A niche site is still a great way to earn a sizeable three-digit passive income on the internet within a few months. It’s also a great way to learn the basics of online marketing such as WordPress, Affiliate Marketing, SEO, Ad Networks and Keyword Research.

Currently, everyone is talking about Amazon FBA and e-books, online courses or productized services can also be used to earn a good, largely passive basic income on the internet. Affiliate niche sites, on the other hand, are often said are not working anymore.

My experience is different. I know that affiliate sites still work, if they offer added value, and they can be a perfect start to your digital self-employment. Big affiliate partners like Amazon are not so easily disappearing from the market, and constantly new niches are emerging that are not yet filled.

My experience with niche sites

Since 2017, I have created over 30 affiliate pages and have lived well in the past, with the effort to maintain the pages within a few hours of work each year.

But I also want to be completely honest with you: In the medium term, the affiliate revenue allows me many freedoms, but offers no fulfillment. They secure my basic income and allow me to devote myself to my true passions. So, they are just a means to an end for passive income.

Exactly for this reason, I consider niche sites as a perfect introduction to online marketing. Especially if you have little prior knowledge, you can try out such a small website and convince yourself that making money on the internet actually works. And I know exactly how much it takes to see these first dollars rollin’ in to truly believe in it.

Since you are heavily dependent on Google, Ad Networks, and Affiliate Partners like Amazon, you should actually only see it as a start. Try to build a passive income with such sites to give you time for your actual passions.

How exactly that has worked very well for me in recent years, I would like to show you in this post, at least rudimentary.

One more request in advance: there are enough bad websites and spammers on the internet. If you are creating an affiliate page yourself, please always remember what added value you can offer. Without this added value you will not succeed in the long term and will be in the red on your Karma account.

What is actually an affiliate niche site

Of course, there are different approaches to how such a niche page can be made. The approaches differ in the scope of the page and the strategy for monetization.

I’d like to show you my strategy, with which I have done well in the last few years: really small niche sites with product comparisons that are mostly monetized via Amazon as well as Ad Networks. The big advantages of the Affiliate Program of Amazon is the huge product range, the high degree of popularity and the easy integration of affiliate products.

When I speak of a niche site, I mean a really small market segment. The main keyword (the product or the service) has a monthly search volume of between 1,000 and 10,000 search queries. In these small niches, it is relatively easy to appear high in Google search results due to low competition.

Of course, the low search volume also limits the yield potential of the niche pages. In my experience, good running sites earn something every month in the triple digits. As soon as you are a bit more experienced, the effort to create an affiliate site is limited, so that you can earn quite a considerable income with a variety of sites.

This income is actually largely passive after the initial work. I do not work for more than 10 hours a year on an already well-running page. For pages with timeless themes it is still much less.

What you need to create an affiliate niche site

Depending on your previous knowledge, you will need time to familiarize yourself with the topics WordPress, Affiliate Marketing and SEO. However, unlike other business models on the Internet, financial investments are very limited:

1. Domain and Hosting (max 5 USD / month): for a website you need a domain (the URL) and a hosting provider that stores the data of your website on a server. So first you have to find a domain name, register it and conclude a contract with a hosting provider.

2. WordPress (free): WordPress is a CMS (Content Management System) with which you can manage a website and create content even without any programming knowledge. WordPress can be installed with a few clicks directly from your account with the hosting provider for free.

3. Web Design Theme or Plugin (free – once around 60 USD): Each WordPress page has a theme, which is the visual and functional backbone of the page. There are free and paid themes that differ in design and functionality (for example special affiliate themes). I would advise you to a special affiliate theme or alternatively a free blogging theme in conjunction with an affiliate plugin to automatically import products from Amazon and other affiliate partners.

What makes the success of an affiliate site

In recent years, I have taught many people how to create affiliate pages. Some wrote me that after only a few months, they have earned over $ 100 with their first affiliate site and are building more sites. Others wrote to me desperately because simply no sales came. In my view, this is due to the following factors:

1. Incorrect niche: the market segment does not have enough searches per month or is too big and therefore has too strong competitors. The ideal size for a niche is 1,000 – 10,000 searches per month. There are market segments that get an awful lot of searches, but where readers have no intention to buy. These are purely informative search queries such as “Marathon Calendar” or “Yoga exercises for beginners”.

2. No search engine optimized texts: the optimization of the written content for Google is the absolute basis for the success of a niche site. Most of your visitors will come through Google, so you’ll need to rank high up in search results.

3. No link building: aside from the on-page SEO (optimization of your own content), the off-page SEO (building links from other sites) is extremely important for a good Google ranking. Your page can be so great but will not get many visitors without backlinks.

As you do in creating an affiliate niche site

A detailed guide would go beyond the scope of this post, but I would like to show you at least in the approach, as I lead in the creation of affiliate pages. More than the following 6 steps are not really necessary:

1. Search and validate a niche: you are looking for a product or a product category with sufficient search volume, to which there is little or bad information on the Internet. To analyze the niche, you use the Google Keyword Planner and evaluate existing competitors.

2. Register a domain and search hosting providers: you are looking for a domain that contains your main keyword, register them and conclude a hosting contract for your website.

3. Install WordPress with theme and plugins: with just a few clicks you can install the CMS WordPress, a WordPress theme suitable for affiliate marketing and / or plugins.

4. Writing Search Engine Optimized Texts: For your main keyword and a few related searches, you’re creating pages and posts, each optimized for a keyword. These pages should be at least 1,000 words long if possible. Of course you can also outsource the writing work.

5. Create Product Descriptions and Comparisons: Based on Amazon product reviews, product testing, and other sources, you’ll be looking for the best 10-20 products in your category, each in a single post. The product descriptions should be at least 500 words long and objectively written. You then compare the top products in a comparison of technical details and other features in order to offer the prospective buyer the best possible basis for making a purchase.

6. Build backlinks: now it’s time to get backlinks from other sites for your finished and search engine optimized page. These signals to Google that your page, in addition to being highly relevant to a particular query, also has the authority to rank high in the search results.

Bringing it together

Of course, the devil is in the details, especially if you have not yet gained experience in creating websites and affiliate marketing. That’s exactly why I found a course a few years ago and linked it HERE for you. You’ll find video and other footage with step-by-step instructions on what to do to:

– create your own website with WordPress,

– develop an understanding of SEO, affiliate marketing and blogging,

– make the first step towards a place of income independence and

– finally, how with multiple affiliate sites you can earn a full income.

This guide is based on a one-month program from 2018, in which Jim and Rick show and guide members of Income School “Project 24” samples on how to create an affiliate niche site. The guide is constantly updated with videos as well as useful information around the topic of ” Niche Sites” emerged from the contents of the 1-month program. In May 2018, this was completely revised and expanded in a new edition.

Based on several practical examples, they explain to you in the guide in detail how you earn your first USD on the Internet with a small niche page. With two of these example pages from the guide, they’ve already earned over 100,000 USD in the first years with relatively little effort and even sold one niche site for 74,000 USD around the subject of “boats” at the same time. They started many niche sites, which have already grossed them thousands of dollars each month in passive income. The detailed statistics for the development of the example pages can be found in the guides’ back-office.

If you want to build a passive base or secondary income with small affiliate niche sites, then this strong guide is just right for you:

Join Project 24

With this guide, I hope not only to help you build your first niche site, but to give you the courage to do more. Because I know from personal experience that it takes this first self-earned dollar to really believe in it.