Making Money with Micro Niche Websites

What is a micro niche website?

Different people have different definitions for micro niche sites. To me, it’s a website that:

• Focuses on one very specific topic.
• Has about 10 or less articles on it.
• Isn’t regularly updated.
• Gets its traffic from search engines.

You will have come across a micro niche site before. You search for something very specific like “best Christmas movies” and come across a website that only contains information about Christmas movies and nothing else. The site will be small and will usually have adverts on it of some sort.

These websites are created with the sole purpose of ranking highly in search results, and earning money by advertising.

Some people don’t like micro niche sites because plenty of them are full of spam and don’t really provide you with the information you’re after. The information can also be quite dated because these, by definition, micro niche sites aren’t updated regularly.

I personally think that these websites can be done quite well. If they contain the information people are after then they are useful for the readers and have the potential to earn a passive income for the owner.

The thing that attracts people to the idea of building micro niche sites is the promise of “passive income”. You build the sites, do some search engine optimization, add some adverts, and then just leave it to earn you money while you sleep.

Because of this great promise of “passive income”, the world of micro niche sites has become hugely competitive. If people search for something very specific, the chances are that there’s already a micro niche site to cater for their needs. On the other hand, people search for a huge variety of things, and new search terms pop up every day. I believe that there’s still some opportunity out there to make some passive income from micro niche sites.

What do I need to do create a micro niche site of my own?

1. Find a niche topic that’s not too competitive.
2. Build a website and populate it with about 10 articles on the chosen niche.
3. Do some search engine optimization to ensure that my website ranks highly in search results.
4. Monetize the website.

Sounds easy right? The vital part is the first one. Picking the niche. It has to be something that people search for that isn’t too competitive.

What I did.

After doing my market research, the topic that I chose to build the site around is oily skin. Specifically oily skin on men. The exact phrase “oily skin men” gets searched for 210 times a month in Google and there isn’t a micro niche site for it on the first page of the search results. 210 searches a month is very little, but I picked this niche because I already have a website about oily skin so it would latterly take me minutes to re-work the articles. The competition for the search term is non-existent too so I will have to spend very little time on this. I aim to rank highly in the search results for other related search phrases too, like “men oily skin”, “moisturizers for men with oily skin” etc.

If I manage to get to the number 1 spot in the search results for “oily skin men”, I’d expect 84 visitors a month from that search term (about 40% of the total searches).

The variable cost for building the site is the price of the domain name. I already have hosting space I can use for the site. It cost me $11 to register the domain for a year.

I registered the domain name www.oilyskinmen.com and set the site up. It took me a total of about 2 hours, all articles included. Since then I have spent about 7 hours on search engine optimization and the site comes up on page 1 or 2 for my key search term.

I expect that it will take me another 10 hours of SEO to get to number 1 on Google for my search term. I’ve only just added Google adverts onto the site. I expect about 4% of the visitors to the site to click on the adverts. This means that in a year, the site could earn about $50. This doesn’t sound great, because it’s not. The aim with these sites is to build loads of them so that your income adds up. Saying that, earning $30 a year for the rest of my life without the need to do any more work doesn’t sound like a bad thing. If this experiment pays off, I’ll definitely be adding more micro niche sites to my income portfolio.

As I’ve only just added adverts to the niche site, I wont be able to conclude this experiment just yet. To get a better idea of how successful micro niche sites can be, I will be experimenting with a couple more so stay posted for that!

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