How I Built A Micro-Niche Site And Earning $174/Month From AdSense

 Internet is full of opportunities to make money online, and blogging is one of the smartest and rewarding way, to earn money. One big mis-conception about blogging is, you need to work day and night to make money. It’s true when you want to create a name along with money, but if your goal is just to earn money, there are many shortcuts out there. For an example, a micro-niche blog. This is  a real-life example of one such blog I created and it is making $174 from AdSense/month for me, and $100 on an average from Affiliate marketing with few hours of work.

This is a blueprint of creating such micro-niche blog, and you can use it for any topic/niche you like. In my case, I didn’t use any content agency, so I picked up a niche which I enjoy reading and writing about. So, instead of sharing a general post, I’m sharing the actual steps I followed to create one such blog, and after 40-50 hours of total work, this blog has made over $2000 for me in last one year.

• Read: Dominate Google with Micro-niche website

Why to start a micro-niche Blog?

First of all after so many algorithmic changes from Google, a niche website ranks higher in search engine. If you create a high-quality website on any specific topic, your chances of ranking higher is stronger than any existing authority website out there. Also you don’t have to work day and night to work on that blog, as once created and automated the content posting, you are almost free. All you need to wait and see money-getting deposited into your account.

This is the blueprint of detailed eBook that I’m working on (Will be on sale next month), which will help you to create a micro-niche blog for profit. Do remember, this is exact method I followed for my blog, and this is the same blog which I used for my Mohali blogging presentation.

The Complete BluePrint to Build a Niche Website which makes money:

Select Niche and domain:

The most important thing which you need to do is find a niche that you are most comfortable with. Make sure to think of commercial and popularity aspect of it.  Since our target is to make money from it using AdSense, you should pick a topic which is popular in countries like U.S. and U.K.  In my case, I picked a topic call “Cydia” which is a jailbroken tool for iOS device, and very popular among iPhone users. I picked this topic, as I was very comfortable with it and expiration time of this topic was quite high, and it has good searched in Google. For quick research, I used LongTailPro tool.

For domain, I settled with Cydiaguide.com

 For domain, I settled with Cydiaguide.com

Keyword research and content planning:

For content planning, I was clear about few things:

• Pick those topics which will last for long.
• Make this micro-niche site like a wikipedia for the topic.
• Pick the keywords which are driving traffic or CPC.

So instead of being particular about picking only high AdSense CPC keywords, I created a mindmap of content. Which was more like a FAQ of that topic. For example:

• What is [topic]
• How to use/install [Topic]
• Advantages and disadvantages of using [topic]
• Important Facts about [topic]

These were some of the basic ideas which I started before getting into detailed Keyword-research, and later I used SEMRUSH to find more keywords. I picked few existing blogs which are driving traffic related to my target topic, and used SEMRUSH to find all those Keywords. Also, competitor in organic search feature of SEMRUSH, gave me more options for similar websites, and thus more keywords. You can use this link to try SEMRUSH completely free for 15 days, which is valued at $160.

This way by the end I had at least 20+ topic ideas for micro-niche website. Next few hours I spent writing 4-5 blog post, and one post daily for next couple of days. This way my content part was done, and I had 15 high-quality evergreen (2-3 year expiration) content.

Settings up the Micro-niche blog:

Now, rest part was very easy, as if you know how to create a blog on WordPress, you don’t have to worry about much. Your content will do the rest of the magic. Here is exact tools I used to create and setup my blog. This checklist includes plugin, theme and other important details which you need to create your own micro-niche blog.

• Hosting : Bluehost with 1 free domain
• Theme: SwiftThemes (Plug and play)
• WordPress plugins :

1. WordPress SEO by Yoast for site SEO.
2. EasyWPSEO for Keyword optimization. (Learn how to use EasyWPSEO plugin)
3. Adrotate for rotating my affiliate ads.
4. Akismet for preventing comment spam.
5. Auto post thumbnail for automatic generation of featured image.
6. Digg digg for Social bookmarking icons
7. Google XML sitemaps for creating sitemap.
8. Insights for helping me in inter-linking while writing post.
9. Jetpack by WordPress for multiple purposes including stats in Dashboard.
10. ManageWP plugin to control blog from ManageWP dashboard.
11. No Self pings to stop self pinging
12. nRelate related content for related posts with thumbnail..
13. PushPress for faster indexing.
14. SEO friendly images for image level SEO.
15. Subscribe to comments plugin.
16. WP Smush.it for image compression.
17. WP Super cache for Caching.
18. Wptouch for mobile friendly WordPress blog.

Additional steps which I followed:

1. Made my blog on site SEO perfect.
2. Took extreme care of content quality and Keyword score.
3. Made few videos on Youtube and linked to my blog from description.
4. Submitted sitemap to major search engine.
5. Submitted my blog to top 100 sites using IMT submitter.
6. Created a logo using free online logo maker.

The whole idea with this blog was to work less, and make it ready for earning. So I didn’t invested much time on branding, as goal was to great search engine traffic, solve the purpose and make money from the niche blog. Here is the traffic report of this blog from starting:

Do remember, this blog have only 18 blog posts and it’s not updated from month. At this stage, I have to start preparing few more content to again push the traffic up.

Few things which I should have done :

Created separate Social-media page: Social media profiles are helpful in many ways, but in this case I skipped doing it, as I had few technology blog, and I integrated their social-media pages with this micro-niche site. Reason being, I didn’t wanted to create a new social media property. But, it’s always good to add Social media profile and use social-media automation.

I use tools like Bufferapp and hootsuite to share content from this blog on Google plus, Facebook pages.

No back link building and no promotion:

I have not built even a single backlink, and no promotion apart from bit of social-media promotion. All traffic is organic, and purely due to quality of content. I have worked most on On site and on Page SEO.

Monetization:

For initial couple of months I used only AdSense, and later added one affiliate product related to iPhone niche, which generated extra income of $100/month on an average.

Over all if you consider all the aspects in nutshell:

With $60 investment, and 40 hours of work I have made over $2000 till now, and blog is still making money. More over, I don’t need to spend time on backlinks and other promotional stuff which takes time. The whole idea is to set few more niche blog like this, and create different sources for online income. An eBook explaining step by step guide will be on sale from next month, for now this micro-niche blueprint is good enough for any experience blogger to start a money making site with few hours of work.

• Also read: How to Build quality micro-niche sites to earn more

If you have any question or more tips to add here, I would love to hear from you. If you find this blueprint useful, consider sharing it on Google plus and Facebook.