Built A Micro-Niche Site: These days, anyone can easily start a blog and follow various methods to make money from blogging.
One misconception about blogging is that you need to work day and night to make money. There’s some truth to that if what you’re trying to do is create a name for yourself and/or build a brand.
But if your goal is simply to earn money within a short period of time (but with long-term gains), then there are many shortcuts available.
Let’s take a look at one such shortcut:
The micro niche blog.
In this guide, I will give you a detailed example of a micro-niche blog that helps you to make $100+ per month from AdSense, and an average of $100/month from affiliate marketing. All of this only took a few hours of work to set up.
Read Also: Ways to Increase AdSense CPC With Simple Tweaks
Before start, first we need to know –
What is Micro Niche Blog
A micro niche blog covers a specific topic and targets a close group of people. It is completely different from normal blogs. These blogs are usually small, and have limited content. You can easily rank a micro niche website on google and drive targeted traffic.
Why start a micro-niche blog?
First of all, following many algorithmic changes from Google, niche websites now rank higher in search engines than non-targeted sites.
If you create a high-quality website on any particular topic, your chances of ranking higher are stronger than any existing authority website out there.
Plus, you won’t have to worry day and night about updating your blog.
Once you’ve done the hard work to create your niche site, the next step is to wait for the money to be deposited into your account.
You can follow these steps to create a successful micro-niche blog of your own.
The Complete Guide To Building A Niche Website That Makes Money:
Step 01 – Select Niche & Domain
The most important thing you need to do is find a niche that you are comfortable with.
Make sure to think about the potential commercial and popularity aspects of your niche.
Since the target is to make money from the blog using AdSense, it is very important to choose a topic that is popular in countries like the U.S. and the U.K., and that has high commercial value (high CPC).
Read Also: Complete Guide to host your website on Hostgator
Here are a few profitable micro niche blog ideas (examples):
- Lens Finder
- Video editing hardware
- Wall decoration
- Home automation
- Peak performance
- Productivity
- Yoga
- Air Purifier
- VPN
- Drones
For keyword research, I used SEMrush. I like SEMrush because you just need to put the website link of the most popular site in your target niche & it will show all of the keywords that site is already ranking for.
The next step is to get a nice domain name. Since it’s a micro-niche site, I would suggest including your keyword in the domain name. Ensure it doesn’t look spammy & add a little flavor to it by using words like “Guide”, “Users”, “101” & so on.
Step 2: Keyword Research & Content Planning
This is the most interesting part, and it’s a little time-consuming. But it pays off well in the long run.
I usually suggest using a Google docs spreadsheet to jot down your research to keep everything organized.
For the content planning, I was clear about a few things I needed to do:
- Choose topics that would be in demand for a long time.
- Design this micro-niche site like Wikipedia.
- Choose keywords that are driving traffic and have a high CPC.
Instead of being particular about choosing only high AdSense CPC keywords, I created a mindmap of content, which was more like an FAQ.
For example:
- What is [topic]?
- How to use/install [topic].
- Advantages and disadvantages of using [topic].
- Important facts about [topic].
These were some of the basic ideas I started with before getting into detailed keyword research.
I then used SEMrush to find keywords.
Next, chose a few related blogs on your topic & as I mentioned earlier, use the same tool (SEMrush) to find the precise keywords which are already driving traffic to these sites.
Note: SEMrush is a paid tool, but you can use this link to try SEMrush completely free for 07 days .
Read Also: Easy Steps to create your own Website with NO coding knowledge on Bluehost
By the end of this process, I had at least 20+ topic ideas for my micro-niche website!
Next, spend few hours writing 4-5 blog posts every day, and then one post each day for the next several days.
Within a few days, you have 15 high-quality evergreen posts and your content was ready to go. (Evergreen posts have a 2-3 year expiration date, meaning that these topics should be relevant for at least the next 2-3 years.)
As I said earlier, if you are not good at writing, there is no harm in hiring someone to write for you. Managing a blog takes a lot of work, and it’s important to make sure you have good content to manage.
Step 3: Setting Up The Micro-Niche Blog
This part of the set-up is very easy.
The following is a list of the exact tools I used to create and set up my blog, and it’s recommended for you too:
- Hosting: Hostgator, Bluehost – pocket friendly shared hosting with one free domain. Check out this tutorial to learn how to install WordPress on Bluehost (These steps are similar for other hosting too)
- Theme: Newspaper theme – plug and play.
Some useful Plugins and tools for website:
- Yoast SEO for site SEO.
- Akismet for preventing comment spam.
- Jetpack by WordPress for multiple purposes, including Social media share and stats in dashboard.
- iThemes – All the foundational tools for WordPress. From backups to security to site management (BackupBuddy, iThemes Security Pro, iThemes Sync, Restrict Content Pro, WPComplete, Agency Bundle, Content Upgrades, WordPress Landing Page Plugin)
- Semrush (*Get 7 days of full access to all toolkits. Cancel anytime.) – Do SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC and social media marketing from just one platform
- Whatagraph (*Free 7 days trial) – to track campaign results across different channels. Build customizable visual reports and let data insights lead the way
- MailOptin – Convert website visitors into subscribers and WordPress users, send one-off newsletters and create automated, event triggered follow-up emails. All inside WordPress.
- MonsterInsights – best Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress.
- OptinMoster – Convert and Monetize Your Website Traffic, Instantly grow your email list, get more leads and increase sales with the #1 most powerful conversion optimization toolkit in the world
- ProfilePress – ProfilePress helps you build awesome WordPress membership sites and control who can access your content without making your life difficult
- SEO Buddy – SEOBUDDY makes analyzing search results quick and easy. you will find the SEO insights you need to start climbing the rankings. And SEOBUDDY keeps track of the results and websites you’ve reviewed so you never have to waste time analyzing the same search result again
- WP Rocket – WP Rocket is the most powerful web performance plugin in the world. It will instantly reduce your load time and boost your Google PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals scores. No coding skills needed
- WPForms – WPForms is the best WordPress contact form plugin.
- WP Mail SMTP – Making Email Deliverability Easy for WordPress, The Most Popular WordPress SMTP and PHP Mailer Plugin
Additional steps that you need to follow:
- Follow my WordPress SEO Book – SEO – Do it yourself
- Took extreme care of content quality and On page SEO.
- Submit sitemap to major search engines. (Google, Bing, Baidu, etc.)
- Submit blog to Web 2.0 + Social networking sites. Note: Don’t build more than 50 links using them in a day.
- Create a logo using a free online logo maker. You can hire someone from Fiverr which usually cost about $10.
- Set Up Google AMP.
- Set Up Facebook Instant Articles.
Otional (but very good) steps to follow:
- Add “Contact” page and “About” page.
- Configure push notifications for getting return traffic.
- Start building an email list. You can find a list of best email marketing services here. You can later give them interesting deals related to your industry & earn commissions via affiliate marketing. You can read about affiliate marketing over here or buy affiliate marketing book which teaches you everything about it.
The whole idea of the blog was to not do a lot of work and create a blog that was capable of earning money. The goal was to get great search engine traffic, provide solutions, and quickly make money from this micro-niche blog.
The following are a few things that you should do if you are interested in creating a micro-niche blog:
Create A Separate Social Media Page
Social media profiles are helpful in many ways, it’s always good to add social media profiles to your site and use social media automation.
Backlink Building & Promotion
For certain niches, competition is too high & the best way to make your blog rank is by generating high-quality backlinks.
Monetization of Micro-niche website
AdSense is best to monetize your website. However, if you haven’t gotten AdSense approval, then you should use Media.net. Both of them work great if you have traffic from the U.S.A or Europe.
If you have any questions, or if you have any tips to add, I would love to hear from you. Share your thoughts in the comments below!
If you find this micro-niche site guide useful, don’t forget to share it!