How To Start A Niche Website

This post is part of the ‘Location Independence‘ series where I provide in depth information on how you can earn a living online or give yourself the freedom to work from anywhere in the world. You can read additional posts from this series here.

Building a niche website is one of the easiest ways to make money online – but only if you do your research! A lot of people (including me at the beginning!) think that they can just pick any topic under the sun, start a site and the traffic (and money) will start rolling in – but this is pretty much never the case. These people also tend to be the type that think earning money online is extremely easy and happens overnight, which of course is again very far from the truth! The good news is though, that if you do the research, have realistic expectations and are consistent in your efforts then you are almost guaranteed to eventually start making good money. I know people bringing in $10,000 a month from just one niche website, but it has taken them up to two years to start earning this kind of money, but trust me, if you have the drive, it can be done!

Starting a niche website is not a complicated process, but a methodical one, so you need to spend time at the beginning researching before jumping in – the longer you spend on the preparation the better the chances of success!

Here are the steps that you should follow in order to start your niche website.

Research Your Niche (1-4 weeks)

Just to be clear first up, a ‘niche’ is the topic or keyword/s of your site. For example, your niche could be ‘Dog Training’, ‘Moving To New York’ or ‘Learn to Sew’, and a niche can be broad or very specific – the key is finding one that is broad enough that people search for it, but specific enough that there isn’t many other sites on the web already providing that information.

Your first port of call is finding your niche, and personally I believe the very first thing you should do is download the 7 day free trial of Market Samurai and watch all of the tutorials on how to use the tool and the ways in which to find your perfect niche.

Basically, your niche needs to fit the following criteria for you to make money from it –

• Its number of searches in Google each day is above 80
• The number of competing sites is below 100,000
• The amount of money-earning potential each day is above $30
• The keywords for that niche are actually believable and likely to be searched – eg. Restaurants London is searched for a lot, but you would never use these words this way in a sentence, instead saying ‘London Restaurants’ – so the key is finding a niche that sounds the way you would say it in real life!

Market Samurai refers to these parameters as the Golden Rules, and their search tool is extremely easy to manipulate to find niches that fit the rules, so I’m not going to go into the huge amount of detail as Market Samurai does this extremely well already. I would urge you to go over the tutorials as I said above and think about the topics you are passionate about that also fit the rules.

Even if a niche is perfect in terms of the golden rules, if it bores you to death then it’s not going to be the one for you, as you’ll probably quit half way through because it’s not your passion. The key is finding that one ‘perfect’ niche that you are passionate about and fits the rules – it may feel like searching for a needle in a haystack sometimes, but trust me, its out there, so never give up!

Research Sites You Like…And Your Competition (1 week)

Once your niche is decided you should spend a week looking at the sites already in your niche and finding out about your competition – what on their site works well, and what can you do better on yours? If you have picked the right niche then you shouldn’t have much to worry about with your competitors, but it still pays to know what’s out there so you can make sure you beat it!

Alternatively, you should also spend time looking at the layout of sites you like visually so that you can grabs ideas for yours.

‘Mind Map’ Your Content (1-4 weeks)

So, you have a niche, now what? It’s time to start mapping out your content and ‘indexing’ your site, for example, you will have a home page and up to 10 other main navigation/category pages, as well as many topics filling down from each of these – so you need to get all your ideas on paper and start putting them where you think they fit best. For example, under the topic of ‘Moving Abroad’ I have many sub topics like ‘Resources for Moving Abroad’ which in turn has many topics underneath it. It’s all about making your content ‘make sense’ and fit together in a logical way.

What has worked really well for me in the past is first brainstorming all of my ideas on paper and then using mind mapping software that you can download for free to help with grouping all of the topics together. I used Free Mind when I was mapping my Living In London Guide site, and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to map out a niche site.

Research Your Exact Site Keywords (1-4 weeks)

Once your mind map is done it’s time to find the exact keywords that you will use on your site. Again, you will be using Market Samurai  for this – Your free trial may have run out at this point, so I would highly recommend paying to use the tool permanently. It’s payed for itself many times over with me, and honestly, if you are serious about making money from a niche website, you absolutely must have this on your PC.

This research is quite simple, and again MS provides tutorials on exactly what you need to do if you don’t know already.

For example, one of the categories within your niche may be ‘How to bake a cake’ but you may find that when you add this to a new keyword search that these exact keywords are highly competitive, but the slightly different wording of ‘Cake baking’ fits all of the golden rules.

This is one of the most time-consuming phases of setting up your site, but also the most crucial – you want to make sure that as many of your categories and sub categories fit the golden rules as possible – it wont be possible for every one, but do your best and play around with combinations to find the keywords that will make you the most money.

Get it right here, and you will be reaping the rewards later!

Pick Your Platform (1-2 weeks)

Now your niche, categories and sub categories are mapped out its time to pick your platform – will you use WordPress, or something else?

In my opinion the best platforms for a niche website are either WordPress or Site Build It (SBI), personally I use WordPress, but if you want a lot of support and a detailed step by step program for how to build a successful site, then SBI is for you. While it’s a paid service after the first 6 months, they hold your hand the whole way and if you follow the instructions they give, you really can’t go wrong.

My advice would be to spend a week researching both, then go with your gut feeling of what you believe will work for you. Then, it’s time to get started!

Again, I’m not going to go into the detail of setting up a site – depending on what platform you choose this information is readily available and easy to follow. Obviously, the WordPress and SBI websites are going to be a great resource here, so make sure you read up on what you need to do!

As I said above, using WordPress will mean you’ll need to organise web hosting and a site theme yourself, so if you are not comfortable doing this or don’t have the time to learn, go with SBI.

Add Content (1-12 weeks)

Another very time-consuming part of the process! Depending on the number of categories and sub categories, this can take you anywhere from one week to 12!

My advice would be to write all of your articles/pages in Word or goggle docs then do one big upload at the end – that way you can focus on the writing and not get distracted by fiddling with the website til the end.

If you have a lot of pages to write, break it down into manageable sections, eg. setting yourself a goal of writing 5-10 pages per week rather than feeling overwhelmed by the overall number.

Tweak The Site (Ongoing)

Once your content is up and your site is live you will probably have a million and one ideas on how to make it better – so my advice is to prioritise the ones you feel will make a difference eg. The overall usability of the site, over the ones that can wait – eg. changing the colours or font styles.

This is an ongoing process, and as you get more experience you’ll think of more ideas and your site will grow into something no doubt far exceeding your initial expectations, so just enjoy the ride and don’t get too hard on yourself if you can’t do every little thing that pops into your head.

Build Links And Your Community (Ongoing)

Again, this process of building a community around your site and links on the web is ongoing, and you should spend time doing this every week. While the whole idea of a niche website is to get passive hits from google, you need to spend time getting your site up the rankings in the beginning, and this is the way you do it.

You may want to even look at outsourcing article writing to help with your keyword Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – Fiverr is a good place to start with this, as are these outsourcing websites.

Monetize (From 3-6 months onwards)

Once your site is established, it’s time to start monetizing! You don’t need to wait until your number 1 in Google before doing this, but you may find that with a good niche it wont take you long to get there, in which case, start planning your monetization strategy early!

Google Adsense can work really well on niche websites, but you may also want to look at text links and banner ads as well as affiliate programs relevant to your niche.

If you want further info on how to monetize a site – check out my article on monetization.

Good luck – and just remember, never give up – it can be a long road, but if you keep going, there’s money and success to be had. Think of your site as a long-term business and one that needs time and effort to grow – eventually it may be earning you passive income, so if you put in the effort now, you’ll reap the rewards in a year or two’s time!

Photo Credit – Thanks to mikekorn (sxu license)

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