By Paul Foley

Creating a profitable niche site isn’t as simple as just creating a site and leaving it to grow old. In order to make money with a website, you must either sell products yourself, or advertise products/sites for another company. Both are very effective ways of building a profitable niche site.

So, if you are selling things on your website, what kind of things should you sell? Or if you decide to create a niche site that doesn’t sell products, what kind of advertising should you do in order to make money? These are both questions that those who want to create a profitable niche site ask.
 

The Profitable Niche Site: Selling Products

Believe it or not, there is a lot of money to be made on the Internet selling other people’s products. If you create a niche site on a particular topic, flowers for example, why not sell an ebook on flowers? Or why not sell flower mugs or something else related to gardening?

When you create a niche site, and want to make it a profitable site, think about the topic at hand. Is it something that is marketable — can you use the idea to make products to sell on your site? If not, and you don’t intend on creating a profitable niche site by advertising for other companies, then you should probably rethink the idea.

Now, even if your niche topic is something that can be used to make products, will they sell? That’s another thing to keep in mind. Try to look at other sites selling products that might be similar to what you have in mind. Are these sites selling products quickly? You want to only create products that will sell well — otherwise, it’s a waste of time/money.

One popular way of creating a profitable niche site is to create an ebook on the niche site’s topic. If you’re a natural at writing, or know a lot about the topic at hand, creating an ebook in PDF format can be quick and painless. It can also be profitable, because people are willing to pay money for ebooks on a topic that interests them — especially if the ebook is affordable (under $10). If you don’t know how to write an ebook, but want to sell such a thing on your site, hire an experienced writer.

Whatever you decide to sell on your niche site, be sure to accept forms of payment like credit cards and PayPal, as well as money orders and checks. PayPal, in particular, has become an extremely popular form of payment on the Internet. PayPal is very easy to set up on a website, and can actually increase your business because it is so easy for customers to use and adds an air of trust/authenticity to your site.
 

The Profitable Niche Site: Selling Advertising

If you have no aspirations of selling products, why not sell advertising to create a profitable niche site? After all, advertising is sought by many businesses who want their services/products marketed. They are willing to pay a fair amount of money for every visit they get from their advertisements.

When you choose to advertise other sites/products, you have several options. You could approach the businesses individually and offer them the chance to place their banner/link on your site in return for some cash for each click those ads/links generate. Or you could sign up with an affiliate network or AdSense.

When you sign up with an affiliate network (Google “affiliate network” for possibilities), you are able to pick and choose through a slew of products/sites to advertise on your site. After you pick one and display it on your site, you can get paid per click (for every click a visitor makes on the ad, you get money), per impression (each time a visitor views the the page where the ad is located, you get some money) or per lead (every time the visitor clicks the link and completes a form on the site, you get money). The amount you make per click, per impression, or per lead depends on how much traffic your site gets.

You could also sign up with Google’s AdSense. If you do this, you’ll display ads on your site provided by Google. After a few days, these ads will become relevant to your site — they will advertise things that relate to your site. Under AdSense, you get paid per click. The amount you get paid per click depends on how much traffic you get. So the more traffic you get, the more money you’ll get per click. One person has made $5,000 a month from AdSense, so this is a definite moneymaker.

If you intend to go the paid-to-advertise route, you should consider launching multiple sites with a few hundred pages each; obviously this is a time-consuming task, but you could also use tools such as Cash Sense to automate the task for you (reducing the task to minutes).

Paul Foley is the publisher of CASH Sense: Create Niche Content Web Sites Literally in Minutes! (click here for a free 5-part mini course).

SOURCE: TeachMarket.com – The Extra-Bucks-For-Teachers Resource