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

The internet is full of opportunities to make money, and blogging is one of the smartest and most ethical ways available.

One misconception about blogging is that you need to work day and night to make money. There’s some truth to that if what you’re trying to do is create a name for yourself and/or build a brand.

But if your goal is simply to earn money within a short period of time (but with long-term gains), then there are many shortcuts available.

Let’s take a look at one such shortcut:

• The micro-niche blog.

In this guide, I will give you a detailed example of a micro-niche blog that I created which is currently making $174/month from AdSense, and an average of $100/month from affiliate marketing. All of this only took a few hours of work to set up.

This is a blueprint for creating a micro-niche blog, and you can use it for any topic or niche that you like. In my case, I didn’t use a content agency, so I picked up a niche that I enjoy reading and writing about. However, if you are not great at writing, you can hire writers from sites like Contentmart or Textbroker.

This micro-niche blog has made me over $2000 in the past year, requiring only 40-50 hours of work!

• Also check out: ShoutMeLoud: Blogging Income Reports

Why start a micro-niche blog?

First of all, following many algorithmic changes from Google, niche websites now rank higher in search engines than non-targeted sites.

If you create a high-quality website on any particular topic, your chances of ranking higher are stronger than any existing authority website out there.

Plus, you won’t have to worry day and night about keeping your blog evergreen.

Once you’ve done the hard work to create your niche site, the next step is to wait for the money to be deposited into your account.

So let me give you the micro-niche blog blueprint that I’ve created.

Remember: This is the exact method that I followed, and you can follow this blueprint to create a successful micro-niche blog of your own.

The Complete Blueprint To Building A Niche Website That Makes Money:

1. Select Niche & Domain

The most important thing you need to do is find a niche that you are comfortable with.

Make sure to think about the potential commercial and popularity aspects of your niche.

Since the target is to make money from the blog using AdSense, it is very important to choose a topic that is popular in countries like the U.S. and the U.K., and that has high commercial value (high CPC).

In my case, I chose a topic called “Cydia”, which is a jailbreaking tool for iOS devices, and very popular among iPhone users. I chose this topic because I was very comfortable with the subject matter, and the expiration time on this topic was quite high. Furthermore, it had a good search rate in Google.

To find out things like CPC, Google search rate, popularity, and competition, I used LongTail Pro.

November 2016 update: This niche is now saturated, but this blueprint is still valid.

For keyword research, I used SEMrush. I like SEMrush because you just need to put the website link of the most popular site in your target niche & it will show all of the keywords that site is already ranking for.

Along with that, SEMrush lets us do a complete SEO audit & a few other things that help bloggers and webmasters grow organic traffic. (You can try SEMrush for 14 days using this special promo link!)

The next step is to get a nice domain name. Since it’s a micro-niche site, I would suggest including your keyword in the domain name. Ensure it doesn’t look spammy & add a little flavor to it by using words like “Guide”, “Users”, “101” & so on.

For my domain, I settled on CydiaGuide.com.

2. Keyword Research & Content Planning

This is the most interesting part, and it’s a little time-consuming. But it pays off well in the long run.

I usually suggest using a Google docs spreadsheet to jot down your research to keep everything organized.

For content planning, I was clear about a few things I needed to do:

• Choose topics that would be in demand for a long time.
• Design this micro-niche site like Wikipedia.
• Choose keywords that are driving traffic and have a high CPC.

Instead of being particular about choosing only high AdSense CPC keywords, I created a mindmap of content, which was more like an FAQ.

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 I started with before getting into detailed keyword research.

I then used SEMrush to find keywords.

• Read this guide to understand how SEMrush will help you find keywords that generate more AdSense revenue.

Next, I chose a few related blogs on my topic & as I mentioned earlier, I used the same tool (SEMrush) to find the precise keywords which are already driving traffic to these sites.

By the end of this process, I had at least 20+ topic ideas for my micro-niche website!

Next, I spent a few hours writing 4-5 blog posts, and then one post each day for the next several days. Within a few days, I had 15 high-quality evergreen posts and my content was ready to go. (Evergreen posts have a 2-3 year expiration date, meaning that these topics should be relevant for at least the next 2-3 years.)

As I said earlier, if you are not good at writing, there is no harm in hiring someone to write for you. Managing a blog takes a lot of work, and it’s important to make sure you have good content to manage.

November 2016 update: You can find a more detailed step by step guide on micro niche blogging over at Shout University.

3. Setting Up The Micro-Niche Blog

This part of the set-up was very easy for me. If you know how to create a blog on WordPress, then this step will be easy for you as well. Beyond this, your content will be the main attraction.

The following is a list of the exact tools I used to create and set up my blog:

• Hosting: Bluehost – only $3.95/month with one free domain.
  • Check out this tutorial to learn how to install WordPress on Bluehost.
• Theme: Genesis – plug and play.

Plugins:

1. Yoast SEO for site SEO 
2. Akismet for preventing comment spam.
3. Auto Post Thumbnail for automatic generation of featured images. (optional)
4. SocialWarfare for social bookmarking icons.
5. Jetpack by WordPress for multiple purposes, including stats in dashboard.
6. No Self Pings to stop self-pinging!
7. PushPress for faster indexing.
8. SEO Friendly Images for image level SEO.
9. Shortpixels for image compression.
10. WP Super Cache for caching. An alternative is W3 Total Cache.

Additional steps that I followed:

1. Made the blog’s SEO perfect.
2. Took extreme care of content quality and keyword score.
3. Made a few videos on YouTube and linked them to my blog in the description, generating additional traffic. This also helped me generate backlinks.
4. Submitted my sitemap to major search engines. (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.)
5. Submitted my blog to traffic estimator sites using IMT submitter. Note: Don’t build more than 50 links using them in a day.
6. Created a logo using a free online logo maker.
7. Set Up Google AMP.
8. Set Up Facebook Instant Articles.

Optional (but very good) steps to follow:

• Add “Contact” page and “About” page.
• Configure push notifications for getting return traffic.
• Start building an email list. You can later give them interesting deals related to your industry & earn commissions via affiliate marketing. You can read about affiliate marketing over here and in this eBook.

The whole idea of the blog was to not do a lot of work, and create a blog that was capable of earning money. For this reason, I didn’t invest much time on branding. The goal was to get great search engine traffic, provide solutions, and quickly make money from this micro-niche blog.

Here is the traffic report: