How to start a niche site:
- Choose a niche
- Pick a domain name
- Set up web hosting
- Build the niche website
- Perform keyword research for content ideas
- Publish high-quality content consistently
- Build backlinks
- Collect user emails
- Monetize the niche website
- Drive more traffic with social media
It’s beneficial to start a niche website if you have an interest in a topic and want to generate online income. A niche site is a website that publishes content for a specific topic to attract an audience interested in that topic. For example, Making Sense of Cents is a niche website by Michelle Schroeder-Gardner that talks about side hustles and making money from home to reach financial independence.
Niche websites do make money. They make money through strategies like affiliate marketing, ad networks, and selling Ecommerce products. For example, the niche site Living Cozy by Ex-Buffer editorial director Ash Read makes over $10K per month promoting home and furniture brand affiliate links.
I've been making money online from website traffic for over a decade now. In the following article, I discuss how to start a niche site and disclose the latest strategies for getting traffic in the age of AI.
1. Choose a niche
The top factors to consider when choosing a niche site niche are:
A niche is the most important consideration of a niche website. In fact, 72% of niche site owners attribute their success to focusing on a specific niche, according to WeCanTrack.
2. Pick a domain name
Follow these simple guidelines for choosing your niche site domain name.
AI name generators like Namelix or Looka can help you brainstorm domain name ideas. Just enter a handful of keywords most relevant to your niche and site topic to generate a list of ideas.
Once you have a few domain name ideas, head to a domain registrar like Namecheap to check availability. If the domain name you want for your niche site is available, you can purchase it. However, many web hosting providers offer a free domain name when you buy their web hosting package. When you buy web hosting in the next step, you can verify if you can get your domain for free.
3. Set up web hosting
Purchase web hosting from a reputable web hosting provider like Hostinger, SiteGround, Bluehost, or Ionos.
If you buy your domain name and web hosting from different service providers, you need to connect your domain name with your web hosting. You do this by adding your web hosting nameservers to the custom Domain Name System (DNS) settings of your domain registrar.
Web hosting allows your niche site project to be accessible over the internet. A web hosting provider stores your website files and data on servers so they are accessible to your users at all times.
It’s essential to choose a quality web hosting provider with fast speed because poor website performance directly affects your niche site revenue potential. A study by Kissmetrics finds that just a 1 second delay reduces customer satisfaction by 16% and site conversions by 7%. Furthermore, Google reveals that 53% of mobile website visitors will abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
4. Build the niche website
Choose a website builder to build your niche website without coding knowledge. Popular options include Snapps.ai, WordPress, and Wix. Snapps is particularly impressive because of its artificial intelligence that builds websites fast. It also includes web hosting through the ultra reliable Amazon Web Services (AWS), allowing you a complete solution for web hosting and website building in one package.
The main pages every niche site should include are:
- Home page - Landing page where you show your niche expertise, promote your offer, and present your best content.
- About page - Where you share your story and mission. Used to build credibility with your audience.
- Blog (or content hub) - URL where your articles are organized for your audience to read.
There are many other pages you can build for a niche site, such as a product or services page, testimonial page, and FAQ page. The additional pages you include depend on how you decide to monetize the niche website.
5. Perform keyword research for content ideas
Use keyword research tools to find article topic ideas. Create a list of 25 - 50 keyword ideas to get started. There are a range of free and paid keyword research tools available. There are also a variety of strategies for performing keyword research for niche sites.
Google Keyword Planner is a free keyword research tool you can access with a Google Ads account. You don’t need to run any paid ad campaigns to use the tool for keyword research.
With Google Keyword Planner, you can find keyword ideas by entering keywords related to your niche or entering a competitor site.
Click "Get Results" and Google produces a list of potential keyword ideas to create content around. It includes useful data like average monthly searches, trend, and competition level.
Most niche site owners elect to perform keyword research with the support of a paid keyword research tool. Typically, Ahrefs. To perform niche site keyword research with Ahrefs, navigate to the Keywords Explorer tool. Enter a handful of keywords relevant to your niche and click search.
Ahrefs excels with its advanced filtering and keyword difficulty (KD) metric. When first starting a niche site, your authority is low. You should target keywords with low difficulty as you build your authority. Update the KD filter in Ahrefs so that the tool outputs low competition keywords for you to target.
You can validate that the keywords Ahrefs produces are really low competition by typing the keyword into Google to analyze the strength of the websites ranking. Ahrefs includes a useful Chrome extension that provides useful metrics right in the Google SERP. One of the best metrics for analyzing keyword ranking difficulty is to look at the domain rating (DR) of the websites ranking on the first page of Google for your target keyword.
Proper keyword research is essential because most niche websites rely on organic traffic from Google. Good keyword research allows you to find the right opportunities in your niche that actually have traffic and that you can actually rank based on your websites strength. The first page of Google accounts for between 71% and 92% of all web traffic, according to Darwill.
6. Publish high-quality content consistently
Once you have your target keyword list, create a content calendar to ensure you publish new content on schedule. Tools like Asana, Google Sheets, and Trello are effective for planning and assigning content.
To create high-quality content, start with a content brief. A content brief organizes sections of an article into a relevant sequence. It incorporates all sections of the article, including the questions to be answered and the keywords that should be incorporated. The purpose of a content brief is to guide your content and ensure you’re hitting the necessary topics to rank on the first page of Google.
Look at the articles ranking on the first page of Google to understand the content Google is currently ranking. See what headers they are using and the keywords they have incorporated into their article. SEO tools like Surfer SEO and Market Muse can quickly pull this information for you. The goal is to make your article better than the top ranking articles by providing better information more concisely and adding more uniqueness.
Once your content brief is ready, write the niche site content. Although AI tools like ChatGPT can be useful in content creation, it’s best to use a human writer to actually write the content. That’s because generative AI tools typically just paraphrase content that is already on the internet. A human writer can think critically and provide unique perspectives, which Google prefers.
The more organic traffic you can attract, the more money your niche site can earn. A study by Hubspot found that websites that publish at least 16 articles per month generate 3.5 times more traffic than those that publish 4 articles or less. Content freshness is also one of the top Google ranking factors, according to Backlinko. Niche sites that publish content on a regular basis show Google they offer fresh content to Google users.
7. Build backlinks
Connect with website owners or use a link building agency to get other websites to link back to your niche site. Simply having high-quality content isn’t enough to attract backlinks to a niche site. Typically, websites will only naturally link back to highly authoritative websites like government agencies and major news outlets.
To build your own backlinks, you need to reach out to website owners directly. Target websites that are relevant to your niche. You can attempt to reach these website owners through cold email or cold calling. You’ll likely need to offer them a combination of content and monetary compensation to get them to link back to your website. Guest posts are a common link building strategy where a website owner provides an entirely new article that includes a backlink. Niche edits are another link building strategy where a backlink is added to an already existing piece of content on the website. The average cost of a quality backlink is around $195, according to FatRank.
Buying backlinks from a link building agency is the easiest way to acquire backlinks. Reputable link building agencies build relationships with high-quality websites to provide links that boost your search engine ranking. For example, I provide my clients with quality backlinks that are at least DR 30 or above.
A third strategy that some niche site owners can use to attract backlinks is to provide free tools on the website. This is the strategy that Neil Patel used to get millions of backlinks to his website. Neil incorporated free digital marketing tools like Answer The Public and Ubersuggest into his website. Other websites owner link back to his website naturally because they want to link their readers to these tools.
Backlinks are a primary ranking factor for Google search. They show Google that other websites value the target website, which gives the Google algorithm more confidence in maximizing the site's visibility. A study by Ahrefs found that the top-ranking pages had 3 times more backlinks on average than the pages on the second page of Google search results. This indicates a strong connection between the amount of backlinks and Google ranking position.
8. Collect user emails
Add an email form to collect reader emails somewhere on your home page. You can add this at the top of your niche website, at the bottom in the footer, or as a pop up that triggers after the user has been on the site for a few seconds.
Email marketing is a useful strategy for monetizing a niche website. Adding a user to your email list allows you to target them with promotions long term, even if they never reach your website through the search engine again. According to a study by Campaign Monitor, 37% of respondents reported email marketing as the most effective marketing channel for customer loyalty and retention.
9. Monetize the niche website
You can generate income with a niche website through:
10. Drive more traffic with social media
Use social media to promote your content beyond the search engine. Facebook is the optimal social channel for increasing niche site traffic.
Niche Site Lady on X uses this strategy to generate thousands of dollars a day from her niche sites. She runs Facebook Ads to get users into her niche Facebook page, where she then promotes her new niche site content.
Social media adds an additional channel to increase traffic for a niche website. Higher levels of traffic boost revenue potential.
Can you still earn a good income with a niche site in 2025?
Yes, you can still earn a good income with a niche site in 2025. Niche Site Lady regularly discloses her niche site earnings to her audience. In her newsletter #135 from January 2025, she reveals she just made a whopping $619,876 in 2024 from just one travel niche site. Although down from her 2023 earnings, people are still earning a solid income from niche sites.
However, it’s gotten much more challenging to be successful with niche sites because of Google algorithm updates and the increasing use of AI. In an effort to combat generative AI content, 2024 Google algorithm updates started giving preference to major publications like Forbes and forums like Reddit and Quora. These are the types of pages ranking at the top of Google these days, taking major traffic from smaller publishers like niche sites. In newsletter #135, even Niche Site Lady admits her Google traffic has dropped substantially.
AI is also changing search habits in a way that is negatively affecting niche websites ability to generate SEO traffic. People used to click into websites 100% of the time to find an answer. Now, Google AI overviews take the best information from the top ranking pages and summarize it at the top of search so people don't need to click into websites anymore. Furthermore, many people are now turning to AI tools like ChatGPT rather than Google. Barry Schwartz of the Search Engine Roundtable posted a survey for his 200K+ followers on X asking if they use traditional search less because of AI. 55% of respondents admitted to using generative AI more than Google these days.
Is affiliate marketing easy or hard with a niche site?
Affiliate marketing is easy with a niche site because affiliate links appear more naturally in website articles. Affiliate marketers using YouTube or social media to generate traffic need to convince the user to click into the description or bio to click links. With a niche site, the user doesn’t need to take this extra step. The affiliate link appears where they already have their cursor. Niche sites account for 40% of all profitable affiliate marketing, according to We Can Track.
Do people still read blogs?
Yes, people still read blogs. 18% of internet users read blogs daily, according to Master Blogging. Most internet users read at least 1 - 4 blogs per month.
Conclusion: Is it possible to build a niche website and monetize it?
Yes, it is possible to build a niche website and monetize it. This has been proven countless times over the years. For example, Jon Dykstra of the Fat Stacks Blog earned $93,676 in just one month in 2023 from his niche sites, primarily from Mediavine ads and affiliate marketing.
However, building and monetizing a niche site isn’t as easy or profitable as it used to be. AI is changing SEO rapidly. Successful niche sites these days leverage additional channels like social media and paid ads to supplement organic traffic. An alternative online business model that hasn’t been affected by recent search changes is local lead generation. Local lead generation is an SEO business model that entails setting up websites that generate and sell leads to local business owners.
Unlike niche websites that rely on high competition traffic from global keywords, local lead generation websites target local competition. These websites compete against a handful of small local business owners for traffic. Furthermore, local lead generation websites rank and generate traffic from business queries, such as “plumber Dallas”. These types of queries can’t really be satisfied with a Google AI overview because they aren’t informational. They are transactional in nature and need to be fulfilled with business websites.
I build business websites that rank on the first page of Google and sell the leads to real business owners for $500 - $3,000. Learn how to generate online income with local lead generation.
