How to start a niche website from scratch [Step by step guide]

Want to create a niche website? In this step-by-step article, I am going to show you how to start a niche website from scratch.

Follow the below 7 steps to create a profitable niche website.

Step-1: Choose a profitable niche for your niche website (with monetization options)
Step-2: Setup your WordPress website
Step-3: Do your keyword research properly
Step-4: Create helpful content for your readers
Step-5: Grow your niche website
Step-6: Grow an email list
Step-7: Implement monetization options

So, let us create a niche website to make money online in detail.

Before this, let us understand what is a niche website and why to create a niche website or a blog. why not start a broad site focussing on a lot of topics?

What is a niche website and why should we choose it?

Instead of focusing on a broad topic, simply write about a specific small topic – this is called a niche website. Here your target audience is a specific group of people and you should target to make useful content for them.

Example-1:

Instead of focusing on how to make money online? You can focus on some specific topics like:

• Make money from blogging
• Make money from YouTube
• Make money from affiliate marketing, etc.

Let us understand from another example.

Example-2:

Instead of creating a website for insurance, which is too broad and tough to rank, you can create the below niche websites:

• Life insurance
• Travel insurance
• Auto insurance
• Car insurance
• Health insurance
• Term life insurance
• Property insurance
• Renters insurance, etc.

If you got an idea about what is a niche website, let us understand why we need to focus on a niche website rather than a broad website especially if you are a beginner.

Nowadays, Google is focusing more on the authoritativeness of a topic. When you will start a website, the domain authority will be zero. In that case, if you will start adding content on different topics (category) then it will be difficult for Google to understand on which topic your website is.

Instead, if you post on a specific topic, then Google will understand that your website has authority on the particular topic.

Your users also would love to get everything about the single topic that they are interested in. All the users might not like to read on different topics.

Once your website’s domain authority increases then, later point in time you can add content on different topics.

So as a beginner in blogging, focus on a niche or a particular topic. Ready for creating a niche website?

Read blog or youtube for money

Create a niche website from scratch – Steps

Let us follow the below 7 easy steps to create a niche website.

Step-1: Choose a profitable niche for your niche website (with monetization options)

After building so many successful websites, one thing I realized, your website niche is very important. This is a factor that decides if your website is going to be a successful website or a failed website.

Trust me, this is one of the tough things to do, especially if you are a beginner.

A lot of SEO professionals suggest you, first check your passion, and other suggest checking out a profitable topic or niche.

I do not completely agree to start a topic that you are passionate about. Same with the profitable niche. You should never choose a topic because it is profitable.

Here are a few things you should consider while choosing your niche for your website:

• Do a simple google search on a topic like profitable niche, niche website ideas, etc. You will get a lot of topics from various bloggers in the United States of America.
• If you want to get more audience from the USA, then check out the niches suggested by bloggers from the United States of America.
• Note down all the topics in a Microsoft Excel or Google spreadsheet file. After this, we will filter and finalize the topic.
• From the list, highlight the topics which look interesting to you. Ask yourself, can you write at least a few articles (around 100 topics) by yourself? Will you be interested in researching the topic and writing about it? If yes, then highlight the topic.
• Now, let us you have highlighted 10 topics.
• Obser the websites and monetization options. Check if the sites are monetized using multiple methods or not. If there are multiple ways, then you can mark this.
• Stay away from the below topics or niches (personal suggestion but you can decide)
  • Weight loss & Fitness
  • Health & Medical stuff (Unless you are certified and in the profession)
  • Dating
  • Parenting (Unless you are qualified for giving parenting tips)
  • Finance
  • Make money online
  • Broad topics like Pets (Instead you can choose about a particular pet), etc.

Step-2: Setup your WordPress website

Setting up a WordPress website is not difficult as people think it is. If I will ask someone to think of having an online business with a website, the first thing that comes from them is that I don’t know how to create or design a website.

But it is super easy! Especially, the support nowadays provided by the hosting companies to set up the WordPress website. We will discuss it, but before that let us think about the domain name.

Chose your domain name

Once you research your niche for your blog, the next thing you can select is the domain name.

SEO professionals suggest that it does not match much but I will highlight a few things about choosing the domain name. Follow some domain name guidelines.

• Always try to choose a .com domain unless you are really targeting a particular country or locality.
• Try to give a shorter and easy-to-remember name, so that people can remember and type.
• Try not to use numbers or dashes. And also avoid Misspellings names. People should easily spell it.
• Avoid using any trademarks and brand names for your new website.
• Try to add a keyword to your domain name. Suppose your niche is about dog food, then you can choose a name starting with dogfood*.
• You can also use https://leandomainsearch.com to search for your domain availability. It will show you a few suggestions and you can easily check if the domain is available or not.

Do not worry, even if you did not get the exact domain name.

Select a WordPress Hosting

After the domain name, choose a WordPress hosting provider.

Before that, always start with WordPress, do not start with a free blogger platform, or any paid 3rd party content management system. Always prefer WordPress.

As a beginner, I will suggest going with either one of the two hosting providers:

• BlueHost
• Hostinger

If you are an experienced professional, you can go for WPX, their support is awesome, but it is a little costly. They can simply create a site for you if you will ping their support team. They are good but a bit costly compared to Bluehost or Hostinger.

Just choose a plan, buy the plan, using your email id and a few details and pay for your plan. Then you can ask the support team and they will create a site for you.

Or you can follow a step-by-step article here also.

Themes & Plugins for your website

Once your website is ready, you need to do a few customizations for your website.

You need to use a good theme as well as you can use a few plugins that are absolutely necessary for your niche website.

Theme: I would suggest using the Generatepress theme. This is one of the lightweight themes that you can use on your website. They have a free version too, that you can apply to your niche website.

Plugins: There are a few plugging that you should add to your website. I am only suggesting those plugins that are there on my website. Here are some useful plugins:

• GP Premium: All the GeneratePress premium modules will be available here. I have the premium version and use all of my websites.
• LuckyWP Table of Contents: You should have a plugin for TOC (Table of Contents) and there are also other TOC plugins available that you can use.
• Simple Author Box: You can use this plugin to display an author bio on each post of your posts.
• W3 Total Cache: You can use the free version of this WordPress performance plugin.
• WPCode – Insert Headers, Footers, and Code Snippets: This plugin we can use to add any code like Google Analytics or Google Search Console code to the header or footer of your niche website.
• RankMath: This is the One SEO plugin your can use on your website, this plugin will help you to optimize your Title, URL, Description, etc.

There are a lot of plugins available but you should not add much, it will unnecessarily make your website heavy.

By this time just remember that we need to put all our effort into the content.

Niche WebSite Logo, Pages & Menus

I will suggest not spending more time designing the logo, just use a free tool like Canva to create a basic logo.

But it is very important for you to make the below pages for your website like:

• About – Write a proper about us page
• Contact – Put some information, on how users will contact you
• Privacy Policy

Apart from this, you can create a Header & Footer menu. Like on this website, I have added a header and footer menu. In Generate press it is easy to add a header and footer menu.

These many customizations is enough to work on helpful content for your website.

Step-3: Do your keyword research properly

This is a very much important time for your niche website.

We should target those keywords that a new website can rank for. So here our target should be to find out a list of topics (~100 topics) that are low competition keywords with high traffic.

These are also known as the long tail keywords.

Example:

• short tail keyword – running shoes
• long tail keyword – running shoes for working professionals

So as a new niche website owner, do not write an article on running shoes, instead, write an article on running shoes for working professionals.

Our intention here is to find out a few long-tail low-competition keywords. There are multiple ways of finding these types of keywords.

Google Autosuggest

Google autosuggestions are very powerful and will help you find a lot of long-tail keywords for free without paying anything.

You can simply type something in the Google search box and it will suggest you a lot of related keywords. Check the fig below:

This way, you can search for a list of keywords.

ahrefs

I use ahrefs to do keyword research for all my websites. But it is not a free tool, it is quite expensive.

I will not recommend you to take a license for this too. But if you have a budget, then you can probably take the license for just 1 month and do all your keyword research.

You can simply choose the Lite plan and cancel it before it completes one month.

Note: They have a 7-day trail for $7 but they have stopped it. Else your keyword research would have been completed in just $7.

Once you sign up for then you can do keyword research like the below:

• Click on the Keywords Explorer menu, then provide a topic name for which you want to find the topics. Here make sure to choose the country as the United States.

• Then click on Matching terms -> Questions. Then you can filter the keywords like here I am selecting min word count should be 5.

• You can also choose the KD (Keyword Difficulty) level. The maximum KD you can choose is like 5 or 10. Since your website is new, we should target keywords that have the KD low.
• Then it will give you a list of keywords that are easy to rank. Do not take these keywords blindly, Check the parent topic and also the SERP. From the SERP, you will be able to know who are the websites ranking for these keywords.
• You should choose informational keywords like question answer types rather than product review types (avoid keywords like best dog foods).
• Go through the list of keywords and maybe you can select around 100 keywords that you can focus on writing.

This way, you will be able to find low-competition keywords for your website.

keywordchef

Keywordchef is a very good tool to find long-tail keywords. They have different plans like the below:

• STARTER – 1200 Credits for $20
• PLUS – 10,000 credits for $100
• PRO – 50,000 credits for $250

Here each credit is like one keyword.

So, when you are starting, pay just $20 and you will get 1200 credits which are similar to getting 1200 keywords. From these 1200 keywords, you can easily find the first 100 keywords to write about for your niche website.

By this time, I am expecting you will have your spreadsheet ready with at least 80 to 100 keywords or topics that you can write about.

Step-4: Create helpful content for your readers

Now, is the time to write helpful content for your readers. And that is the reason, I always believe you should write your first 100 articles before may be outsourcing them to a content agency like Word agent.

Here are a few things you should remember while writing content for your niche website.

• Understand the topic and the target audience: Try to understand what exactly your users looking out for, and what problem they are facing. It is very important that your users will find the answers they are looking out for. And I am assuming most of the articles are how-to articles.
• Do proper topic research: Very important to do proper topic research before writing anything. The information should be correct and accurate.
• Focus on answer target: According to a new Google update, Google does not look at the word counts. So, it does not matter what is the word count of the post, but what is matters is whether it is providing the solution to the user or not.
• Title, URL, and Meta description: Make sure to provide an eye-catching blog post title for your blog post. Your title is what is going to attract your users. Make sure to provide short URLs. Check out a complete article on URL structure. Also, provide a meta description that should be less than 160 words.
• Introduction and Conclusion Paragraph: Write a proper introduction paragraph that allows users to keep on reading. From the introduction paragraph, they should know exactly what are the things you are going to talk about in the article. In the same way, write a conclusion paragraph.
• Write short & simple sentences: It is always better to write short and simple sentences. So, that your users will like to read the complete article. Make sure it is also grammatically correct.
• Add images and facts: An image can tell you 1000 words. Try to use visual content like images, infographics, graphs, etc. Provide image alt tags while adding images to the post. Always, try to use original images if you can instead of using stock images.
• Headings, tables, bullet points: Make sure to add proper headings, like your h2 h3, h4, etc. tags. Also, where ever necessary try to display the information in tables, bullet points, etc. Also, you can add keywords and synonymous inside the headings.

Also, you can look at a few points below while writing the blog post:

• Do not write keep it in mind for SEO, instead, write for your users.
• Google is not looking at the word count, so do not focus on a particular word count for your blog post.
• Do not try to insert keywords unnecessarily.
• Avoid writing long paragraphs.
• Images should not be too heavy. Look at the size of the images before uploading the images to the posts.

Step-5: Grow your niche website

I always believe in growing a website organically, especially from Google search.

So for the first few months (~nearly 10 months) just focus on high-quality content.

For the first few months, you might not be able to any organic visitors to your website, but you keep on writing content for your website.

Consistency is very important for a website to rank. So, it is very important to follow a schedule and publish content consistently. You should post regularly on your website.

At the same time, focus on internal linking and outbound links. Make sure to provide internal links inside your article.

During this time, you can also build your social profile on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Another important thing you can do is if possible focus on making videos on the topic and upload them to a new YouTube channel. You can also embed the video on the blog post.

This is very important as Google is also promoting video content in the search results.

In the first few months, make sure you have integrated Google analytics and Google search console for your website.

After 6 – 8 months you should be able to see some movements in your Google analytics and search console.

Do not feel discouraged if your website did not get any traffic during this sandbox period which is nearly 8 months.

Step-6: Grow an email list

Your trusted readers or subscribers are your assets when you are doing an online business. After two or three months, you can start collecting subscribers on your website.

For this, you can create a small PDF and send users that PDF when they will sign up for your newsletter.

You can try the convertkit free plan which is free for up to 300 subscribers. So up to 300 subscribers, you do not need to pay anything.

In the future, if you want to create and sell any digital products, then the subscriber list will help you. So, start creating and growing your email list.

Step-7: Implement monetization options

Once you started getting a few thousand subscribers, you can start thinking of implementing monetization options.

There are a lot of monetization options you can try on your niche website.

You can start making a few dollars from your website through affiliate marketing, even if your website is getting fewer visitors.

I would personally suggest if you are getting nearly 5000 visits, then start adding a few affiliate links. The easiest one you can try is the amazon affiliates.

Once your website started getting nearly 30000 page views, then you can start applying for Google Adsense or Ezoic display ads network.

If your niche website has options for creating any digital product like a training course or pdf, then you can start creating it and try to sell it to your subscriber list.

Conclusion

Niche websites can be a great way to make money online. By focusing on a specific topic, you can create content and products that appeal to a targeted audience.

And I hope you got an idea of how to create a niche website and start making money online. It will take time to make a niche website successful and profitable. But, you need to add useful content consistently for your niche website.

Even if you want to create a micro niche website, or you can create adsense niche website or you want to build a niche affiliate website, then follow these 7 steps.