As you may know by now, niche websites are my jam. I stumbled on the idea of niche sites while looking for ways to bring my network marketing business online. When I started selling my network marketing products on my niche site consistently, I realized that this online business was no longer about network marketing. It turns out you can sell anything you want on a niche site. In this post, I am going to share the exact formula I use to create a reliable passive income with niche websites.
What Is a Niche Website
In my post What Is a Niche Site: The Ultimate Passive Income Strategy, I explain in great detail how I define a niche website and I give you tips on narrowing down your niche. Let me give you my quick definition: a niche site is a site that focuses on a segment of a specific market to target the right buyers for a predetermined product. Determining your niche goes hand in hand with defining your monetization strategy. Every piece of content you create will be geared toward your ideal customer. To learn more about to create passive income with niche websites, don’t forget to sign up for my 30-minute workshop.
The Difference Between a Blog and Niche Website
A Niche Website is a blog, but a blog isn’t always a niche website. Does that make any sense? Many blogs don’t earn any money and don’t target a specific segment of the population. They serve as a journal for the blog owners, who may enjoy writing down thoughts and ideas. Furthermore, some blogs that have a proper SEO and monetization strategy encompass a broad segment of the market. By definition, a niche website is more targeted. This helps make your blog more authoritative quicker as you don’t have to compete against the big players whose websites include articles about broader topics.
Profitable Niches for Your Niche Website
When I created my post Top 10 Must-See Niche Websites To Unlock Your Niche Research, I classified the websites among five niches and I think seeing this will be useful to understand how you can narrow down your niche and expand later (if you wish):
- Health and Wellness (cooking, food, healthy eating, fitness, weight loss, supplements, coaching, beauty)
- Relationships (dating, parenting, marriage, self-improivement, homeschooling)
- Money (making money, personal finances, investing)
- Technology (streaming, video conferencing, gadgets, phones, computers)
- Hobbies (hiking, fishing, knitting, camping, golfing, homesteading, survival skills, gardening)
Of course, this is by no mean the end-of-all-be-all of niches, but it is a helpful way to start thinking about your niche and how you can niche down. Please don’t neglect to do your competitor research as you are defining your niche. Your competitor research will be super important to come up with your lead magnet, your SEO content, and your monetization strategy, all of which we talk about in great detail in my Niche Site Workshop.
What It Means to Make Passive Income With Niche Websites
Before we go any further, you need to realize that passive income is never fully passive. For example, if you invest in property, you have to maintain your properties. If you invest in the stock market, you will need to research and update your investing portfolio. With niche websites, you need to update your site regularly. However, your previous content will keep bringing in new customers and your income will compound itself. Moreover, you do not need to be actively involved in the process forever. With time, you will be able to outsource the creation of new content.
Ok, so now that we have the basics out of the way what is the exact formula I use to create a reliable income with niche websites? Read on…
Passive Income With Niche Websites Formula
If you have watched my workshop, you know that my formula for passive income with niche websites includes five steps:
- Setting Up for Success
- Creating Your Website
- Using Email Marketing
- Monetizing Your Website
- Driving Traffic
My post How to Start a Niche Site That Can Actually Make a Full-Time Income deals with each of the steps in great detail. In this post, I want to expand on the monetizing side of the process to help you have a better understanding of what it means to earn passive income with niche websites.
How Much Can a Niche Site Earn
The amount of money you can earn with your niche site will vary depending on many factors like:
- What is you niche?
- What are you selling?
- How old is your site?
- How often are you updating your site?
- How much traffic are you getting?
After about a year, you will earn anything between $100 a month to $3000 a month. My health and wellness website is a little bit over one year old and earns between $200 and $700 a month. The health and wellness niche is very competitive and the products you will be selling will usually not bring tons of money per sale (for example, you may be an affiliate for supplements and sell a weight loss or wellness digital program).
The $2,000 a month mark is the tipping point where you are no longer a hobby blogger, and you have a legitimate online business (even though all the time leading up to that, you may still be working as hard as any business owner). It’s important to remember that it takes time to reach that tipping point. Many bloggers hustle and get on the phone to make sales. That’s not the strategy I teach. My focus is driving SEO traffic blog content.
To learn more about creating passive income with niche websites read this fascinating Blog Income Report Research Study by The Blog Millionaire. All the infographics you will find here are from this Blog Income Report.
Digital Courses
There is one consistent revenue stream that all bloggers in the higher income brackets share: digital courses. Even though I am still in the hobby income bracket, I have noticed this to be true on my sites as well. My digital courses have skyrocketed my revenue. On my health and wellness site, it accounts for at least half my revenue each month.
I really enjoyed reading Blog Income Report Research Study by The Blog Millionaire. And this nice little chart offers a great visual;
Ads
In the Blog Income Report Research Study by The Blog Millionaire, you will also see that ads can generate an important proportion of your passive income with niche websites.
Your income from ads is in direct correlation with your blog traffic. Here are the top 3 most common ad networks used by bloggers:
- AdSense (no traffic requirement)
- Monumetric (at least 10,000 pageviews a month)
- Mediavine (at least 60,000 pagiews a month).
Affiliate Marketing
I love affiliate marketing as a monetization strategy! It’s one of the first strategies I recommend. By the way, I promote network marketing products on my health and wellness blog the same way you would promote affiliate products. That’s also an option. To find affiliate products to promote, think of products you already love and use in your niche and google if they offer affiliate programs. Furthermore, check the most popular affiliate networks for products in your niche and look at what products your competitors are promoting.
Here are some popular affiliate networks:
Amazon Associates: Don’t forget that you need to make 3 sales within 180 days. If you decide to become an Amazon affiliate, it’s a good idea to wait that you have enough traffic to make sales.
ShareASale: My favorite affiliate network! It’s worth checking it out!
FlexOffers: You will find affiliate programs in various niches.
Clickbank: Clickbank remains one of the most popular affiliate marketplaces.
In Summary
Earning passive income with niche websites doesn’t mean you are earning a full-time income after less than a year of blogging and that you don’t have to do any work to maintain your income. What it does mean is that you have the potential of earning a full-time income writing about your passion and helping others who are going on a similar journey as you. It takes time perseverance, but it is incredibly rewarding. As a blogger, you will find that working on your online business is one of those pull activities from which you have a heard time stepping away from. That’s when you know you have found your purpose! If you can relate, let me know, I would love to connect with you.
