What on Earth is a Niche Website?

A niche website is a website that focuses on a specific topic or a batch of closely related topics.

Instead of being some random collection of topics, they focus and drill down within a topic striving to become a leading source of information on that topic.

It’s one of the most common types of websites on the internet.  Even large top-tier publications fall into the niche website paradigm.

For example, Yoga Journal is a print magazine with a huge website all about yoga and wellness.  That website is a niche website.

Other examples of niche websites (smaller than Yoga Journal) include Bonsai Empire, Improve Squash and Fish Keeping World.

Niche examples:  There are literally thousands of niches to choose from.  Some are better than others.  Check out my growing list of Niche Ideas for inspiration.

Are niche websites blogs?

IMO, yes, they are basically the same thing these days.  While technically there may be minute distinctions, for the most part a niche website and niche blog is the same thing.

How do you build a niche website?

Fortunately, y0u don’t need to be technical at all to launch a niche site these days.  There are many software platforms to use as your website software that costs little (or nothing).

The starting point is choosing a name for your niche website and then registering a domain name.  You can register a domain at GoDaddy or Bluehost (two of many).

The most popular website platform for niche sites is WordPress.org.  While WordPress is free, you do need to pay for website hosting.  Fortunately, hosting is very cheap.  Bluehost is a great low-cost starter hosting platform (I used it for years).

As for getting your site launched on Bluehost, when you sign up with Bluehost, they have instructions on how to get it up and running very quickly.  It’s very easy these days.  If you can use a computer mouse, you can set up a website.

Read my “how to start a blog” article for more info.

How do niche websites make money?

In the beginning don’t expect to make any money because it takes time to build it up.  The key to making money from a niche site is getting website traffic.  This takes time.

Chances are, your biggest traffic source in the long run will be Google search (the biggest search engine).  This means that as you build out your site, you should learn some basic search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

Once you have traffic, you can start trying different ways to make money from it.  There are dozens of ways to make money from a niche site.  I set out 47 ways to monetize a website here.

Who writes the content for a niche site?

Most people when starting out write the content themselves.  As the site grows, they often hire writers just like larger publications.  However, if you prefer writing everything yourself, you can of course continue doing all the writing.  Here’s a good list of content sources I’ve used over the years.

Learn more:  11 types of blogs that make money

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