Niche websites are a great way to generate a consistent online income. There are many online marketers who have created their own niche empires starting from scratch.
Regardless of your approach towards niche sites, it’s important that you monetize them effectively. Eventually, the success of your niche website will be measured by the money it makes.
But before you monetize your site, you need to prepare it to get the best results. If you don’t lay a strong foundation – you won’t see much returns.
Here are 3 useful tips to help you prepare your niche site before you start monetizing it
Tip #1: Focus on Content and SEO First
One of the benefits of niche sites is that you know exactly who your audience is. You are sure of your readers and that makes the monetization process easy.
However, in order to make money from your niche sites you will need some high quality traffic coming your way. And that’s why you should first focus on creating content that’s optimized for the search engines. Not just any content, but high quality content that your readers want.
Search engine optimization helps you generate free and targeted traffic. So if you’re doing it right and have valuable content, it won’t take you long before you receive organic search traffic. But still, don’t monetize your site until you’re getting at least a few hundred visitors. Work on the content first, everything else will follow.
Tip #2: Capture Email Addresses from Day One
Many niche sites make the mistake of not capturing email addresses. But if you really want to build a long term business, you need to start building an email list from day one. It’s crucial that you get people on your list or else you lose all those visitors that didn’t take action on their first visit.
Also, see to it that your email subscription form is on every page of your site. Don’t miss out on any chances to grab their email address. Since you don’t know what page your visitors will land on, look at each page of your site as a landing page.
And once you start monetizing your site, all you’ll have to do is shoot one email to your list, and a surge of targeted traffic will come your way.
Tip #3: Think Beyond Google AdSense
Before you do any kind of monetization on your niche site, see to it that you have your monetization strategy in place. You need to zero down on multiple monetization methods and then choose what’s most applicable to your site.
Many niche sites forget the power of affiliate marketing and instead focus on running Google AdSense ads since they’re easy to setup. There’s nothing wrong in using AdSense, but you can earn so much more by promoting relevant affiliate products.
You can write reviews, create comparison charts between two products, interview the affiliate product owner, etc. Don’t look at your niche site as a mini AdSense earner. Go beyond that and leverage the true power of affiliate marketing.
What steps do you take to make the most out of your niche site? Do share your thoughts and comments below.
