How to make money with a niche blog

Niche marketing is a very broad term itself because there are thousands of ways to make money with it. I know a handful of ways to make money with it, and I’m about to share them with you in my Niche Marketing 101 courses.

The first course will be the easiest one that will help you experience what it is like to own a niche.

How to Make Money with a Niche Blog

I’m sure you’ve heard it before. Start a blog and put some Adsense on it. Well, my niche blog model has a little twist. You don’t have to spend hours in searching for a niche with my model. For content, you will just need to write about 2-3 paragraphs. Oh, and probably.. 1 post a month… yeah..only 1!

I have a niche blog that has 3 posts and brings me almost 10,000 uniques a month. Each post has about 3 short paragraphs. I know it’s hard to believe, but I have a handful of these sites in my portfolio. Here is a most recent screenshot from the niche blog.

I think it will hit 10,000 mark by the end of May. Did I create a crap site to attract the visitors? well, if the site was crappy, 40% of them wouldn’t bookmark my site, right?

I’m just trying to tell you that you are not wasting time with my niche blog model. If you are willing to give it a try, you will be able to make money with it, breaking the infamous niche marketing myth! This is critical for niche marketing beginners. It’s a founding step for anyone who wants to see their first $1 in niche marketing. And my niche blog model will help you earn your first $1 with niche marketing.

Choosing a Niche

I’ve already told you that you will not spend hours searching for a niche. That’s right. Choosing a niche is the key to my model. With this model, you will be selecting a popular event or contest/giveaway as your main niche. I’m not talking about TV programs like American Idol, but I’m talking about an annual event or some sort, such as HGTV annual dream home giveaways. Wait, is HGTV giveaway my niche? no, but I’m going to use it as my example here. Feel free to use it though.

Why This Works

Believe or not, again using HGTV as an example, millions people talk about it and search for it consistently throughout the year. But there aren’t many niche sites dedicated for covering these giveaways or events. These events are usually covered by the mainstream media, and that’s about it. If you build a dedicated site covering these events, you can out-rank major media sites. No kidding. Even if they out-rank you, you will be able to claim a spot in the first page of the search result page with little effort. This is true because the main media covers only at the time of the event while your site will be talking about it throughout the year and your site will be credited for it by the search engines.

Why a Blog?

It’s just my personal preference. It’s easy to update, and I’m comfortable with it. Feel free to try different things.

How it Works

First thing you need to do is choosing a domain name and getting a hosting service for it. I don’t want to go over it in this tutorial. I’m willing to help you it, but will not discuss it in this post.

I’m assuming you’ve already chosen your niche by now (visit the forum for some ideas) . What you are going to do is just write a short news brief of the event. You can summarize news write-ups from other sites, and even give your personal opinions on it. It shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes for each post. Make sure to use your keywords. Try to use the variations of your chosen niche event. After a while, just remind the readers how many days are left to the event and how you are excited about it. Try to create some buzz around it, and start some conversations and surveys. Surveys can be as simple as.. asking your readers where they are coming from.

It may sound silly, but people DO go crazy for an annual event or monthly event that they are attached to. Usually, your blog will be the only site where they can find the latest updates in one place. I’ve noticed that even the bigger events don’t have a proper website. You will be filling the gap with your niche blog.

Let me tell you some of my crazy niche blogs that I’m using this methods with. I have niche blogs in local farmer’s market, local fire station’s monthly yard sale (very popular one in the city), and about 5 niche blogs covering nationwide events that happens once a year, 4 niche blogs covering some types of giveaways and contests, and some other crazy stuff.

Helpful Tips

1. Stay away from one time events. It’s a waste of your time.

2. Try both micro-niche events and world-wide events.

3. Find event images through Flickr.com and post them on your blog. Don’t forget to give proper credits.

4. When you post an image, make sure to put keywords in it also. Name your photo with your keywords. This is how I get so many visitors from Google Image search.

5. If you can, write at least once a week when you begin. I normally do 1-2 posts a month, or 1-2 posts a week for monthly events. I found it just enough for me. But you can do better with more posts.

6. Try different monetization methods for each site. Some sites will do better with CPA, and some sites will do better with plain Adsense.

7. Give outbound links to related sites.

Questions & Need Help?

My time is limited, but I’m sure other great marketers will be helping you at our niche marketing forum. Ask questions there please.

I hope you learned something from the post, and take action. I will share some of my ideas on niche topics in my forum. So come there to discuss about it.