How to Start a Micro Niche Blog and Grow Fast in 2023, You see, one of the best ways for a true beginner to make money online is to make a niche website, grow it, and then sell it. Many people think it would be a dream to be able to make enough money from a single blog to live full-time or even change their lives.
That’s the case for the thousands of people who live off of one or more websites full-time.
Don’t listen to people who say it’s impossible to make a niche website that makes money. Every day, thousands of new websites are made with the goal of making money.
Here is a step-by-step guide to setting up and starting a niche blog that does everything right to make money in the long run.
What Is a Niche Website?
Making money from a website is a great way to make money, but you can’t just start a personal blog and expect people to click on ads. Website owners who make good money focus on making sites that are about specific topics, or “niches,” that offer ways to make money.
These aren’t personal blogs, but rather sites that focus on a specific subject. A niche website might be about something like pets. Or it can keep getting smaller. A niche site could also be about training dogs, Labradors, Poodles, or something else more specific.
Niche sites are made with the goal of making money in mind. So they are built with display ads, affiliate sales, and making money in mind. This is important to keep advertisers happy.
Beginners might find this scary, but with a little bit of smart planning, it’s easy to start a new niche blog.
How To Start a Niche Blog
Here are the 9 easy steps to start a blog in a niche blog:
- Find out why you want to blog and make a plan to keep you going.
- Do your homework to find the right niche.
- Research on keywords and topics
- Choose a platform for your blog
- Choose the right place to host
- Create and build the blog
- Make content and set up a long-term plan for managing it.
- Learn how to make money and plan how to do it.
- Start making books.
I’ll explain each step in detail and show you screenshots of what you need to do.
Step 1: Why Do You Want To Blog?
When you drive without a map, it’s easy to get lost. This may seem like a simple answer, like “Get paid to write” or “Make money,” but breaking down those reasons can give you the long-term motivation you need.
Because building a niche blog can be profitable, but even people who have built and sold niche sites before know that it takes time.
Sit down and make sure you can write down why you want to blog. This will help you stay motivated when things get tough. Because if you are just starting out, you will have to work hard and it will take time.
Step 2: How to Choose Your Niche the Right Way
Blogs are interesting because you can write about almost anything you want. You are the editor in chief and publisher of your own work.
If the goal is to make money, the niche should be something that has a lot of interest, can be made money from, and to which you can add good information.
There are a lot of niches from which to choose. Don’t choose your topic based on how much it will pay. That puts you in competition with a lot of professionals who know more and have better credentials. It also puts you in a market niche where there is a lot of competition.
Look at your own interests, hobbies, or skills as a place to start. Look at what interests you, like cooking, camping, sports, or something you’ve always wanted to learn.
You might not find the perfect niche this way, but coming up with ideas will give you a good list to start with.
Step 3: How to Do Keyword Research Like a Pro
There are many ways to do keyword research, and there are even online courses that focus on different ways to do keyword research.
There is no one right way to do keyword research. Instead, there are several ways to do it. Before we get into specific practices, let’s make sure you know a few important things so you don’t make the same mistakes that many new bloggers do.
Step 4: How to Pick a Platform for Blogging
You already know that there are a lot of different ways to blog. You have to decide whether you want to start your blog on a free or paid platform.
We’ll go over the differences, but if you just want the short answer, it’s that you need a self-hosted blog, preferably with WordPress.
Step 5: How to Pick the Right Web Host and Domain Name
Many companies that host websites offer cheap shared hosting plans that promise the moon. Most of them fall short.
Many people who own niche websites find this out the hard way. The web hosting is slow. At best, there isn’t enough help. Websites go offline for hours and may or may not come back online at some point.
Most people have been through this before. Find good hosting by doing some research. Getting a server or good VPS is a good idea in the long run, but before you do that, look for a company like Cloudways that has a great reputation for quality shared hosting.
Step 6: How To Design & Develop The Blog
You can’t start making a lot of content until the blog is set up, and there are important things to think about when setting up a good blog for the long term.
Step 7: Create a Content Strategy
Every niche website that does well has a good content strategy at its core. Google wants good content, and good content that answers questions, uses long-tail keywords, and adds a lot of value will be ranked higher by Google than content that doesn’t do those things.
Your full strategy should include things like content goals, a schedule for publishing, keyword lists, and more. Think about the big picture and then move from the big picture to the details to get a better understanding.
Step 8: Using a niche blog to make money
A niche website can make money in a number of ways, and it’s important to know how they work. This can change how you write, what you write about, and how your blog posts are put together.
Here are the most common ways for bloggers to make money.
Step 9: Start Publishing
If the content isn’t written and shared, nothing gets done. Several studies done by big site owners show that it doesn’t seem to matter if you “trickle out” the content one post at a time or publish a lot all at once.
Just start publishing as you finish articles or as you edit and publish the ones you got from other people. The most important step is getting that content online. Nothing else can happen without the content.
Starting from scratch vs buying a niche site that already exists
There are pros and cons to starting a new website from scratch, just as there are pros and cons to buying an existing website and working off of that. In general, I tell people who are just starting out to build their first site from scratch.
This will teach you the skills, problems, and challenges that come with building a website. You’ll need these skills not only to build more niche sites, but also to know what to look for when you hire outside help.
Buying niche sites that are already up and running and making them better is a great strategy, but it comes with its own problems. Before you spend a lot of money on a website, make sure you’ve done your research.
Questions about Niche Website Blogging
Here are some of the most common questions that people who are just starting out ask about blogging and making money with niche sites.
How much money can a niche blog make?
This depends on the niche, the market, and how you make money from it. It’s not unusual at all for someone to make a full-time living from a good niche website.
It’s not unusual for a blog to make a few thousand dollars a month, and there are many examples of blogs that make five figures or more a month.
How long does it take for a niche website to start making money?
This varies. If you start from nothing, you can expect to make real money after two years. There are ways to cut down on this time, like using an expired domain, outsourcing content creation, and building links, but building a good niche site requires a lot of skills that can only be learned by doing.
Once you know how to do it, you can do it again and again. Some niches are easier than others and can be done in a year, while others that are more competitive can take even longer.
Can you make money with any niche?
No. Even though there are a huge number of niches and micro-niches that can be profitable, it won’t be easy to make a website about 14th-century Romanian poetry.
Use some common sense, but remember that there are many ways to make money from a niche.
Do I have to know a lot about my niche?
You do want to build authority and expertise for your site, but in most niches, it’s not hard to be enough of a “expert” to have a strong site.
Do some research, watch some YouTube videos, listen to some podcasts, and talk to a few experts. You’ll be way ahead of 99% of people who search the internet and know enough to answer their questions.
What makes a keyword good?
A good keyword has traffic, is about something people want to learn or study, and doesn’t have a good or detailed answer in Google’s current results.
This is one reason why many questions make great topics or long-tail keywords. If you have a question about a favorite hobby that “everyone has at some point” and there’s no good information online or only scattered forum posts, that’s a clear winner.
Remember that “keyword phrase” and “long tail keyword” can mean the same thing. Many of these keywords can be full questions or even full sentences, as long as they are the kind of terms that might get a lot of searches.
4 ways to find keywords with low competition
There are a few methods that many niche website builders use and that have always worked well for many different site owners.
1. Google Alphabet Soup
Here, you type a keyword, a space, and then a letter into Google. So, if you’re thinking about making a niche site about camping tents, you would type “camping tents a,” “camping tents b,” “camping tents c,” and so on into Google search to see what Google suggests.
These are some of the most common things people search for on Google. Do this for each and every letter. Some terms won’t be good or make sense not to go after, but you’ll have a long list of possible keywords to write about or to Google to see what other keywords come up.
This is the Google Alphabet Soup method, and it is always a great way to find good keywords if you don’t know where to look. If you Google terms that look promising and want to go even more niche, you’ll get ideas for great questions and keywords with low competition.
2. Ahrefs Tool
The Ahrefs paid tool can be expensive for a beginner, but it is one of the most trusted and well-known SEO tools out there. Come up with a list of topics and general keywords, and then use the search function to look for keywords with low competition.
Ahrefs has a tool that ranks the estimated difficulty of each keyword. After using this tool to search, look for keywords with an estimated difficulty of 10 or less (lower is better) and put them in order based on how many searches you think they will get.
That’s a simple way to get a list of good keyword topics to write about.
3. Keyword Chef
Keyword Chef is a paid tool that lets you search in a few different ways. It focuses on getting data from Google’s “People Also Asked” and “People Also Searched For” to find long tail keywords. This tool is great for finding those longtails in particular.
Many will be listed as having no traffic, but estimates of traffic are always just that. Many of the terms Keyword Chef suggests will have less traffic, but some of them will be good.
This tool is good for learning how to use because it focuses on long-tail keywords.
4. Niche Forums or In-Niche Knowledge
When you make a niche website about a hobby or area of expertise, you already know about common questions, problems, or products that other people might be interested in.
You can also check out forums. Look at forums for a certain subject and see what questions or topics come up. This can give you a lot of good ideas.
Why is it so important to have a niche?
Google doesn’t like most general sites anymore. They want EAT, which stands for expertise, authority, and trust. Sites that only talk about one thing can give them that.
You limit what you write about so you can go deep into the niche without getting sidetracked by new ideas or topics that aren’t in the niche.
When you write 100 or more articles on the same niche or topic, you learn a lot about it and can write about it better.
Niche blogs do better in search results because Google and other search engines can easily figure out what your website is about and rank it accordingly.
Last, having a clear niche for your blog makes it easier to make money from it. You will have a group of people who might be interested in your products or services instead of a bunch of random people who don’t know why they are reading your posts.
When info products or high-ticket items are on a site that focuses on one topic instead of a dozen, people are more likely to trust them.
How do you choose a niche for your website?
Choose something you’re interested in and know a lot about. Think about your hobbies, free time activities, interesting work experiences, or something you like to learn about.
Think about what you’re good at. What do you do well? Making cupcakes, designing websites, gardening, taking care of children, or taking Instagram photos?
Don’t get too specific. There’s a reason why there are so many personal finance blogs but not enough for college students in Japan, for example. Focusing on a micro-niche will stop your blog from growing. Too soon, you might not have enough people to reach or new places to go.