I'm working on getting a new niche website online, inspired in part by the progress of a pets-themed niche site I started last December. You can read my niche site profit report about that site; in short, I have about a dozen content pages online and it earns around $65 a month. I've added a couple more pages to it recently and monthly earning should increase as those pages are indexed and start to show up in searches.
But anyway, the site I am working on today is on a personal finance topic with a narrow focus. The keyword phrase I use for the URL gets about 176 searches a day and there isn't much competition. I bought the domain and host the site through Hostgator. My strategy has been to go for small niches and win with those. I expect I could get the #1 Google placement for that specific search, as well as several others closely related, within a few months (or maybe less).
The site is built on an HTML static site template, which I broke down and bought for $62 from this template site -- one of the best I've found. The template came with an index page and five versions of secondary pages, and works great in my free html editor (Kompozer). I've bought some very frustrating, hard-to-customize templates in the past from a "bargain" site and I really wasted my money. I also don't like using free templates anymore (my pets site is built on one) because the quality has not been as good and they have links to the template creators which can not be removed.
In addition to Google Adsense, I will include niche affiliate marketing of products on the site. Inspired by the One-Week Marketing course I bought (and blogged about here), I'm including a Clickbank product as part of that monetization model.
Since this personal-finance-related topic gets more searches and ads pay better than the ones for my pets site, I think it will soon earn more per month than the pets site. One of my goals is to get 10 mini niche content sites earning $100 each a month, to add another $1,000 a month to my long-term residual income.
And I should reach that goal by this time next year, while also keeping up with eHow and my blogs ... not to mention the kids ... here's hoping!
Have you had success with a niche content site? I'd love to hear about it!
