Residual Income Web Blog

Niche websites can be an excellent, long-term source of passive income. In this post and more to follow, I’ll show you how to make money with a content site. If you don’t yet have a site, you’ll have to build it from scratch or use a website builder to start. But even before you purchase your domain name, if you’re building from scratch, you need to do a little background research to determine if your niche is potentially profitable.

As a disclaimer, I should note that the majority of my residual income is currently from content articles, my ebook, and affiliate sales. I am in the process of monetizing a nutrition website I started 15 months ago, and have created several smaller websites in the past few months that are already generating ad and affiliate revenue. Building up a sizable passive income from websites is part of my long-term business model.

There are several steps, or criteria, to determining a profitable niche topic for your website. My method isn’t purely scientific, but I do weigh several different things when purchasing a domain for an additional income stream.

Brainstorm Ideas

Consider your hobbies, interests, experience, past and present jobs and skills and knowledge base when brainstorming possible niche topics for your website. Come up with several ideas and use Wordtracker’s Free Keyword Tool to find keywords that could be your main domain name and website title.

TIP: Consumer- themed websites, such as ones on items people are looking into purchasing, can be quite profitable as site visitors are already in a buying mood. For example, a site on ski equipment or electronics.

Sites with information on how to do things, whether it’s lose weight or learn how to golf, have also been extremely popular. Keep in mind current trends, but look for an overall topic that can encompass change if the trends are short lived.

Projected Profitability

Will your niche site idea actually make money? This is obviously rather important if you are building it to make money online and develop a decent passive income stream.  You’ll need to do a little scouting to find out if your site will monetize well.

Take your site keywords and plug them into the Google Adsense Keyword Tool. Select the Average CPC column so you can view the cost of advertisements. If there are many keywords over $1, especially if some are $5 and above, you have good profitability potential for your niche.

TIP: Another way to get related keywords to your main site keyword is to find a similar site online and use its URL to find keywords. Navigate to the Google Search-based keyword tool, and use the website address of your top competing site (find this by googling your main keywords) and click find keywords. You can then check out these keywords’ advertisement costs as well as search statistics to help determine whether you should use them.

Check out Amazon.com for books and items in your niche. If there are good products that fit your topic, you’ll have the possibility of using Amazon for affiliate sales on your site.

Also look for other affiliate programs, through ClickBank, Commission Junction (cj.com) and topic-related commercial sites, for possible matches. Use this information to get a feel for how well you could bring in money through your site.

Competition

Google the main keywords for your site, as well as keyword phrases you would use for individual pages on your topic. If there are dozens of high-ranking, highly relevant sites for your niche keywords, you might have trouble garnering top Google spots for your site pages. However, there are often many mediocre sites or ones without relevant domain names in the search results. These will be easier to pass in search results. Also, if you see Amazon or other merchandise-based sites high in the list, the niche probably doesn’t have a lot of competition, as Google generally prefers content-based sites.

The search result numbers aren’t as important as the quality and relevance of sites returned. Look at the domain names. If they don’t have your main keywords, it will be even easier to get ahead.

Personal Knowledge & Interest in Topic

Choose topics that interest you and that will be easy to research and write, especially if you plan to create all fo the content yourself. If a topic bores you to tears or requires a lot of careful research to make sure you get it right, it will likely be too burdensome to keep up. Make sure you have a decent amount of interest and experience on the topic so you come across as an authority and can easily create many content pages on the topic.

Putting it Together

SiteBuildIt! has a Brainstorming tool you can use to determine whether a site topic will be worth it to you, and that’s how I decided on the topic for my first niche site.  But you can also weigh the criteria yourself, or even go with a “hunch” if something feels right and the numbers are at least respectable. One of my sites was not projected to be very profitable due to low-cost advertisements for my keywords, but I decided to write it anyway because it was low-effort and I have a feeling the topic will increase in popularity and profitability if the economic downturn continues or turns into a depression. Only a couple months after I put it online with about a dozen pages it makes about 50 cents to a $1 a day, and I have barely begun marketing and adding content. So it is earnings and paying for itself, with minimal effort. With time and work, I think it will be a nice income stream.

Make a list of your different site ideas and their main keywords. Note profitability, competition, and personal interest on a low-medium-high scale and consider the whole picture when making your decision.

Next post in the series will be about setting up a  niche site … stay tuned or subscribe to my RSS feed to get notification of new posts.

Do you have niche websites? Have they been reliable residual income streams for you? What have you learned through your experiences?