Niche Websites - Income Producing and Easy to Maintain - 11 minutes read
Niche Websites For Beginners
A niche website is a small website that concentrates on a particular segment of a particular market. They are an excellent way to develop an online business. Even though there are millions of websites currently on the internet, thousands more are being added daily. Therefore there's no point in competing in an over-crowded market. Niche websites offer the opportunity to select a targeted segment with few suppliers but with potentially great demand resulting it better chances of business success.
Finding and selecting a niche
You may already have in mind a topic that you would like to explore, so run with it. However there are online research tools available that can give you ideas of topics around which to build a niche website. Examples are Google Trends, Yahoo's Overture and Wordtracker. Additionally, there are paid research tools which are helpful if you need to conduct in-depth research or cover several niches areas.
Website templates
Several options are available for building and hosting niche websites. These include free blog-spot templates such as Google's Blogger (which also gives you the option of upgrading to a domain for a small fee), Final Sense, and eBlog Templates.
WordPress and Site Build-it (SBI) are other options. These two are generally accepted as good content management programs that are easy to manage. WordPress and SBI don't require web page editors like Dreamweaver or Frontpage because their systems allow segregation of the site page from the content pages. Neither system requires specialized web designing skills, just general understanding of site layout and HTML formats.
Have a look at several programs before deciding which one to select. Generally if you just want to know the basics or your technical understanding is limited then SBI is better. If you want to incorporate more technical aspects and are willing to learn how, then WordPress is a better selection. The latter has plug-in architecture that allows you to add elements beyond the basic installation package.
Monetizing a website
Monetizing refers to earning additional income from your niche website or blog by incorporating alternative packages and external advertising. Examples of monetizing plans include Squidoo, affiliate marketing, Google's AdSense and Pepperjam. The two most popular monetizing methods are affiliate programs and AdSense.
Affiliate programs are cost-free plans whereby you place a link or banner of a particular product that you can promote in return for payment. You should be somewhat familiar with the product and therefore it's recommended that you try it out yourself. You earn money for each visitor or paying customer based on per visit or a sales commission.
AdSense requires that you place on your website a code given by Google after which they put ads on your page that are relevant to the theme of your website. They look similar to ads placed in a newspaper. Google pays you for each ad click. Unlike affiliate marketing, AdSense does not require any selling. AdSense is better for content-based websites where as affiliate marketing is best suited to product-review pages. It is possible to use both on the same website.
Many people build niche websites especially for use as income producing sites. The search engines have no problem with this if the site contains quality content for the readers. When building niche websites solely as income producing sites, it is very important to have someone build your site who is very familiar with search engine optimization techniques. Also, stay away from the build it yourself websites that millions of people have. The search engines are more interested in well built but unique sites with quality content.
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Making Money on Niche Websites
There are multiple ways to make money on a niche website. You can sell products, services, or ad space for example. You can use a niche website to market affiliate products.
If you choose to sell products on your niche website, these products can be something you make yourself or purchase from vendors. If you sell information products, such as eBooks, you can write the books yourself or market products from a website such as ClickBank.
Topics for Niche Websites
Choosing a topic for a niche website requires some thought and research. You want the niche topic to be popular enough to have a good percentage of interested consumers. However, you don't want a topic that is too competitive, either. You need a topic that not only will allow you to attract visitors, but that will provide a basis for related products or services that are marketable in order to produce sales.
Most niche marketers have more than one website, and typically have dozens or more. Since a niche website will be a site you will be promoting regularly, it helps if the topic is something you are interested in and knowledgeable about.
ClickBank And AdSense for Niche Websites
One of the most popular methods of making money in niche marketing is not to have any product of your own at all. Instead, you can sift through hundreds of titles at ClickBank and find those you'd like to promote on your niche websites. One niche website can promote more than one product, too. If you don't have a niche topic selected, you might browse through the ClickBank products and get some ideas on some niche themes.
When you promote a product from ClickBank on your niche site, shoppers can click a link to purchase and the transaction is handled through ClickBank. They are then directed to a download area where they can obtain the product. You never touch the actual product; you simply promote it and earn a commission each time the product sells.
The difference between ClickBank and AdSense is that AdSense pays you a commission if someone just visits a site. A purchase does not have to be made. The commission is small compared to ClickBank, usually less than a dollar, but most people make up for it in quantity. With AdSense you also do not have to worry about constantly looking for ads to put on your site. AdSense automatically puts the ads on your site that has the best potential of getting the most clicks.
Attracting Targeted Niche Customers
In order to attract visitors to your site, you must create content and plenty of it. The content should contain keywords specifically related to the niche topic. A good strategy is to provide readers with information they can use.
If your niche is about coin collecting, for example, then you might add articles to your site that answer frequently asked questions coin collectors typically have. When readers find useful information on your niche website, they are more inclined to bookmark it and return in the future.
Once your niche site becomes a trusted and frequented source for them, they will be more inclined also to purchase your product or service.
Niche Website Platforms
A niche website can be on any type of hosting platform, but one of the most popular is the WordPress blog platform. It is easy to install, easy to use, and there are hundreds of free and paid web templates available for download on the internet.
Functionality of the basic WordPress installation is greatly enhanced by the use of hundreds of free plug-ins, making almost any customization possible that you could possibly need. The type of WordPress installation mentioned here is the type hosted on your own server, not on the WordPress server. If you are considering a niche website launch, you might want to try WordPress as your site platform using one of the many free available templates.
Of course there are other more difficult website platforms you can use such as HTML Microsoft Expressions. WordPress is just the easiest and seems to be the most popular at this time.
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Niche Websites - Content, What Content?
What's In A Niche? When talking of niche websites, the answer to that question is, in my humble opinion, not very much at all in most cases. Certainly much less than should be in a niche. Is it just me - are my expectations too high? I don't think so because I have seen some good niche websites as well as many horrors. A real niche website that has been built with care and passion is a thing of beauty (or, at the very least, interest) and is usually a treasure trove for visitors who share a love of the niche subject.
What I am complaining about are the so-called niche websites people are throwing together for the sole purpose of collecting advertising revenue. These sites have little (if anything) in the way of content. The colourful pictures and plentiful advertisements do not make up for this lack. Advertising is fine, in fact it's usually essential if you want to stay in business. What makes me see red is clicking on misleading advertisements and landing on website after cloned website only to be confronted with a few sentences of poorly written text and dozens of gibbering advertisements. To test the integrity of a niche site, look at what would be left if you removed all the pay per click advertisements.
It is unfortunate for people who are surfing for information that the Internet is being overrun by the awful flimsy looking template produced websites that are being churned out at a crazy rate. If you spend any time on the Internet, you will know the type of thing I mean. These websites consist of a couple of pages with nice enough looking header graphics (that's the pictures at the top, if you are not "in the trade" so to speak), and clumps of advertisements placed so that they are the first thing you see. If you manage to get past the advertisements, you might find a few articles which have been copied from other websites just for the sake of having something on the pages to lend them some credibility. These websites don't exist to provide information or services or to promote anything. Their sole purpose is to carry advertising that will earn the owner money in return for just about zero work on his part.
How much time and effort goes into creating one of these monstrosities? Practically none: in most cases it is all done by a software package. The pseudo webmaster doesn't ever need to worry about actual webpage design or building. All these charlatans need to do is decide upon their niche topic, toss a bunch of keywords into the mix and the software will do the rest. These people can create their pseudo niche websites on any subject anyone in the world might think of. It's easy because they don't need to know anything about the subject themselves. Whether it is dog training, bridal dresses, funerals or haemorrhoids, an online search tool will provide a list of keywords and the software will do the rest. Nobody cares that the laughing man clutching a fistful of cash or the sports car pictured in the heading has no relevance to the content and would be frankly inappropriate if you were looking for a funeral director or medication for a painful medical condition. The webmaster has no intention of offering you anything of value. In fact, it is in his interests if you take an immediate dislike to his web page because that makes you more likely to click away from it via one of his advertising links and that's how he makes his money.
After a couple of days of trying to do some semi-serious research on the Internet, I feel like unplugging my pc and dusting off my library tickets. OK - so you can't judge a book by its cover but the cover doesn't usually set out to deliberately mislead you as to the contents (quite the opposite in fact). When I type a query into a search engine, I want the results to lead me to websites containing the answer to that query. If I am searching for information about a particular subject, I don't appreciate being directed to websites that consist of a few keyword loaded sentences walled in by blocks of advertisements for other similar websites.
Roll on the day when someone invents a search engine that can distinguish between a real niche website and an advertising vehicle built from a cheap kit. Maybe we can get back to the time when searching the Internet was faster than catching a bus to the library and thumbing through books.