So You Want to Build a Niche Web Site?

Written by Zac Johnson
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Have you ever wanted to build your own mini niche web site? If you haven’t yet, I’m sure you’ve at least heard of them. Niche web sites are every where and there is virtually an endless supply of topics and search terms you can build sites around.

This mini guide will serve as your blue print for creating mini niche web sites and how you can start making money in literally just a few days after creating your site. During the process, you may find yourself building up a little empire of mini sites that can each earn you anywhere from $300 to $1000 a year while you continue to build and scale out more sites!

What is a Mini Niche Web Site?

The best way to explain a niche web site, is to think about a very specific topic. Let’s use basketball for example, and break it down a few levels. BASKETBALL > PLAYING BASKETBALL > JUMP TRAINING. First we started with “basketball”, which covers everything possible about basketball, then we went to “playing basketball”, then one level even deeper, where we stop at “jump training”. This is a perfect example of a mini niche.

You might not think there is a huge market for “jump training”, but everyone who is searching for that topic is very dedicated to purchasing or finding more information. This same breakdown process can be used to find any niche market, just keep breaking down your original topic. Your web site or blog would focus just on jump training for basketball, or your desired niche of choice, just make sure it’s extremely targeted to only that one topic.

Still skeptical about mini niches or even using “jump training” as a real profitable niche? Just read my post on how Jacob is earning over $75,000 in this same niche!

Finding a Niche that Makes Money

Now that we found our “jump training” nice, let’s make sure it’s a good choice for making some money. I like to head over to Google’s Keyword Tool when searching new niche markets and just doing quick keyword searches. Here are the search results for the breakdown of topics we discussed above.

BASKETBALL – 16.6M monthly searches – 1.07 average cpc
PLAYING BASKETBALL – 33k monthly searches – .54 average cpc
JUMP TRAINING – 18k monthly searches – .82 average cpc

From the stats above we can see “basketball” gets a ridiculous amount of searches per month and wouldn’t be a good topic to go after since it’s so broad. Search “basketball” on Google and you will see Amazon.com and Ask.com as the advertisers, so you have little chance if any to compete for this keyword, while trying to make a profit. Next we have “playing basketball”, which has a lot less searches, but enough to keep it interesting… but still too broad for our niche site. Our final breakdown of “jump training” is perfect with 18k searches per month, and also has a decent per click average of .82  from advertisers bidding on the term.

When searching for each of the terms on Google, you will see different advertisers appear for each. “Basketball” and “playing basketball” were pretty generic, but when you look at the advertisers for “jump training”, it’s gets pretty cool! Nearly all of these advertisers have their own products to sell, but also an affiliate program for you to push their offers. Bingo! We found a solid niche to make money with.

Head over to ClickBank and type in “jump training” as your search request and you will find a great deal of ebooks and guides you could promote through your jump training niche site. The same holds true for many other niches and ClickBank has made a lot of niche site owners a lot of money!

What to Put on Your Mini Niche Web Site

As mentioned earlier, you should keep you niche web site completely focused on your topic… and nothing else. Excellent ways to find content for your site is to head over to Google Keyword Tool again, place “jump training” in the search box and check off “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms”. You know have a great selection of topics to write about, that other people are searching… while all are still completely focused on your topic. You can also post videos from YouTube, product reviews, interviews and news stories.

We already know that jump training is a great niche topic, but looking at the web sites of the products you may be promoting, can actually help you create your niche sites. Are they offering a free ebook / download for your email subscribe? What type of jump training are they offering? Do they have real customer feedback? Use all of this information to create the best content for your niche sites and visitors.

Getting Traffic to a Niche Web Site

Whether you are building your niche web site for search rankings or paid traffic, it’s all about finding relevant traffic. If you can buy an exact keyword match domain for your mini site, you are already ahead of the game for SEO. If you don’t have the money to spend on advertising, create a mini niche site with some nice content, submit a few articles to directories for link building, spend a few bucks on getting social networking bookmarks and you could see your site ranked very high for your niche keyword in no time.

Article marketing has been very effective for mini niche web sites, which are tightly focused on trying to get indexed in Google and other engines for one or two specific keywords. As an author on an article submission web site, you would submit content and receive a high quality and high page rank backlink to your site, thus helping with your seo ranking. Be sure to read my Article Marketing blog post for how to build free backlinks and which article directories you should be using.

Another alternative is paid advertising. Facebook Ads allows you to target any demographic you can think of. Imagine how many people on Facebook have “play basketball” as an interest, which is completely relevant to “jump training”.  Also see my Facebook Ads Design Tips & Creating Your First FaceBook Ads Campaign posts for more help and information on creating killer Facebook campaigns. You also have search engine marketing through PPC, which allows you to get ads for your web site right in the face of people searching for your niche keywords.

Free search traffic or paid traffic, work the numbers and improve your conversions to see what works best for you. You can even split test by creating a mini niche site for each type of traffic source.

Making Money with a Niche Web Site

Most niche web sites are created to drive conversions, which may be in the form of mailing lists, affiliate programs / leads, pushing your own product or even Google Adsense. It’s up to you to decide how you would like to monetize your niche web site. While Google Adsense has been a big winner in the niche area, you may be missing out on a lot of potential revenue by pushing an individual product or service.

Going back to our example of “jump training”, if you create a mini blog updated with new content on the best ways to strengthen your leg muscles to jump higher, then at the bottom of each post, recommend that your reader buys “XYZ Jump Training Manual”, and you would earn a commission on each sale. If your niche web site ends up making you a lot of money off affiliate sales, you should think about creating your own product so you earn 100% of all sales.

Work the Numbers, Get Better & Replicate

Niche web sites are all about finding hidden gems and what works. It can also be quite addicting to play around with making mini niche web sites, which you could find earning you a few dollars a day here and there. It’s not hard to buy a domain, outsource your content and link building… then have a small web site you forget about that makes $1,000+ per year. It’s all about continually adding content over time and building new incoming backlinks to the site. Remember… you mini sites will always be working for you. Ten mini sites earning $1 per day will bring in over $3600 a year.

So You Want to Build a Niche Web Site?… Go for it! Pick up a few domain names, create some content and do some link building. Take note of what’s working and what isn’t. Make changes with your positive and negative results along the way, then replicate with new mini sites and see where you can get!

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40 Replies to “So You Want to Build a Niche Web Site?”

  1. Great stuff Zac! 😉 I like your blog posts i keep reading each one of them!

    I struggle to find these small niches, do you have any type of formula you follow to find these hidden gems?

    And what type of promotion do you do? Build your own product or promote affiliate stuff?

  3. Good post Zac! There is definitely money to be made building niche sites. The jump training niche is a nice example. It can be tricky to find a good niche (I think a lot of people pick ones that are either too big or too small) but if you can find the right ones, they can be great income drivers. I definitely know some publishers who are similar to dotCOMreport – building a couple sites a month and generating some solid recurring revenue.
    My recent post Happy New Year!

    1. I've created a ton of mini sites and half will phase out, while others will make money through out the coming years. It's all about testing and just growing out new sites and forgetting about the ones that don't perform. You can also hire an outsource team to manage and link build for your sites.
      My recent post So You Want to Build a Niche Web Site

  7. Making an empire on niche websites maybe hard at first but if we find that our first mini site really brings money to the table it will become addicted. Until then, we will be eager to build more and replicate what works for us.

  8. There's a ton of money to be made in building out niche sites. I have a few niche sites earning in excess 100k each a month. Have you ever used our processing solution that handles high risk sites / and includes a customer support team?

    There's a lot more money in running your own offer vs. someone elses.
    My recent post Persuasion- Science or Art

  9. I think niche sites are a great idea! There is so much on the internet these days that it's really getting to the point that sites have to be a bit more specific to edge out the competition. Users are also wising up the idea that just typing in a vague category like "basketball" is going to give them an overwhelming amount of sites to sift through.

  10. To another point: website building is addicting, especially if you've found a formula that works. It's surprising how quick you get at it after you've gotten into a rhythm!

  11. You mention link building as a way to get your niche site some traffic, I definitely agree! Keywords work really well for essentially point a huge area at your page. Power to keywords!

  12. I have a question for you. How do you treat spinned articles? Do they have great value if outsourced well?
    My recent post Online Zino 42 – WordPress дизайн

  13. Do these mini niche sites have to rank on the 1st page of search to make money? Seems to me that if they did, they would make more than $300-$1,000 per year.

  14. Wow, great detailed information Zac. I must admit I've tried in the past to build niche websites and failed miserably. But after reading your post, I'm leaning toward trying my hand at it again.

    I really appreciate you taking the time and effort you did sharing everything we need to do. I'm going to have to bookmark your site and come back and reread this when I get ready to dive back in. Thanks for that boost my friend.

    Adrienne
    My recent post I’ve Been SO Bad!!!

  15. Hey this was a great article. A lot of times bloggers just write about their successes, or are too general, you actually break it down here with analytics and such. Thanks a lot I appreciated the read!
    My recent post Highest Brea CD Rates – December 27- 2010

  16. I think I have to try this as well. Wouldn´t it be a good idea to use top adwords keywords as domain names, in order to get the best conversions? These keywords are often low traffic (not too difficult) keywords and probably may need only a few extra links.
    My recent post Hatha Yoga – “The Yoga of Vitality”

  18. Yes, I am definitely looking forward to build a niche website as really niche is really a very good way for marketing as it is new and fresh and not more people are aware of it. I liked this very much.

  19. Hello! This is my first comment here so I just wanted to give a quick shout out and tell you I truly enjoy reading through your articles. Can you suggest any other blogs/websites/forums that go over the same topics?
    Thanks a ton!
    Jose nunes
    My recent post Ethical Marketing

  20. Nice! Keep building that empire and imagine where you will be by 2011 new years!
    Thank you for niche

  21. Nice write up I've always wanted a nitch site but always start blogging about random stuff lol
    My recent post Berloque Mini 1911 Gun

  22. Building a topic specific website is a great way to start the niche website because users are targeted. This means that if they search for a specific topic they are more likely to buy your product. The problem with specifics is that the traffic is less compared to broad topics… Just my opinion..

    Mark
    My recent post Pacquiao- ‘No easy fight for me’

  25. Wow, clearly explained about niche websites. I think building niche site is a slow process. When you start 1-3 new sites every month, in next 6 months your presence will go higher & higher !

  26. I guess its about having the time, mini niche websites are a great way of making money from affiliates and adwords but I guess if your like me wanting to make every site look and feel good than you would need a team of web developers to keep on top of things. Great article though will link it to some guys that I know are looking for some ideas in this area.

  27. This is SUCH a good article, cheers Zac! It really breaks down affiliate marketing strategies so it's really easy to grasp. Will definitely be implementing these methods.

  28. Hey Zac,

    Nice summary of the niche marketing process. I have looked in the vertical-jump market myself and several Clickbank merchants have some great video salesletters. High-quality products too.
    My recent post How to build a niche website

  29. Finally, someone who actually teaches something in their posts! I find a lot of marketing sites only make sense to readers who already know the ropes, in which case-what's the point?
    My recent post Seth Davis-Regional Predictions

  32. i'm an newbie…i still learn about how to make a good website..can you give me an advice?..thank's a lot

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