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

Internet is full of opportunities to make money, and blogging is one of the smartest and ethical way, to earn money. One big misconception about blogging is, you need to work day and night to make money. It’s true when you want to create a name along with money, but if your goal is to earn money in shortest time and long-gain, then there are many shortcuts out there. For an example, a micro-niche blog.


In this guide, I will share an example of one such micro-niche blog I created and is making $174 from AdSense/month for me and $100 on an average from Affiliate marketing with few hours of work.

This is a blueprint for creating such micro-niche blog, and you can use it for any topic/niche you like. In my case, I didn’t use any content agency, so I picked up a niche that I enjoy reading and writing about. So, instead of sharing a general post, I’m sharing the actual steps I followed to create one such blog, and after 40-50 hours of total work, this blog has made over $2000 for me in last one year.

• Read: How Much money I made in 2014 with my blogs

Why start a micro-niche Blog?

First of all after so many algorithmic changes from Google, a niche website ranks higher in search engines. If you create a high-quality website on any particular topic, your chances of ranking higher is stronger than any existing authority website out there. Plus, you won’t have to worry day and night about an evergreen blog. Once you’ve done the hard work to create it, the next step is to wait for the money to be deposited into your account.
This is the blueprint of a micro-niche blog that I created. Remember, this is the exact method I followed so you too can follow this to create one for yourself right away.

The Complete Blueprint to Build a Niche Website which makes money:

Select Niche and Domain:

The most important thing you need to do is find a niche that you are comfortable with. Make sure to think about the commercial and popularity aspect of it.  Since our target is to make money from it using AdSense, you should pick a topic that is popular in countries like U.S. and U.K., and have commercial value (High CPC).
In my case, I picked a topic call “Cydia” that is a jailbroken tool for iOS device, and very popular among iPhone users. I chose this topic, as I was very comfortable with it and expiration time on this topic was quite high, and it has good searched in Google. For keyword research I used SEMRUSH. (You can try SEMRUSH for 14 days using this special promo link)
For domain, I settled with Cydiaguide.com

Keyword research and content planning:

For content planning, I was clear about few things:

• Pick topics that would be in demand for a long time.
• Make this micro-niche site like a Wikipedia.
• Pick keywords that are driving traffic or CPC.

So instead of being particular about picking only high AdSense CPC keywords, I created a mindmap of content. Which was more like a 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 more. Next, I picked few related blogs on my topic that had a good amount of traffic. I used SEMRUSH to find the keywords those website were using. You can use this link to try SEMRUSH completely free for 15 days, which is valued at $150.

By the end, I had at least 20+ topic ideas for a micro-niche website. Next, I spent a few hours writing 4-5 blog posts, and one post daily for the next couple of days. This way my content part was done, and I had 15 high-quality evergreen (topics with 2-3 year expiration days) content ready to go.

Setting up the Micro niche blog:

Now, the next part was very easy. If you know how to create a blog on WordPress, then there is not much to worry about. Your content will do the rest of the magic.
Here is the exact tools I used to create and setup my blog. This checklist includes plugins, theme and other important details you’ll need to create your micro-niche blog.

• Hosting: Bluehost with one free domain (Only $3.95/month) ( Check this tutorial to learn how to install WordPress on Bluehost)
• Theme: SwiftThemes (Plug and play)
• WordPress plugins:

1. WordPress SEO by Yoast for site SEO.
2. EasyWPSEO for Keyword optimization. (Learn how to use EasyWPSEO plugin)
3. WPSocial for social media optimization
4. Akismet for preventing comment spam.
5. Auto post thumbnail for automatic generation of the featured image.
6. Digg digg for Social Bookmarking icons
7. Google XML sitemaps for creating sitemap.
8. Insights for helping me in inter-linking while writing post.
9. Jetpack by WordPress for multiple purposes including stats in Dashboard.
10. No Self pings to stop self-pinging
11. PushPress for faster indexing.
12. SEO friendly images for image level SEO.
13. Subscribe to comments plugin.
14. WP Smush.it for image compression.
15. WP Super cache for Caching.
16. Wptouch for mobile friendly WordPress blog.

Additional steps that I followed:

1. Made my blog on site SEO perfect.
2. Took extreme care of content quality and Keyword score.
3. Made a few videos on Youtube and linked to my blog from description. This generated traffic and also earned decent quality themes.
4. Submitted sitemap to major search engine.
5. Submitted my blog to top 100 sites using IMT submitter.
6. Created a logo using free online logo maker.

The whole idea of the blog was to work less, and make it ready for earning. So I didn’t invest much time on branding. The goal was to create great search engine traffic, provide solutions, and make money from the niche blog.
Here is the traffic report::


Remember, the blog had only 26 posts, and it’s not updated beyond a month. At this stage, I had to start preparing more content to push the traffic again.

Few things that I should have done: (Things that you should do)

Created a separate social media page:
Social media profiles are helpful in many ways, but in this case I skipped doing it. Reason being, I didn’t want to create a new social media property. But, it’s always good to add Social media profile and use social-media automation.
I use tools like Bufferapp and Hootsuite to share content from this blog on Google plus, Facebook pages.
No back link building and no promotion:
I have not built a single backlink, and did not do any promotion apart from a bit of social-media promotion. All traffic is organic, and purely due to quality of content, and SEO settings of the site.

Monetization:

For the initial couple of months I used only AdSense, and later added one affiliate product related to the iPhone niche, which generated extra income of $100/month on an average.

Over all if you consider all the aspects in nutshell:

With $60 investment, and 40 hours of work I made over $2200, and the blog is still making money. More over, I don’t need to spend time on backlinks and other promotional stuff which takes time. The idea is to create a few more niche blog like this, and create different sources for online income. An eBook explaining step by step guide will be on sale from next month, for now this micro-niche blueprint is good enough for any experienced blogger to start a money making site with few hours of work.
If you have any question or more tips to add here, I would love to hear from you. If you find this blueprint useful, consider sharing it on Google plus and Facebook.