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When I first started to learn about niche based websites I kept reading about micro niche sites but didn’t dig into them much but this changed when I found a good candidate.
I chose recently to build a micro niche site to see what and how they could work and figured I would explain fully what they are and why they can be excellent or hold you back.
What is a micro niche site? A typical micro niche site is a site which is tightly controlled and most the time not over 10-30 total pages or posts. It is built to target a specific device or keyword or search phrase, aiming to dominate the topic due to being directly on point.
Now that you understand what the micro niche website is lets dive into why you should use it for your niche. Then we will explain the benefits and drawbacks to building a site as a micro niche.
The last thing we will go over is the simple 4 step plan to build out a micro niche site which will start you on your path to making an income from a website and help prove this business model to yourself and possibly to others.
Why Would you Create a Micro Niche Site
A micro niche site is a perfect way to own on a single specific topic as you can easily be the best “authority” when you are able to cover everything about a very specific thing in more detail than anyone else.
Most authority sites are going to be 500+ posts and pages and just will never be able to cover a single topic in as much detail as your micro niche will.
This will get you the traffic of people, who like you, are only interested in the micro niche details and will be more open to making a purchase from you.
A micro niche site also requires the least amount of time to manage after you publish it you only need to update content every so often, which depends on the niche itself, and to update WordPress and plugins.
What Are the Benefits to a Micro Niche Website
There are a few reasons why you would want to run a micro niche website and these include:
- Easier Marketability: You have a singular focus so this makes it easier to stand out from the competition which is your key to getting attention for your brand and to increase your sales.
- Increased Profitability: Due in large part to lower competition, you’ll should naturally experience greater profits. You have access to more visitors who share your exact same interest.
- Low Competition: Since your niche is targeted and highly specialized, there are fewer other businesses who can directly compete with you.
- Easier to Gain Traction: As a small businesses you need momentum to get started and continue growing. Using a targeted micro niche can help you gain the traction you need to make progress.
What Are the Drawbacks to a Micro Niche Website
There are a few things which can be a drawback or con to choosing to make a micro niche site:
- Limited Search Volumes – When you micro niche down you will only be getting a very small sub-set of the internet searches so you will never probably hit those 100k pageviews a month numbers.
- Limited Scope – If you purchase a micro niche domain name you will have no room to grow or expand should you decide you would like to cover more.
How to Build a Micro Niche Site
Building a micro niche site is very similar, if not exactly the same, as how you would build any niche site or even authority site. The only difference is overall scale and volume of content and coverage.
To build a micro niche site you need to:
- Choose Your Niche and Domain
- Purchase a Quality Hosting Plan to Host Your Site
- Write about 10-30 Helpful Articles (1500+ Words Minimum)
- Get Traffic to Your Site
Yes, that is it, a simple 4 step plan to having your micro niche up and running and it is that easy. If you do these steps well and you develop good content you will get the traffic and even possibly sales.
Choose Your Niche and Domain
When you start this process you will need to figure out a niche and product you plan to feature to gain your income, we have a post on locating exploding topics (things which are growing rapidly) that may be of assistance.
Niche Choice – High Value Low Competition
Your niche will more than likely decide the amount of income your site will be able to generate. On average if you are choosing Amazon for your affiliate offers the income is about 3-4% of the sales price of the item(s) in the cart.
This means if you choose ball point pens you are going to make pennies for each visitor and will be a huge limiting factor in your sites ability to make you money.
What I would instead suggest is that you look for a perfect target item in a price range of $100-$250 for most niches as this will give you a decent return per sale.
This would yield at least $4 per purchase made from your site and with a solid traffic volume would yield a good monthly return.
Domain Choice – Choose a Niche Up For Options
The old adage of picking an exact match domain name isn’t true any longer, instead you should look at purchasing a domain name which aligns with your intended product or niche.
In addition to this, when you choose the name you should niche up a level so you can maneuver if you find an opportunity instead of being locked in by a name that wouldn’t make sense otherwise.
- Previous Naming: bestsinglewingrocket.com
- How You Should Name: spacerockets.com
As the example shows, a site about the best single wing rocket is the way old sites used to be created where you were locked into a single topic. This limits you though and has nowhere to go should single wing rockets decline.
Instead my proposal would be to open up to space rockets, this would allow you to build all your content on single wing rockets and if you were to run out of posts, you could then start another category for twin wing rockets.
This allows you to grow should you find a niche which creates a load of traffic as you may want to grow it out into a full niche website and then into an authority site down the road, changing a domain down the road is painful at best, horrifying at worst.
I never purchase a domain through my web host as I want to be able to switch hosting providers should one fail me, this is why I purchase domains on NameCheap, in addition they are typically one of the best for cost per year and include security.
Purchase a Quality Hosting Plan
Lets be honest, there is hundreds of hosts and every person online tells you that theirs is the best based on their ability to make a commission.
What you may be looking for is overall ease, if that is your skill level then you should choose Bluehost. They have the easiest panel to setup a WordPress site for a newbie.
If you are looking for a little better horsepower for your site and are more willing to learn how to setup everything without being as user friendly then I would suggest SiteGround.
The shared hosting to 30,000 visits is perfect for a micro niche or three as they allow multiple websites on one hosting account.
When I purchase hosting I always will max it out at 3 years to get the maximum value from the initial discount as it always increases.
Josh
Unless you are starting to reach the 15k-30k pageviews per month on your site there is no need to pay more for “dedicated” hosting.
Whichever you choose for hosting above you want to take advantage of that initial purchase discount and purchase at least a year of service.
Write Helpful Content For Your Visitors
This is where many who start will fail as they just don’t create the content which will gather views, whether it is from lack of content length, poor titling, or a bad description for the SERP. Each of these can hurt you when you don’t put the time and effort in to dominate on each post you create.
High Quality Posts with Content Length
I would suggest that you write at least your first 10 posts and get a feeling for the community and information your visitors would expect based on searching Google, Reddit, Quora, and other sites.
You need to write longer posts now more than ever for Google to take your site seriously, there shouldn’t be any posts at less than 1000 words for the most part on your site, you should aim for at least 1500 words for each post you create and longer to make the best resource available online.
After this you could start to look into using content generation services like FatJoe, iWriter, TextGoods, or other program which can help create good quality SEO worthy posts.
Building a Content Title That Gets the Click
When you spend hours on creating amazingly high quality content and give it a poor title then you limit the benefits of your writing.
The title is what gets the click in the search engine results pages, if you have a lame title then you will have a lame click-through rate, or CTR.
Most sites will average about a 2.5% CTR as an overall average, to maximize your value you should be aiming to get a 5-7% or greater as this means you are being clicked more than double the average site.
This could mean double the sales you would get for building a poor title to get content up fast. This is the opposite of what you need, you want to spend a decent amount of time looking at the top 10 results as that is who is getting clicks, use their titles to help you create your own.
Content Meta Description That Draws Them In
The meta description area is the additional text which shows under the title in the SERPs and is the last chance to garner the click from the visitor.
Over time these are becoming less necessary as Google sometimes will overwrite your meta description with other text from your site that it believes is more on point to the searchers intent.
This doesn’t mean you should skip it, instead it needs some work to craft as good a sales pitch as possible as to sell them that you are the better click over anyone else on the topic of your post.
Get Traffic To Your Site
The longest part of this entire process will be the wait for traffic, on average most sites will have very little organic search traffic for upwards of 6 months from the time the article is posted.
This can cause people to believe they failed and to delete their site and shut down their services just as they were about to become something online.
What you need to understand is that ranking is on average a 8 month process for Google, they are the largest search engine by far over all the others.
They put content through multiple tests which will cause your post to jump up and down the rankings frequently making measuring in this initial time almost useless.
There is additional ways to get traffic faster to your website but both require you to either open your wallet or to open up on yourself.
The two methods would be advertising (ads) which get you to the top of the SERP for any phrase, or YouTube (the second largest search engine in the world).
Advertising is a hard place for a niche site to run in as you have to make enough money from sales to justify the ad spend, a normal converting website that isn’t highly optimized will almost never hit this level which means ads would cost you money to make sales.
YouTube meanwhile is still a wild place where you normally would have a very difficult time ranking in the normal Google SERP due to authoritativeness this isn’t the same for YouTube.
In YouTube you can win those same terms and gain an income. The only downside is getting yourself comfortable with being online, note that it isn’t necessary to share your face.
Final Thoughts on What is a Micro Niche Site
So is a micro niche site for you? I would argue as long as you can stay on purpose and write highly targeted and very useful posts at your specific topic would give you results that will yield a positive cash flow.
Will you retire from a day job with a micro niche site, well that answer I would state is almost always a no. But, if you can build a micro niche site in a month this means you could build multiple sites and have an income from each that may reach the level of a day job or more.
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