types of review posts to help give you some ideas on what to write about.
Product reviews:
You need to spend time reviewing the products you will be promoting.
Do you have to buy them? Not really, no affiliate marketer is buying up every portable AC and doing reviews on them first hand.
I’ll leave it up to you to decide how you can provide detailed reviews of the products you want to promote, but whatever you do, make sure you do publish product reviews.
How to use reviews to make money:
Let’s say you have a post explaining “the quietest portable air conditioners on the market“.
In that post, you will be mentioning different models and that is where having a review of each of those models would come in handy.
When talking about high ticket items, I recommend you link to your review instead of directly to Amazon as people that are going to spend $600 on an AC might require some further convincing first.
The other way you can monetize it by doing product comparisons.
Comparison reviews:
“Portable AC X vs Portable AC Y: Which Is More Eco-Friendly?”
Anybody reading that post has surely done their research already. They know which one they like and they have probably made their decision.
Your job now is to confirm to them that they are making the right choice and that their hard-earned money would be spent well.
How To Convince Readers To Buy
Now that you have a steady audience ready to pull out their credit cards, you need to figure out how to get them to make that final decision to purchase and earn your commissions.
It would be advisable to start learning about copywriting here.
I have recently discovered this whole phenomenon and I have been including tips I learned in my reviews with great results.
One way I found that seems to be working well is addressing all the reasons a person may not want to buy.
With my portable AC website, I try to answer everything in my reviews:
- How long does it take to ship?
- How to contact support?
- How to set it up?
- Does it require installation?
- How much power does it use?
- How much would it cost to run?
- and every other thing I can think of.
As we said, the person reading your content is with his card in hands ready to make the purchase, don’t lose them because they go someplace else to look for that one answer.
How Much Money Can You Make With A Niche Website?
This is a tough question to answer because there are a lot of variables that go into answering this.
For example. I don’t know what niche you will pick, I don’t know how much the products are and I don’t know how well you’ll be able to execute the content strategies mentioned above.
Just for the sake of it, let’s just take an example of what I think you can expect from niche websites getting a modest 500 people a day in traffic.
With a conversion rate of 1% – which is low (more like 2-3% on average) you are looking at 5 sales a day.
A $100 product (which is the minimum you should go for when starting a niche site) with a 6% commission rate (let’s say you’re using Amazon) will net you $6 per purchase.
500 people, $100 product, 1%, conversion rate, $6 off each sale, $30 a day, $900 dollars a month.
Again, basic example but probably the closest estimation to the minimum you can expect.
A $900 per month income, (at its most conservative estimation) is a very realistic number to hit with an affiliate niche website.
Tweak at it some more for conversions, get more traffic, learn better sales techniques and that $900 per month site can easily become a $2,000 per month site.
How Long Before You Start Making Money?
The above process may sound a bit complicated and complex, but what you are looking at is around 1 month’s worth of work to set up the complete site.
Around the 6 month line, you will start seeing some big spikes in traffic and you will start making money, but your “work” with the site would have been completed a long time ago.
Are you willing to do 30-days worth of work, wait 6 months, then earn a passive income for many more months to come?
4 Tips To Make Make A Niche Website Successful
While I can guarantee that the above process works, I can not guarantee that you will be successful with your niche sites. However, I can share with you a few parting tips in order to help you achieve your mission:
✔️ Pick A Niche That Makes Money
As I said, you should only promote products that are at the very least $100 each. If you’re going to use the Amazon affiliate program, the commission rate is typically not that high so anything under $100 won’t be worth going after.
You might still earn money, but why would you go that route if there are literally millions of products on there that can earn you a bigger paycheck?
Remember; selling a $1000 product is harder than selling a $10 product, but it’s not 100X harder.
✔️ Give It Time
Niche sites can get you ranked, indexed, and receiving customers faster than building an authority website can, but when I say fast, I do mean months not minutes.
As a general rule, I do not expect to see any results worth getting excited with my niche sites till it’s at least 6 months in. However, as explained above, once you set it upright, it would not take much work to keep it running after the initial set up.
All that is really required once you’ve established your audience and site content is to just keep dripping content on there twice a month or so. At that level, you can afford to pay a content writer for the job and you just collect commissions.
✔️ Learn Copywriting To Better Convert Your Traffic
As I mentioned, I’m currently learning this myself and I am currently going into my top posts and testing a few different sales strategies in order to convert more of my traffic.
Learn about sales and what makes a reader buy. Your job is to simply convince the reader they are making the right choice (since they’re already looking to buy).
Just learning that could mean making money in a month vs making money in a year. Powerful stuff.
Continue Learning About Niche Websites With Project 24
If you’d like to see how I built up a full-time online business, you can see my tell-all guide about it here.
On the other hand, if you’re ready to get started straight away and you want to learn from (what I believe is) one of the best courses available about building money-making websites, check out Income School’s Project 24 course.
It’s a course that’ll show you how to get started today and have a full-time-money earning website in – you guessed it – 24 months.
That’s all from my end today. I hope this guide has shown you all you need to know to get started with your own niche website.
I’ll leave you to it.
