Are you passionate about something? Do you have a lot to say on a certain subject? Are you an amazing cook or fitness guru? Running your own niche website is a great way of expressing your opinion and making money through things like Adsense, banner advertising and sponsored articles. This article will show you how to get started and hopefully make some extra income.
Are you passionate about something? Do you have a lot to say on a certain subject? Are you an amazing cook or fitness guru? Running your own niche website is a great way of expressing your opinion and making money through things like Adsense, banner advertising and sponsored articles. This article will show you how to get started and hopefully make some extra income.
Find a Topic Your Care About
When you think of your niche website pick something that you know there is an active community for as you always want to encourage engagement. By inviting people to comment and send in their own thoughts it helps you create a community around your own website which will then bring in even more visitors.
Always put a unique perspective on what you’re talking about. This can be done through research, questionnaires, reading books that have been lost for years, interviewing people or just coming up with your own theories and putting them out to the world.
One thing to remember is that you should always keep a notebook handy so when you do come up with a great idea for an article you have safe place to remember it.
Consistency is Key
I spoke to a wonderful gentleman who runs a long term blog here in Thailand and he said that the most important thing was the consistency of posting i.e what and when you post. He always posts his articles on Sunday afternoon without fail and his readership expects this too.
Creating a content schedule is a great way of helping you keep on track. First, choose how many articles you can consistently write a week, second space them out over the week (or month if you writing only a few articles) and then write the type of article you will write into the calendar. For example Monday = article on ESL teaching, Wednesday = Book review and Friday = funny stories from teachers.
Just remember to be honest yourself and map your content writing around your daily life.
Know your Voice
Before you embark on this quest think about the angle and kind of voice you want to bring to your topic. Are reviewing, informing or condemning? Are formal, free, fanatical or friendly? Choose early and stick to it as people tend to warm towards characters.
To get started first define your personality in a sentence. Then think if your writing style was say a drink what would it be? A glass of aged red wine? A fruity cocktail or even a cool glass of easy-going beer? If you get stuck then try different personalities and write say 200 words in that persona and see which one feels right.
Think of your favourite author or column in the newspaper and how look forward to reading articles from certain critics. Well that is the feeling you want to give to your readers.
Are you Ready to Make Money?
To cut a long story short you need over 30,000 unique visitors a month to warrant charging for exposure on your website with the norm being around 50,000 to 100,000. However! If you can show potential customers that your site has a highly active and focused readership then they may consider paying you for advertising.
Business owners like me want ROI or brand exposure. Businesses they will want to know your CTR (click through rate) so they can work out how many potential customers they can expect. It is easy to do a Google Analytics PDF export of your sites stats so keep that handy to send to customers.
How to make the money
Selling Banner Space
First you will need to page on your site advertising what banner sizes and types are available. Be sure to include information about dimensions in Pixels and the size of the file e.g. keep under 100Kb. Your pricing will depend on the length of time, placement and size of the banner. Start cheap and work your way up e.g 460×60 full banner, on the homepage for one month is 3000 baht.
Need help selling? Then try signing up for http://buysellads.com as they will sell and manage your spaces for you. You could also offer banner design services by learning photoshop and offer a full package.
Installing AdSense
Another way to make money is through Adsense which puts Google ads on your website depending upon your set criteria or the keywords on the page. Be careful when doing this, less is more so don’t spam your own website with too many ads.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is a lucrative way to make money with your site by working with stores and earning a cut of their sales. There are a number of affiliate marketing tools that can help you get started with this and it is an easy way to earn.
Sponsored Articles
If you have a successful website you may start to get companies and individuals contacting you to do paid reviews or sponsored articles. Essentially they pay you to review their product or they send you an article to put in your site. In return, they will ask for a link to their site. With this, you have to put the quality of your website first rather than a quick $20 shoddy article on your site.
Only post reviews and sponsored articles that are interesting and relevant to your users and don’t be afraid to ask the company to re-write an article or link back to your review from their website.
Last Thoughts
Building a successful website is all about amazing content, lots of quality inbound links and tones of social media. It takes time to build a successful website and it all depends on that passion you have in the pit of your stomach for your topic.
Write passionately and they will come.
