Christopher Jan Benitez
The mark of a good niche is the amount of money you can earn from it.
It is easy to come up with a niche that you love and know inside and out. But passion and knowledge will not pay for the costs of setting up and developing your site.
That is why you need to find a niche site that allows you to make money.
When done correctly, you can turn your niche site into your main source of income. That means you are independent from an employer and can work at your own pace.
“You had me at ‘make money.’ Now where do I start in finding my niche site?”
Because not all niches are made equal, you need to research for a niche with the greatest opportunity to earn.
Below are factors that you must consider in finding and determining a profitable niche.
High average monthly search
Run a quick search on Google Keyword Planner. Enter your preferred topic that you want to turn into a niche.
For this example, let us find a niche about how to play heavy metal guitar leads.
Click on the keyword ideas tab to see suggestions for related keywords.
Focus on the Average Monthly Search Volume (AMSV) column. This features the approximate number of times users searched for this keyword on Google.
What you want is to choose keywords with the highest number of AMSV.
These are keywords that users search the most times. Once you start optimizing your niche website, you have the chance to rank atop the search results for your keyword.
The AMSV depends on the niche you want to target. Some niche keywords can have millions of search while others can be in the low thousands at most.
Choose at least five interrelated niche keywords for your site. This way, you can optimize and rank on Google for more than one keyword for your site.
If users see your keyword within the first page of search results, there is a great chance that they will click on it. This means a greater opportunity for you to turn your visitors into profit.
Narrowed niche idea
After choosing your keywords, combine them all together to form a cohesive niche. You need to conduct your research on how to proceed with this.
I suggest you join specific groups and communities to help you refine your idea.
Join NicheHacks Mastermind Group moderated by NicheHacks owner Stuart Walker. Receive ideas from members who are more than willing to help you out.
While you are at it, you can also share your knowledge to members looking for ideas on their own niche.
Another site that you join that will help refine your niche is MyBlogU. It is another community for bloggers and marketers that is willing to help each other out.
Sign up for an account and brainstorm for ideas there. Promote your post there on social media to get more people to help you out.
You will have to indicate a blog for your idea. MyBlogU requests users to link back to approved ideas back to your blog.
This is arbitrary if you just want to brainstorm for your niche idea. Indicate on the text that you will not be able to post their ideas on your blog. Not yet, at least
Aside from niche ideas, you can brainstorm for articles ideas or quotes from users about your post.
Collect all the ideas you have and choose the appropriate keyword for your site.
Search for products from affiliate sites
To earn from your niche site, you need to do affiliate marketing. This is the tactic that lets you earn a commission from every successful sale you make.
Once you have decided on a keyword, search for it on the sites below:
I searched for the ‘heavy metal guitar’ keyword at ClickBank. This is the screenshot of the results. Promote affiliate products based on the average sale.
The more products available for your niche keywords, the more chances you can make money.
Most of your profit will come from how you conduct your affiliate marketing strategy. There are other sources of income online, but it will be much easier to make a profit from affiliate products.
If your niche keyword does not have lots of products from affiliate sites, you may need to rethink your niche site.
Collect the products related to your niche that you can sell from these sites. List them down in a spreadsheet.
Content creation
To increase your chances of making a sale with affiliate products, create a content strategy that includes the products.
This means you need to develop and publish content in your niche site. It is through your content that you are able to build trust with your audience.
This is achieved by developing content that provides value to your audience. Find out what makes your audience tick and produce content that will feed into their hopes and dreams.
Once you have their trust, you can encourage them to buy from your site much easier.
Why should we have to learn how to write? As niche marketers, you may be more interested in the grand scheme of things instead of the little things. Not all marketers are content creators, after all.
But to be successful with your niche site, you need to gauge your niche site based on the content you will be producing.
Therefore, implementing a fully realized content strategy and editorial calendar are important in building a sustainable site.
You do not have to be a wordsmith to run a good niche site. But you need to understand the process of effective content creation to understand how to roll out the plans for your niche site.
[Y]our content really does need to be of a high standard. Everyday millions of blog posts are published on the internet and with so much competition for our limited attention spans you really have to be creating blog posts people are going to want to read and perhaps even share on social media or on their own blogs. – Jamie Spencer, How to Make Money Blogging
Below are common ways on how most make their money from affiliate marketing:
- Blog posts – Write reviews of the products to increase your chances of making a sale. Review products that you like instead of featuring products that you don’t. Another idea is to include the products in your roundup posts of products you recommend.
- Emails – Feature a banner of the affiliate product in your newsletters. There is a great chance that you can convert your subscribers into customers. The fact that they are subscribed to your email list means that they like the content you produce.
- Landing pages – Design a dedicated page for the affiliate product. Developing this involves writing great copy and CTA buttons. Promote the pages on social media or using off-page optimization tactics. This will drive visitors to browse through the page and commit to your desired action.
Writing tools are also things you need to consider when developing your content.
The heart of a great content is a message that is communicated clearly to readers. This means that you need to check how your grammar, choice of words, and sentences work. These build the path between readers and your ideas.
Ensure that the path remains clear by using Grammarly and Hemingway to clean up your writing.
Search competitors
Use Google Search to find your competitors. Enter your chosen keywords and list down the sites that may pose a threat to your site.
Narrow down the choices by looking at their sites. Upon looking at your competitor sites, you need to obverse the following:
- Design – Is the site observing the best design practices? For example, does the site load fast? What blogging platform is the site using? What features does each site have that make it different from others?
- Social proof – Is the site shared by hundreds and thousands of social media users? Are there testimonials from satisfied clients? What is the site doing that allows it to gain social authority?
- Sources of income – How is the site earning money? What are the different tactics used for monetizing the site? How effective are they using these tactics?
Using these three factors, you must list down your observations in a spreadsheet. You can simplify your sheet by categorizing each competitor site by their positive and negative features.
Once you have compiled all these, you need to build your niche site using all the positive features.
What you will be doing is replicating the best traits of all your competitors on your site.
The idea is to make a better site than anyone else in your niche. This way, you can maximize the profits and hack your niche site to growth.
The question now is, are you capable of copying the best tactics of your competitors unto your niche site?
Your answer here is a measure on how you think you can succeed against your competitors.
Ability to build audience prior to launch
Even before you launch your niche site, you need to create an audience that is interested with what you have to offer.
You can do this by creating a pre-launch email list. Encourage visitors to sign up to your list so they can see updates in your niche site as they happen.
You should be thinking about growth before you even launch your product. One of the simplest ways to do this is to build hype, then funnel that hype into a pre-launch list. – Stuart McKeown, 15 Pre-launch Growth Hacking Strategies For Startups
What you want is to become transparent with your audience. Send out newsletters on a regular basis of your progress. This way, you keep an honest and open line of communication with them.
Building a site is like a journey. In your pre-launch list, you take them with your journey of developing your niche site from the ground up.
This approach helps humanize your brand and makes your site much more authentic to people. This can have a positive effect to your relationship with subscribers.
If done correctly, you can garner as many as thousands of subscribers for your pre-launch list. Having this many people interested in your niche site before it launches is a good sign that people will buy into your content.
Prior to its release, Taasky created a pre-launch landing page where people can subscribe to its email list. Subscribers will be informed when the site will be ready. The post “3 Pre-launch Landing Pages [Critiqued]: How to Generate Buzz for Your Biz” at Wishpond features this page. Click here to find out the other two.
Another interesting way to promote your site is by sending emails to the followers of your competitors.
You can do this by analyzing their Twitter followers on Followerwonk.
Choose users with reasonable social authority and who are active.
I analyze the followers of Tom Hess, a heavy metal guitar teacher online. Follow those who have high social authority and lots of followers.
Send them a tweet informing them that you have a niche site similar to the one they are following. You can also message them on their websites instead, if they have one.
It is possible to have a low subscriber count to your list even after implementing your strategy. If this is the case, it will be much more difficult for you to monetize your site.
Without a built-in audience upon site launch, you will have to scramble for different sources where you can get your potential customers. This will eat much of your time since you will also have to manage the site once released.
Before building a pre-launch list, you need to set a reasonable baseline to meet within the next couple month. Implement your promotions strategy and see how it goes. If your target audience is not subscribing to your list, then you may want to reconsider your niche.
Conclusion
To recap:
That’s the wrap! If you have comments and suggestions about this post, feel free to comment below!
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