Do you want to know how to make money from a niche website? Here, I will show you the exact steps on how to make money from blogging by working on a niche website or a blog.
I will not reveal the exact niche now, but I promise, I will tell you the exact niche, even will show you the exact niche when either the website crossed 100000 page views or the website earns USD 3000 per month. You will get to know here, how to make money from niche websites.
My target here is to start making some dollars from 6 months onwards and scale to a USD 3000 site in another 15 to 20 months.
Every month, I will update this article, so that you can get what exactly I am doing to grow the blog from zero visits.
I have been writing technical articles kind of tutorials from 2007 onwards but never thought blogging or YouTube has this much scope in the market especially for making money online.
I will also make videos update for this particular niche case site update which you can find on our YouTube Channel. (Subscribe to the channel to get useful & helpful videos on making money online).
Now, let us first understand what a niche website is.
What is a niche website?
If your website is talking about a particular topic or targeting a specific set of audiences, then it is a niche website.
This means, your website contains information for a particular topic or niche.
Let us understand which niche is best for the website through a few examples.
Suppose you want to make a website on Pets, you can think of Pet as a niche. But as a new site owner, it will be really very difficult to grow the website and make money from advertisement or from affiliate marketing. Because you will see a lot of high domain authority sites in the United States of America will be ranking for various keywords in the Pets niche.
Now, let us narrow down the niche a bit more.
Instead of the Pet niche, we can target to a specific niche like Cats, Dogs, Rabbits, Snakes, Hamsters, etc.
Today, if you want to start your first site, then I will suggest you can pick a niche like the above as I said. But we can also go a bit niche down.
Like, instead of starting a website on the Dog niche, we can also pick and write about a particular type of dog breed like Basset Hound, Boston Terrier, Shar Pei, etc.
There are lots of websites in the United States that are in the micro niche and making millions of dollars of money in a year.
So take some time and choose your niche carefully.
Note: A niche website content should always solve problems like it should contain more questions and answers kind of how-to articles. It should never be like a product review site, instead, it should always be an informational website.
After thinking and researching a lot, I have chosen a niche and expect we will get more traffic from the USA.
Read Best blogging course to make money from niche sites
How to monetize a niche website or blog?
This is one of the important research you should do while choosing your niche for your blog. Find out what different ways you can monetize the blog. The niche should have at least 2/3 different monetization options.
There are various monetization methods available that we can use to make money from our niche website:
Google Adsense
One of the popular methods used by bloggers or online entrepreneurs is to make money from blogs or websites. Once your website got some traffic, you can apply for the Google Adsense program and if your site got approved, you can start earning money from your niche website.
Before applying for the Adsense program, make sure to check out the guidelines provided by Google. This is one of the best methods to make money online from your niche website.
If your niche website is getting traffic from the USA, then you can get more RPM and you can earn more money compared to other countries. So your target audience should always be the United States or the United Kingdom.
If your site is not get approved by Google then try to fix the issue or else do not continue with that website. So it is important to read the guidelines.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is another good option to make money from your niche website. Amazon affiliate is one of the popular options which you can use even if your niche website is getting less traffic.
Even if your niche website is getting 5000 page views per month, you can apply for it and start making money from your blog.
There are also other affiliates that you can use in your niche website like ClickBank, CJ (Commission Junction), ShareASale, etc. These affiliate companies pay more that Amazon associates in most of the niches. You can check out an article by Authority Hacker on 16 Best Affiliate Marketing Programs For Beginners.
If you are very much new to affiliate marketing, I would recommend starting with Amazon associates.
There are also individual affiliate programs like Bluehost.
Digital products like courses or ebooks
Another way you can earn money from your niche website is by selling any digital products. Like you can create an online course or even you can sell an ebook from your website.
Suppose you have a website on Gardening then you can create an ebook on how to grow your own vegetable garden and sell it online from your website.
Another example is, Let us see, your niche on how to make money online, then you can create a premium training course and sell it online from your niche website.
Authority Hacker is a website that teaches about SEO, Blogging, Affiliate Marketing, etc. And they have a premium course on the same.
If you have chosen a technical niche like Python, you can easily create a Python training course and sell it online.
In the same way, we can also create a useful PDF, or an ebook, and sell it online.
Providing professional service
This is another option to make money from your niche website. You can provide professional services and make money.
Suppose you are a dog owner and a professional dog trainer, then you can provide dog grooming service to the clients and you can charge for it. Like you can charge more than USD 150 for services like dogs bath, brushes, etc.
Physical product
You can also sell your own physical product and sell it online from your website. Suppose you are having a niche website where your write topics about soil, then you can sell soil online.
You can check out a website on gardening and they sell potting mix, soil, fertilizers, etc online.
This is another great monetization option that we can use in our niche website to make money online.
Sponsor Posts
As a very new website or blogger, you might not get sponsored posts. But this is also a great way of making money online from your niche website. For this, you can partner with various product companies within your niche.
These are basically companies that pay you money to write about their product on your own niche website. Based on your page views you can charge more and earn more money from your niche website.
Suppose you have a website on electric bikes, then you can write reviews about various electric bikes. And in these cases, companies will reach out to you to write about their electric bikes.
Read How to make money from niche websites
What I have planned for?
For my nice website, I have selected two monetization options Google Adsense and Affiliate marketing. And at the beginning, I will use here Amazon affiliate program.
I will not apply for the Google Adsense program unless I will have at least 5000 page views or will not have more than 75 blog posts. This is not a guideline, but I will follow this as you will not have any earnings in the beginning months.
If you are based out in the USA or UK, it is a little easy to get Adsense approval they do not have any policy regarding how old your website should be.
Choose Domain name carefully
This is the address of your website or blog. So choose it carefully. Because this you should not change, it will be your address forever.
While choosing your domain, try to provide a keyword in the domain name.
Like I am trying to provide tips on how to earn money online, so I choose the domain name earnmoneyfaqs.com.
I have used namecheap.com to buy domain names for all my websites. You can also sign up and buy your domain names from Namecheap, as it will be litter cheap compared to others.
Blogger or WordPress or any third-party platform
There are a lot of platforms available where you can host your niche website.
- Blogger
- WordPress
- Wix
- Medium
- Tumblr
- Shopify
- Webflow
- Zyro, etc.
A lot of new bloggers choose Blogger from Google to host their websites. Because it is very easy to start a website using a blogger, you just need a Gmail id and then you can start.
But when your site will grow, it will be difficult to maintain and grow.
The best platform to start with is WordPress. Though they also have a free plan, I will suggest you go for a premium plan. There are a lot of companies providing WordPress hosting.
Let us check out now the details about hosting options.
Which hosting I am using for my niche website?
There are a lot of hosting providers you can choose like:
It is very cheap to start with premium WordPress hosting. As a beginner, if this is your first website or blog, then you can go for Bluehost.
Note: Never go for a free plan, always for a small premium plan.
You can go for a plan as low as USD 2.95 per month.
This is not my first website and I already own a lot of websites, most of my websites are hosted in WPX.
When your website grows a bit more, then you can think of going for the WPX hosting. They have super fast support and that is what I like the most about WPX hosting.
As a beginner, I will not suggest you go for WPX hosting.
So, by this time, we have selected the domain name and hosting options. Next, we will design the website and add a few useful WordPress plugins.
Build your niche website
Let me tell you how I have created a niche website using WordPress. It is a simple lightweight website that I have created with very few plugins.
I have used the Generatepress theme, which is a lightweight theme. Because the website should load fast, as the loading time matters a lot to get appear in the Google search results.
Here my recommendation is to use the Generatepress theme.
I have added a few plugins which are below:
- LuckyWP Table of Contents: This plugin I have used to add the Table of Content (TOC) in all the blog posts automatically. I would recommend using a TOC plugin for your website.
- Insert Amz Images: This plugin I am using to insert amazon affiliate images into your blog post. This is not a recommended plugin at the start, once you get some traffic and sign up for an amazon affiliate then you can use this plugin.
- Simple Author Box: This plugin allows you to display a few lines about the author at the button of each post. This is a useful plugin for your niche website.
- W3 Total Cache: This is a WordPress performance plugin and you can use the free version on your niche website. This will increase the speed and improve the performance of your website.
- Yoast SEO: This is one of the best and most popular WordPress plugins. I have used this plugin on almost all of my websites. This will help you to optimize your blog post based on your target keyword, and also will help you generate the XML sitemaps, that you required while submitting your site google search engine through the Google Search console.
- WPCode – Insert Headers, Footers, and Code Snippets: This plugin will help you to add any script to a header, or footer of your website. If you want to add google analytics code to track how many visitors you are getting, you require this plugin.
By this time, the website setup is ready and we will focus on the contents.
Keyword research I have done for my niche website
Once our site is ready, it is time to select the topics for which we are going to write about. Basically, in the SEO term, we need to choose the right keywords for our blog posts or articles.
Since our site is new and domain authority is zero, we should always target long tail keywords rather than short tail keywords.
Long tail keywords are usually longer in length more than 3 words. And these are usually low search volume as well as less competition.
To give an example:
| Short tail keyword | Long tail keywords |
| Earn Money | earn money from home without investment anything |
So as a new blogger, if you want to write your first blog, do not write an article on “Earn Money” instead write an article on “how to earn money from home without investment anything”.
When your site becomes high in domain authority, you can target short-tail keywords.
Now, let us find out how to find the first unique 150 to 200 keywords for our niche.
Tools to find long tail keywords for niche website
There are various free and paid tools we can use to find long tail keywords. Below are a few tools I personally use to find keywords for our niche.
Here, I will show you 4 tools (2 free and 2 paid) which will be enough to do the keyword research.
1. Google Autosuggest (Free tool)
We can use the Google autosuggest option to find long tail keywords for free. Open Google.com and search for keywords and it will show you a lot of suggestions. See the screenshot below:
Lot of time I use Google autosuggest to find the right long tail keywords for a particular niche.
2. ahrefs (Paid tool)
This is a paid tool but it makes it easier for you to find out the keywords. It also provides other parameters like the difficulty level of the keyword.
As a beginner, I will not suggest taking the license for ahrefs. Instead, you can sign up for a trial (7 days for $7) and you can extract the keywords. You do not need this costly tool every day. Instead of spending $99 per month on this tool, I would suggest, utilizing the money to get another blog post for the site.
But, I use this tool to do all my keyword research for all my websites.
Still, go ahead and ahrefs Keywords Explorer.
3. Keywordchef (Paid tool)
Keywordchef is a paid tool but it is worth it, to get a set of long-tail keywords.
The tool will help to find out keywords in different forms like questions, how to, compare, best, alternatives, etc.
The license is also simple, you need to buy some credit and 1 keyword result = 1 credit. And it has different plans like below:
| $20 | $100 | $250 |
| 1,200 credits | 10,000 credits | 50,000 credits |
So if you will pay $100, then you can get around 10,000 keywords. That will be more than enough.
4. Answerthepublic (Free tool)
This is another free tool, I use frequently to find useful long-tail keywords. This is simple to use. Just put a keyword and choose the country, and language and click on Search. This displays a list of long tail keywords.
Recently, Answerthepublic has been acquired by Ubbersuggest and Neil Patel team.
These are the 4 tools, I use to do all my keyword research.
How do I write content for my niche website?
If you are starting your first website, make sure to choose a topic that you are passionate about. The intention here is that you should be able to write a few articles by yourself, before outsourcing to content agencies.
Even I would suggest for your first website, at least you should write your self the first 100-150 blogs.
Since this is not my first site and I want to build my portfolio of websites, apart from a few articles, I started outsourcing the articles.
For most of my websites, I use a content agency as content development pros. When choosing your content agency, do proper research, and go through a few articles at the beginning. Check the article will Copyscape so that you can see if the content is unique or copied from somewhere else.
Note: If you are not putting unique and original content, there is a high chance your website will not be approved by Google Adsense and you will not be able to monetize your niche website.
Compared to other content agencies like WordAgents, WriterAccess, Upwork, Textbroker, Crowd Content, iWriter, etc, CDS is a little cheap and they provide decent quality.
As a beginner, you can choose CDS as your content agency. If you want more discounts, send me an email (hello@earnmoneyfaqs.com) with your name, email address, and requirements. I will reply to you will details.
In the beginning, I ordered them for 100 articles with a word count of 2000 per article. And I want to publish these 100 articles in the first 3 months, approx 30 articles a month.
June, July, and August Niche Website Update
I started the website in June and place an order for 150 articles with Content Development Pros.
They started providing me content from June 8th onwards and in the month of June, I posted 10 articles on the website.
And in the month of July 2022, I published 24 articles on the niche website.
Then in the month of August, I published 44 articles on the niche website.
| Month Name | Number of Articles Published |
| June 2022 | 10 |
| July 2022 | 24 |
| August 2022 | 52 |
Added website to Google Search Console
We need to add the website to the Google search console so that we can submit the sitemap for Google to start indexing our articles.
It is easy to add a website to the Google search console, you can check out a complete tutorial on How to Submit Site to Google Search Console and Submit XML Sitemap.
Once you add the website to Google Search Console, from the left navigation, click on Sitemaps and you can see the details.
As you can see above, I have submitted only the pages and posts. I do not index the categories or tags.
Till now Google able to discover 5 pages and 54 articles, though I have published 87 articles.
And out of 54 articles, Google successfully indexed 52 articles. See fig below:
Slowly, Google will keep more articles Indexed, Nowadays it takes a lot of time for Google to index your articles.
Integrated Google Analytics
In the month of June itself, I integrated Google analytics on the site. It is easy to add the Google Analytics code to the website.
You can see here, I have selected the report from 1st June 2022 to 22 Aug 2022 and the website got 936 page views.
All the page views are not from the organic search. And the more articles will get indexed, we will get more page views and mostly from the organic Google search results.
So, by the end of August 2022, we have published 87 articles on the niche site.
This is what the niche website performs till the month of August 2022.
September Month Niche Website Update
In the month of September 2022, I published a total of 14 articles on the niche website. So, now, on the website, there are a total of 101 articles.
| Month Name | Number of Articles Published |
| Sept 2022 | 14 |
And on the month of Sept 2022, the niche website had 465 page views and 133 sessions. Check the google analytics screenshot.
And If we will look at the Google Search Console, Google has indexed 82 articles and still, 20 articles are not yet indexed.
So, this is about the niche website Sept 2022 update.
October 2022 Niche Case Site Update
In the month of October 2022, I published 13 articles in total, and almost every 2 days one article I published. The website now has 113 articles in total.
For a new website, only 13 articles in a month are not at all sufficient. I should have published more articles.
| Month Name | Number of Articles Published |
| Oct 2022 | 13 |
Now, let us check how many visits or page views, we received on the niche website in Oct 2022.
In this month, I received 614 page views in Oct 2022.
You can check out the Google analytics for the niche website.
There are not many movements on the Google Search console. 69 articles have been indexed out of a total of 113 articles.
This signal is not good for the website. More articles should have been indexed, but it did not.
Now, let us wait for Nov 2022 and see the improvements on the website.
I am Hannah, an online entrepreneur based in New York, United States. As the founder of several successful niche websites, I got the expertise in areas such as making money online, blogging, YouTube, affiliate marketing, and more. Through this website and blog posts, I am trying to provide insightful and actionable tips to help aspiring entrepreneurs, find ways to make money online. Read more.