In my post What Is a Niche Site: The Ultimate Passive Income Strategy, I explain my favorite strategy to narrow down your niche and research your competitors. Today, I am going to use this same strategy and present to you my top 10 niche websites to inspire your niche research.
Top 5 Niches
The top 10 niche websites I will feature in this post will be in the top 5 most popular niches. Now, if you look at popular niches online, you will find that there are many ways to classify them, so I will do my best to define my top 5 niches well enough for you to know where you fit in:
- 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, I realize that I grouped a bunch of niches that some wouldn’t group together. For example, beauty with fitness and personal finances with making money, but you can probably see how they could fall under the same umbrella. Moreover, having five main niches allows me to present two websites in each niche, which is a nice even way to classify my top 10 niche websites.
To learn more about creating your own niche site to build your online business, don’t forget to sign up for my 30-minute workshop.
Top 10 Niche Websites
Now that we have our niches all defined, let’s get to our top 10 niche websites that you must see to get inspired as you research your niche and unlock your online income earning potential.
Health and Wellness Niche
The health and wellness niche is huge and very competitive. In fact, many courses I have taken didn’t recommend it as a niche site option because it is not only very competitive, but you also need to be some kind of expert for Google to rank your posts. However, my own niche site is in the health and wellness niche so I can guarantee you that if health is your passion, you can make it work.
1. Autumn Bates
This first website in my top 10 niche website list was easy to pick because it’s my main competitor in the world of fitness, weight loss, and intermittent fasting. Autum Bates has done many things right on her website:
- She has a super effective lead magnet that is congruent with her digital products.
- Her main menu gives you access to her most important resources.
- She shares transformations that showcase her clients’s results.
- Her blog posts are written with SEO in mind.
- She has been growing her traffic steadily.
2. Lindsay Silberman
I really wanted to find a good website to emulate in the beauty niche, and it wasn’t easy! That being, it only means that there is room for you! The reason it was so hard wasn’t that I could find sites with a lower domain authority ranking for good keywords. Rather, the problem was that the sites that were ranking were also lacking good marketing practices. They didn’t have a lead magnet or didn’t sell anything easily accessible from their website. In the beauty niche, you could be an affiliate for beauty products and you could create a digital product to help women learn to take care of their skin or to apply makeup, for example. I wonder, if I had research hair keywords, I probably would have found sites that sell hairdo tutorials (I remember buying one like that before).
Can Paid Beauty Tutorials Be Profitable?
You might say there are tons of free tutorials online, why would people pay for a digital product about how to apply makeup? Two reasons (and that goes for all the niches):
- When you consistently provide quality content, your fan base will grow and these fans will buy your paid content even if they may be able to research the info for free (time is valuable as well).
- There is an important distinction between paid content and free content: Free content is just a small fraction of what you are trying to achieve while paid content takes you step-by step to get you from point A to point B. For example, you are not just getting a makeup tutorial, you are learning to look younger and brigther through, diet, exercise, skin care, and makeup.
Anyway back to Lindsy Silberman’s website. She doesn’t sell digital products, but she has an Amazon store to monetize her site. She also has excellent Google traffic despite her still growing domain authority (36). I always look for websites that have a domain authority around 50 or lower.
Relationships Niche
Ok, our two next sites in my 10 niche websites are in the relationship niche. Let’s start with marriage advice.
3. Our Relationship
This niche research exercise made me realize how good of a niche the relationships niche is. I didn’t have to dig further with long-tail keywords and I didn’t have to scroll way down the results to find decent competitors. The site Our Relationship offers programs to help couples and individual improve their relationships. The site’s monthly traffic is impressive too!
4. Hess Un-Academy
As a homeschooling mom myself, I had to pick a niche site in the homeschooling niche. Again, it was an easy find, so this is another great niche. The Hess Un-Academy site has excellent traffic (with the benefits of Mediavine, yay! – learn more about monetizing though ads in my post How to Start a Niche Site That Can Actually Make a Full-Time Income). There is also a shop tab, which is excellent. That being said, I am not a big fan of the site name, but oh well!
Money Niche
The making money online niche is also very competitive. Personal finances can be tricky because Google will favor content from experts. For my first niche site example, I decided to look for something about investing in the real estate market. I ended up finding a site about living and investing overseas.
5. Live and Invest Overseas
I could see myself starting a website in this niche as moving overseas is one of my long-term goals (I will try real hard to resist the urge to start yet another website😊). Again, the Live and Invest Overseas site was easy to find. Looks like working and investing abroad would be an excellent niche. The website owner knows marketing and offers an effective and congruent lead magnet on top of having a bookstore with useful digital products. Could do a better job with SEO, but still getting excellent traffic.
6. Wealth Awesome
As part of my top 10 niche websites, this one is still not strictly about real estate, but it goes to show you that you can start more specific and grow from there. The Wealth Awesome site is about wealth in general. There, you will find info about money and investing. The monetization strategy is pretty clear: affiliate products. It doesn’t look like the site owner has an email marketing strategy though. If you were to pick this niche, I would recommend you research it until you find some lead magnet ideas.
Technology Niche
The technology niche is an excellent niche if you love gadgets! Your readers are usually ready to buy as they research reviews and tutorials.
7. Too Many Adapters
The Too Many Adapters niche site is clearly monetized hrough affiliate commissions and a clever What to Buy menu. No ads despite enough traffic for ads to generate a decent income. No digital products either. It is actually a more specific niche as well as it targets travelers. The tagline read: Technology for Travelers.
8- Micreviews
I didn’t realize you could narrow down your niche this much, but that’s what Micreviews did with a niche site exclusively about microphones! And it has done so successfully as well, check out its monthly traffic:
It look slike Micreviews is monetized exclusively through affiliate commissions.
Hobby Niche
The hobby niche is surely one of the best choices of niches. In the context of my top 10 niche websites, the first hobby niche site I found is a photopraphy site, which ironically I found when I was looking for gadget sites!
9- Dave Morrow Photography
I love this website, it is one of the better-done sites that I’ve found. It has an excellent lead magnet, some affiliate reviews, digital products, and on-site workshops. This photographer knows how to run a site!
10- GroCycle
I really wanted to find a good homesteading niche site example. Homesteading is gaining in popularity fast, you could easily create a digital product to help people who wish to homestead and need to learn how to become self-reliant. Furthermore, the competition is not difficult, most sites that came up in my research had a faily low domain authority. However, let me say this: I don’t think homesteaders have a clue about online marketing. Most homesteading websites don’t seem to have a clear monetization strategy. Eventually, I managed to find GroCycle. GroCycle provides an effective lead magnet to help readers set up a mushroom farm and then some mushroom cultivation courses (remember, in my Niche Site Workshop, I emphasize the importance of making sure your lead magnet solves the same problem as your digital product?).
In Summary
What did you think of my top 10 niche websites? It was very time consuming to search for good niche site examples in the 5 most poplar niches, but totally worth it! I am glad I did because it made me realize something super important: the blogging space has tons of room for growth. Most bloggers don’t really know how to properly monetize their site. For you, it means that you can outgrow most niche sites out there if you know what you are doing. That’s why I am here to help!
