Building a Successful Niche Website

If you are interested in building a niche website that ranks in Google and makes some money along the way, this guide is going to be a huge help to you. I’ve been building niche websites for years and although this guide is short, it’s packed with critical information. Be sure to read the articles that are linked to in this guide for more advanced research.

First, let’s quickly break down the essentials you have to have when creating your own income-generating website.

A Domain Name

This is the url of your site and how people will find you. I recommend thinking of a professional sounding, branded domain name, rather than one full of keywords. For instance, a site about drones would sound higher quality if named something like www.dronecentral.com as opposed to www.best-drones-for-the-money-2016.com – I use BigRock to buy domains.

Hosting

After you buy a domain name, you have to connect it to a host to a host in order to launch your site. There are tons of hosting providers out there, but I personally suggest starting with BlueHost because it’s affordable and has been very reliable for many of my sites.

Site Design

I run all of my sites on WordPress, which can be installed with one click when you use BlueHost. To get a nice looking, responsive website design I use a professional theme because you can have a professional-looking site in just minutes. While there are some nice free themes out there, I’ve become a big fan of Mekado Themes and use them for many sites. Once you’ve bought a domain name, set it up on a host, and installed a theme you are ready to start adding content to your site. Before you do that, I highly recommend taking a step back and detailing your content strategy to get traffic and make money (that’s the whole point, right?)

Focus on Long Tail Keywords

If you’ve been reading digitalBE for a while, it’s no secret that I’ve always been a fan of targeting low competition keywords because they are easier to rank especially for newer sites if you are writing about keywords that are too competitive you’ll have a very hard time ranking well in Google. I recommend you look for keywords that:

1. Are 3 or more words long
2. Have low authority types of sites ranking on the first page of Google
3. Use modifiers like: best, vs., review, under $100 (or other price), etc
4. Have a KC score under 30 (according to Long Tail Pro Calculation).

Write For Humans First

Although you want your site to be loved by the robots over at Google, it’s more important for your site’s content to be loved by your actual human audience. Google tracks how long people stay on your site, and if people stay for a long time Google tends to move your site up in the rankings. To make my site content more visually appealing, I like to use the Thrive Content Builder.

Build Real Links

Getting high-quality links pointing to your site is another thing Google loves to see! Rather than taking any shortcuts, I like to follow a few simple link building strategies for my sites. These strategies include email outreach to other sites in my niche, creating and sharing infographics, as well as broken link building.

Monetize Your Site

It’s going to take several months before you start getting any real organic traffic, so don’t worry about making money too soon. Once you do get some traffic rolling in, a couple of the easiest ways to monetize a niche site are Google Adsense and Amazon Associates. I tend to make bigger earnings with Amazon, and using the Easy Azon plug-in makes adding your affiliate links much easier.

Build an Email list

Collecting email addresses is a fantastic way to stay in touch with your readers and really maximize the amount of money you make. One of my favorite ways to get people to give me their email address is to create some valuable free download and then promote that free resource on my site. This is often called a “lead magnet.” The important thing is to make sure you’re using pop-ups, in content ads, and more to draw attention to your offer.

At a high level, if you start by targeting the low hanging fruit known as long tail keywords and then deliver excellent content – you’ll be on the fast track to success. Building links to your site will help the traffic come even faster, at which point you can start monetizing that traffic and working on building an email list that you can follow-up and get them coming back to your site again and again.