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How to Make Money with a Niche Blog

So, you’re one of those kinds of people who spends way to much time on the internet, right? (cough totallynotme cough) It’s probably crossed your mind more than once: “I sure wish I could make money while I spend my life feeding my addiction being completely productive on the internets.”

Well good news, you can, and if writing is your thing, it’s easy! I’m going to run it down step by step:

Step One: Choose Your Topic

Now you may be all “but it’s a blog I wanna blog about whatever”  but no, that’s my job. Believe me, it’s much easier to make money by blogging if your content has a specific topic, so what better to blog about than something you love?

Like football? Blog about it. Like cars? Blog about them. Like rollerblading? Blog about it.

You see, the more targeted your target is, the more specific the ads displayed on your site (we’re getting to that later) will be, and your target audience will be more likely to be interested in whatever the ads display.

Step Two: Getting Your Own Domain Name

Now, before we get all giddy and run off to create our domain name, lets go over a few tips when picking out your domain name:

• Keep it relevant. A site about llamas should definitely not be under a domain such as “thisisaboutpickles.com”.
• Keep it short and sweet. Your llama site? llamaland.com would sound good. thisisablogaboutllamasandwhatiknowaboutthem.com wouldn’t.

Got that down? Hope so, it was a short list. Now scoot your butt over to Namecheap (featured premium registrar) or Co.CC (for a free yoursite.co.cc “domain”). When you get the domain, hold off setting up the nameservers until the next step is finished.

Step Three: Finding Webhosting

Now we need a place to store the files that make up your website, so what we need is a webhost. Since you’re just starting out your site, you probably wont need any expensive hosting or packaging, so here is what I recommend:

• For free: Can Has Website, my free hosting (example hosted site: Bombcade)
• Paid: Cirtex, ffmpeg hosting from about $3 a month (ffmpeg means you can host video hosting scripts similar to youtube)

Once your hosting account is setup, the host you chose will likely send you an e-mail detailing what nameservers to point your domain to. This is where you put in the nameservers for the domain name you picked in step two.

Step Four: Installing and Theming WordPress

So, I’m not going to lie, my absolute favorite blogging platform is WordPress. It’s quick, lightweight yet feature filled, and is highly supported by a community of themers and plugin developers to make your WordPress site do whatever you want it to. There are two ways of installing WordPress:

• If your host offers fantastico or softaculous or any other script installer, you can use that to instantly and painlessly setup your blog.
• If they don’t, you’re going to have to download WordPress and manually setup the script yourself (no, I’m not going over it here, refer to the Readme.html file in the download)

Once you have that setup, it’s likely you’ll want to use a new theme (If you want to use TwentyTen go ahead). I recommend picking up your themes from ElegantThemes, although there are tons of free sources around the internet for free themes as well. If you are having troubles installing your new theme, refer to this WordPress document on it.

Step Five: Write Content and Get Established

Sorry, the money isn’t going to flow in instantly, you still have to put in some work. Once your blog looks the way you want it, the next step is to fill it with some quality posts about the topic you choose. Don’t rush it and do it all in one day; write unique, interesting, quality content. If you don’t, you’ll go unnoticed by potential readers and search engines, which isn’t exactly very good.

So take your time, and see if you can get 10 or so posts in within a month. By that time you should be considered established and ready for the final step.

Final Step: Apply Advertising

So here’s where the money-making comes in. Your site is established, it gets it’s share of visitors. Now it’s time you put a few ads on your site (note the few, meaning about 2 or 3 per page, keeping your content near the top and the ads unobtrusive). The easiest system to use is Adsense, provided by Google. Sign up for it, and wait for your site to get approved (it wont get approved without quality content!).

Once that’s done, create some properly sized ads and place them on your site (good spots are in the header, in the sidebar, and above or below the beginning of posts). Some themes come with panels for easily adding your own ads, but some will require some plugins that create widgets for your html code, or you might just have to edit the html manually.

Give it a few days, and BAM, ads relevant to your blog’s topic should start being displayed. Don’t stop writing for your blog though! Keep writing new content to keep visitors interested and draw in new ones. Otherwise nobody will be there to click your ads!

Final Tips:

• Do not include text to tell your users to click your ads! It’s strictly forbidden in Adsense’s ToS!
• If you have Adsense installed, don’t put your site in a traffic exchange; also against Adsense ToS
• Promote your site by participating in forums similar to your site’s topic or by commenting on sites similar in topic to yours.

And that’s how it’s done. Best of luck with your new site!