Can you build a niche website which makes money? Niche websites are built with the purpose of ranking them to get free traffic from the search engines. If you’re successful, you can have free traffic from Google, Bing and the other search engines. If you can turn this traffic into sales, you’ve built a website which can earn income passively. This is quite an achievement but since there’s so much competition on the search engines for content, it can be also quite a challenge.
To build a niche website from scratch, start with keyword research and by defining your “perfect” customer or customer avatar. If you’re an affiliate marketer this will depend on your product and topic. It’s so important to do this because if you don’t give some thought to it before building your niche site, you can waste a huge amount of time. Since it can take months or even years to get a niche website working, you need to lay the foundations first before you build. A niche website can get traction quite quickly too, but it’s still worth doing the planning to ensure you’re building it in the right way.
Build A Niche Website – Why Customer Avatar Is So Important
If the purpose of your website is to make money, you need to make sure the traffic you will ultimately attract is going to be interested in your product or service. If you attract traffic that doesn’t buy, you will have wasted a lot of time! Of course the product or service is pretty important too. As an affiliate you need to choose products which sell well and offer loads of value. Even with a tonne of traffic, you can’t guarantee a sale. But this is especially true if you haven’t chosen a good product to sell on your site, or attracted the right audience. See also best affiliate products to sell.
Your customer avatar is your “perfect” customer. They are interested in your product/service. When you can connect products to customers through your niche website, you’ll know you have succeeded in attracting the right audience for your particular product/service.
Your main focus for a niche website initially is defining your target audience and choosing a good keyword which offers monthly traffic and low search engine competition.
Build A Niche Website: Warning
When I first discovered niche websites I built many of them and rushed to throw them all up! One particular site I built was about mushroom harvesting. I chose this particular keyword because it had low SEO difficulty, so I could easily rank the site, and monthly search traffic. Unfortunately the site was a failure and although I got a top ranking for my main keyword, I didn’t make sales and the site eventually dropped off the listings. I gave up on it and shut it down. The two main reasons my site didn’t work were:
- I chose a topic I didn’t care about
- The search traffic didn’t convert into sales – I didn’t investigate monetising the site until afterwards
I didn’t lay the groundwork for this site and so it was a failure. It taught me a couple of valuable lessons:
- Start with your product (or service)- I didn’t have a viable affiliate product to sell and in fact the site was difficult to monetise (not many affiliate products in this niche)
- Choose a topic you are passionate about – I lost interest in the site after 6 months of writing about mushrooms! (Something I knew nothing about beforehand and which took a huge amount of effort and time).
Build A Niche Website: Keyword Research
Once you have defined your target audience and chosen your product, you will need to look at Google’s keyword planner for keywords. Start with your “seed” keyword which is most appropriate for your business. In the case of this website, it was “affiliate marketing”.
As you look through the search results, you can choose a good keyword which meets the following criteria:
- Attracts the type of people who might be interested in your product
- Is 3 or more words long – see why long tail keywords are important
- Has lower competition on Google search results pages than most
- Is a topic you can build on/ are interested or passionate about
For this website, for example, I chose the keywords “affiliate marketing mentors“
As you can see, the search results using Google’s keyword planner first brings up the most competitive keywords which get the most traffic. However, your chances of attaining a top listing for these kinds of keywords are incredibly small.
Longer Tail Keywords Are Easier To Rank For
So instead of looking at the shorter tail keywords which get the most traffic, look for the longer tail ones which have lower search volume. Do this by clicking on the Avg. monthly searches tab in the right hand column (image above). You can then scroll through the results until you find a suitable keyword for your niche website.
Here’s an example of a search term I’ve found which might be suitable for a niche website: “youtube affiliate marketing for beginners”.
Once you have found a suitable keyword for your niche site, head over to Google and type it in to the search bar. Do a normal search and a “phrase match” search (in quotes) for your term. You should find a number which correlates to the amount of competing websites for that particular term.
This can give you an idea about the relative difficulty of ranking your niche site on Google. You can also look for the top listed websites which is also an indicator of how difficult it might be to rank your site.
Buy Your Domain Name
Once you find a good keyword match you can head over to namecheap.com and see if you can purchase a domain name for your chosen phrase. Ideally, you’ll have all your keywords within the domain name and a .com.
If you’re a locally based business though, choose a domain name which will have the most authority in your particular country. For example, for me, a .co.uk would be better for a locally based business because I’m in the UK. But for an affiliate site, choose a .com because it has the most authority worldwide.
In this example, the keyword domain is free and you could build a site around this particular keyword. However, it’s a bit of a mouthful so it might not be the best domain name for your site, but it’s only an example! When I looked at purchasing “affiliatemarketingmentors.com” it was already gone. So I tagged the “online” onto the end so I could purchase a domain which contained my keywords in it.
Host Your Site & Setup
I use Hostgator to host my websites and it offers a simple quick install process very cheaply for website owners. You can get a basic website hosting package for less than $10 a month with Hostgator. Since there’s a tonne of information available on YouTube about setting up a website using Hostgator I won’t cover this here. Once you’re ready with your WordPress website, there’s lots more to cover. Namely, building your site so that it will eventually rank on Google (hopefully).
Once you’re inside your WordPress dashboard on your new niche website, set up your settings so that you use your main keyword in your site title like this:
Setup your permalink structure so your post title is part of the url like so:
You can also get a number of plugins which will help you with your SEO – search engine optimisation. Here’s an article explaining some of the best free blog plugins for WordPress.
One of the best ones is Yoast SEO which will help you to write search engine friendly articles on your niche site.
Blogging – Write Content On Your Site
The next step is to build content on your site. Remember all those keywords you looked through for building your site initially? They are the keywords you can use to attract your customer avatar to your site through the search engines. Make a habit of building content on your new niche website on a regular basis.
You can find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty in the same way you built your niche website. Then write content for those particular keywords.
Although blogging is a slow process, having built a niche site around a low competition keyword should give you a bit of a head start. Ideally choose a good keyword from which to base your content around for your site. Having a congruent theme throughout your site should give you more authority in your niche than if you were to jump from one topic to another.
Remember, it takes time for Google to recognise your site, so don’t be discouraged if your site doesn’t appear immediately. Look at Bing, Duckduckgo and Yahoo at first because they will rank your niche site sooner. It can take a few months for Google to give you a ranking.
See also niche blogging for profit.