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Niche sites are websites whose content and products are designed to address a specific group of people (a “niche market” or “target audience”). Affiliate marketers have been using niche sites to corner niche markets and sell products for years.
But knowing how to build affiliate marketing niche sites that are of high enough quality to turn a profit is critical. Over the years, many people have created extremely low quality, spammy niche sites filled with poorly written filler content that is of no use to site visitors.
Search engines like Google have cracked down on these types of sites. The fortunate side effect of this crackdown has been the emergence of high quality niche sites with solid backlinks and useful information – exactly the sort of site you should create!
AdSense vs Affiliate Niche Sites
There are two popular types of niche sites online today: AdSense niche sites and affiliate niche sites.
AdSense niche sites are sites that work with Google Adsense specifically. With them, you build content around a set of keywords. Google AdSense places ads related to those keywords on your site. Then, you earn a commission when someone clicks on one of these ads.
Affiliate niche sites, which we’re talking about in this post, are sites that generate income through affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you build your content around links to products for which you are an affiliate.
Depending on the arrangement you have with the advertiser, you earn a commission each time someone clicks on a link from your site and completes a desired action. This action can be things like purchasing a product, providing an email address, or signing up for an email newsletter.
How to Build Affiliate Marketing Niche Sites
#1 Determine your product
First, you need to decide which product or products you want to sell. There are so many out there, the choices are endless. Check out this blog post on great places to find affiliate products to sell. Look them over, and pick the product or products that best fit within your niche.
Be sure to keep your range small. You don’t want to promote yoga mats on a niche site for kitchenware.
Once you’ve settled on a product or two, you can start working on setting up your site.
#2 Get a Domain & Web Host
Once you’ve settled on your products, it’s time to get a domain and web host. Buying a domain name is pretty easy, as long as you work with a reputable domain name seller.
Since you’re just starting out, we recommend going with a company that provides both domain and hosting services.
Bluehost is a great option. Along with hosting and domain services, they offer website design and maintenance, as well as marketing and SEO services. Bluehost also includes a free domain name and SSL Certificate for a year with every hosting package.
#4 Get a Cool Theme
There’s no need to pay for a custom-made website with a custom-made theme. WordPress has tons of templates you can use for free or for as little as $24 per year. Just make sure you choose a theme that suits your niche in style and format.
#5 Create Some Awesome Content
Now that you have the structure of your niche site set up, you need to add some solid SEO content. Try not to bombard your site with content. You don’t need to post three articles a day, every day.
More importantly, make sure your content is well-researched and well-written (or created). Then post it on your niche site at intervals, such as three times per week or every other day. As time goes on, you should be able to post as little as twice or even once per week.
Check out our article on the best types of content for affiliate marketing to get some great ideas on where to start.
#6 Build Up Your Backlinks
Now that you’ve got some content in place, it’s time to do some link prospecting to help your niche site land on page one of the search engine results pages (SERPs).
It’s important that you take the time to earn your backlinks manually. Purchasing links can be a risky business, because these types of links may be fake or stolen, and using them could get your site banned from search indexes.
To get started with your backlinking strategy, have a look at our post on link prospecting.
Conclusion
You can build affiliate marketing niche sites in just a few hours, provided you’ve prepared and done your research in advance. From there, you can continue to build and tweak things as your affiliate marketing business grows and becomes more profitable.
The most important thing is to stay committed. Keep producing great content, and stay the course. In the long run, the passive income is worth it!
Do you have any questions about how to build niche sites for affiliate marketing? Let us know in the comments!
This is great article, but can you provide at least 2 links as to show two examples of an MFA-site and Made-for-CPA-site? It would help us boost some ideas.
Thanks for the post Kelly, I think an important part of building a affiliate niche site is market/keyword research. Knowing which niches are profitable and finding profitable yet lower competition keywords is of utmost importance. Targeting the wrong keywords could mean your while site hardly get any traffic. Sometimes targeting the right keywords (the golden hidden ones) could mean you rank easily for the term with minimal backlinks. These are lessons I had to learn the hard way! I hope that helps someone somewhere 🙂
Hello Mozie,
I’m replying on Kally’s behalf. First of all, thank you for your thoughts!
Not doing keyword research can be one of the biggest mistakes you could make in affiliate marketing. Kind of like shooting in the dark. If you have no clue what to target, or what specific words and phrases people use to search for something, it’s very unlikely you’ll get the visibility you want. And search engines can’t sniff you out as easily, too.
And thanks for sharing your experience! It’s sure to help out people who are new to affiliate marketing. 🙂
Cheers,
Kleia
Great article!
Niche and micro-niche sites don’t get the credit they should these days and authority sites are definitely the new kid on the block. The problem with these new shiny objects is they are as easily oversaturated, in terms of market and reach, as the system they replace.
Dotcomsecrets and Expert Secrets (both by Russell Brunson) can be an invaluable resource for anyone looking to grow their business and more importantly their profits online.
Hey, Stephen!
You have a point. People shouldn’t automatically dismiss Niches and Micro-niches when creating an affiliate site.
Sure, Authority Sites tend to gain more traffic, attract more potential buyers, and promote more products, but Niches and Micro-Niches are still a great option for people who aren’t ready to manage a huge website with thousands of content and pages.
For people who are new to affiliate marketing, a Niche site would be the best place to start!
Cheers,
Kleia
Thanks for the great article. In my opinion, You might be interesting in building a niche site because:
It’s relatively cheap to setup. There are paid products and services that you can use to speed things up, but the only required fee is for your domain and hosting account, which is usually between $4.95 and $6.95 per month depending on the host you choose.
It’s relatively easy to setup. Anyone with some time can setup a niche site. A lot of work needs to be done, but it’s actually not that complicated.
It’s relatively quicker to provide results. Nothing will make money for you overnight, but niche sites are relatively quicker as far as traffic generation and income – especially compared to blogging which can take years to build an audience with.
It can be very passive. You can get to a point where you can set up your niche site and have it run virtually on autopilot while you collect earnings and start up a new site, if you wish. Like I said, it takes a lot of work to get to this point, but if done correctly, it can be a fantastic form of passive income. Many people have built niche site empires, with 10, 20 or even 30 of these sites working for them automatically.
All great points David, thanks for the comment!
Thank you for your amazing article on Nich site…
In my point of view, Nich site are more profitable than multiple Nich site…also Nich site helpful for getting targeted traffic and selling product to them..
According to the competition of web marketing world, Nich site are very profitable for Website owner.
☺️
Thanks for stopping by Bishnu!
Great article!
Niche and micro-niche sites don’t get the
credit they should these days and authority
sites are definitely the new kid on the block.
The problem with these new shiny objects is
they are as easily oversaturated, in terms of
market and reach, as the system they replace.
Thanks for the great post, Kelly. Many beginners face problems in the beginning and you have written a detailed article so that beginners can start affiliate marketing.
You really did a great job!