create niche websites Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Ten years ago you could create niche websites with only a few pages and they would still rank highly on Google. Today it’s a lot more difficult to do this. There’s a lot more competition today and there’s more than 600 million blogs out there in pretty much every topic. Google won’t rank a site immediately either and will often place new websites in what’s known as Google’s sandbox. This is a waiting area for new sites and although Google doesn’t officially recognise the “sandbox”, it exists.

So even if you threw up a website in the hope of ranking it on Google, it might be several months before it ranks. But you can still create niche websites which rank on Google, and the other search engines. It just takes a little more work today than it used to.

Google has updated its algorithms too and consistently does this to give the end user the best experience. Nobody wants to find scrawny, useless, spammy affiliate websites which offer zero value at the top of their search! But if you can keep value in mind when creating niche websites, and focus on quality, they can and do still rank and bring in traffic for free. You can then monetise that traffic and turn it into cash! Here’s how it’s done..

Create Niche Websites: Research

Before you go about creating a niche website it pays to do your research first. Three or five page websites aren’t what they used to be so you’ll need to do better. You’ll need to create some content on your site too to give it the best chance of attaining a ranking for the main keywords you’re targeting.

You can also start with the affiliate product you are promoting, if you choose the affiliate route. You can also monetise with Google Adsense or another advertiser which offers placement ads. See affiliate marketing vs Google Adsense for more on this.

Head over the Google’s keyword planner and type in your main “seed” keyword. That’s a keyword in your niche which you have an interest in or would like to build a site around. You’ll find a tonne of long tail keywords which relate to your main seed keyword. You can then check with Google to find one which is suitable to build a site around. Ideally you want a keyword which gets a good number of monthly visitors and which has little competition in the search results on Google.

Before deciding on a particular keyword to build a site around ask yourself these questions:

Is the keyword a “buyer” keyword? That is, does it have the potential to bring in targeted visitors? (Think about the intent behind a search for this keyword).
Does the keyword have enough search traffic?
Is it too competitive on a simple Google search?
What are your chances of ranking for it?

See also this article for more info on this.

Create Niche Websites: Buy A Domain Name

Next you can head over to namecheap.com and purchase a domain name which contains your selected keywords in it. If the .com isn’t available find one which is. You can add words to the end to make sure you get your main keywords within the domain name. As an example, this website has been built on the keywords affiliate marketing mentors. The domain name affiliatemarketingmentors.com was taken, so I added “online” to the end to make it work! This site now (at the time of writing) ranks for the keyword “affiliate marketing mentors”.

Although “affiliate marketing mentors” only gets a few hundred views every month, it’s enough to gain some free traffic from the search engines. With some extra work blogging, you can increase this number over time.

Build Your Site

Once you have bought your domain name you can build your site. Make sure you install an SEO plugin to help you create content on it. I use Yoast SEO. See also best free Blog plugins for WordPress.

Once your site is up you can use the keyword planner to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty which match your main keywords. Then write content for each of the keywords which are suitable for your site. This should give you lots of content ideas and this will help you build authority with Google.

Write at least 10 articles on your site and ideally create a few backlinks too. Within a few months you should see your site showing up on the search engines. Google typically will make you wait longer than the rest but if you show up on Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo etc then you know you’ve cracked it.

The more content you create and of course promote, the better your site will do. Once you have built a niche website once, you should have learned from the experience. You can then go on and build several more.

What To Expect

You can’t expect too much from a niche website straight away and keep in mind that you’ll need to create a lot of content in order to get more traffic. But having your site ranking for its main keywords can give you a huge boost in the beginning. If your main keyword gets 200 monthly hits, and you manage to rank at the top or second on Google, you won’t get all this traffic.

The searches you will get on Google will be divided between the top several sites and any paid results which rank at the top. So for 200 monthly hits for a particular keyword you can only expect about a quarter of this to even find you, assuming you rank at the top. Other hots are shared between the top most highly ranking sites typically. So 200 divided by 4 = 50. 50 hits a month is less than 2 hits a day! So the more search traffic your keyword gets the more traffic you’ll get if you rank your site.

Of course more traffic typically means more competition too so chances are good that with a more competitive keyword you’ll have more work to do to rank your site.

Summary

To create niche websites and get free traffic takes some time and dedication. But with many of these sites you can pick up some fairly easy traffic without paying for advertising. However, your domains all cost money and renewing them costs money too.

So keep in mind that as your niche website collection grows, you’ll be servicing the domain names when they come up for renewal. So it’s worth making them count by doing your research before you start building them. It’s tough when a site doesn’t rank, particularly if you’ve put a lot of effort into it. Don’t despair, just take the knowledge you have learned from one niche site and make the next one even better!

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.