“How Much Money Do Niche Sites Make?”
Commenter Aaron asked me the other day about how much money my niche sites make.
I answered, but it was a pretty vague answer. Read the comment and answer here:
I’m not going to give away how much my niche sites earn in total or really any information about them whatsoever. However, I figured that if I could ever talk about the subject and give figures in a way that wasn’t a “Hey… this is how much money I make” kind of way, I would.
Today, I’m going to do that. I’m going to give you an example of something that happened to me recently, and I’m going to break down why it’s not really worth it to wonder how much money niche sites make in terms of fixed figures. (As opposed to building them and learning etc.)
As always… to find out how much money niche sites make, you should go and build some yourself.
Before we get into the article, a little about where this is coming from.
James, friend of the blog, has been writing daily articles recently. A couple of them stuck in my head particularly. They are:
Building Niche Sites Is A Long Term Strategy.
Give them a read, because they’ll help you with this article (and tomorrow’s article too).
How Much Money Do Niche Sites Make
As you’ll have gathered from my comments to aaron above, some of my niche sites weren’t performing.
One site in particular was particularly irritating, because I’d written a couple of what I thought were great articles for it. One was a How-To article and one was a list article. They added a lot of value and pointed to some great products.
Total earnings for that site so far… $0.08.
$0.08 which came from the fact somebody read my article, clicked through and bought a book completely unrelated to anything I was talking about from Amazon.
Ultimately, you’d call this niche website a failure as we near the three month point.
This morning, I woke up $150 richer.
I did a double-take at first, because I couldn’t even remember having written a review for any products by this supplier.
It turns out I hadn’t.
I have written about the product, but I haven’t written a whole article about it. In fact, I’ve written about it twice on Niche Site #4. Here are examples of the two entries:
“For X, I’d recommend using [Product], but there are a few alternatives like [alternative one] and [alternative 2].”
“[Product] is a great way to do X, because it gives you a high quality supply of [X] on a daily basis. Also…”
In total, I wrote about this product twice. I had one sentence in one article and a paragraph in another article. This wasn’t rocket-science copywriting or anything. I literally mentioned the product and gave a couple of reasons why I used it.
Today, I got an affiliate payment for two sales that occurred in the past month that I hadn’t realised existed.
Now, my niche site has gone from earning an average of three cents per month to earning an average of just under fifty dollars a month. (It’s about two and a half months old.)
Alright… why is this important?
The Economics Of A Niche Site
There are two parts to this topic. How much money do niche sites make in terms of the big picture and how much money do niche sites make in terms of the somewhat autistic detail that analytics provide.
When people ask “how much money do niche sites make?” there’s a fundamental problem with the question.
It implies that there’s some sort of fixed amount of money coming in monthly and that never changes.
In reality, there are a ton of weird things that’ll mean your niche sites make varying amounts of money in any given month.
- Christmas time is a great time to have a ton of niche sites.
- If your website is subject-specific, then that subject will grow and fade over time.
- Your website has no traffic when you start.
- One sale with the right price/program can change everything.
- Niche sites (and all sites) gain traction over time.
- Sometimes, your site will do badly for whatever reason.
- Sometimes it’ll do great.
- Sometimes, you’ll get a manufacturer whose affiliate program fails to track the clicks and buys you send them (not that I’m having a bad day or anything!)
- Sometimes a manufacturer will change their terms, suspend their program or bring out a new product.
You get the idea.
Building a niche site isn’t like having a job where you work a set amount of hours on it and then you get paid a set amount. Like I said, I’ve made two sales on this niche site so far and it’s gone from being a dud where I probably wouldn’t even renew the domain to something that’s paid itself off for the next ten years or so.
Anyway, let’s get on with the analytics and whatever, because I’m rambling.
How Much Money Your Niche Sites Make Will Depend On The Analytics
Some guys will make money with their first article on their first niche site in their first week. Some guys will never make any money from niche sites, and dedicate their lives to leaving angry comments saying, “Making Money Online Is A SCAM Man!”
The reason for this is mostly to do with analytics. If you find a great niche – a unicorn with low competition and high demand – then you can write a single article about a product nobody has written about on the internet, and providing it’s not a complete screw-up of a sales letter, you’ll get clicks and buys.
On the other hand, if you write about a topic nobody cares about, you’ll get no views. If you write a topic that people aren’t going to pay money for (e.g. politics, personal issues, religion, fantasy sports) then you can get a huge readership but no money to show for it.
The other day I saw someone on Twitter who said, “You need a million viewers a month to make $1000 from a website.)
I don’t know what metric they’re using, but it’s a great example of the point above.
Let’s look at the analytics for the sales I got paid for today, because it’s interesting.
Niche Site #4 Traffic Stats
The above picture shows the all-time stats for my niche site. It has just over a thousand views in total. The blacked out articles are various articles that have nothing to do with our sale, and the two articles I’ve marked are the ones I mentioned above that contain the affiliate link.
A three month old site with about 300 views per month in total is not a big site at all.
What’s more interesting is that the combined amount of times the pages I’ve mentioned the affiliate link on combine to just 72.
72 people have read my articles with the affiliate link in. That’s not enough to tell anything statistically, but it is one thing: Achievable by anyone. You can write a sales letter that gets 72 readers in three months. If you can’t… well, you can. That’s 26 readers a month.
The affiliate commission I received is for two sales at 50% commission and the product costs $149.50.
Let’s move on.
My little failed niche site is obviously not terribly written.
As you can see from the screenshot, I’ve made $149.50. But more importantly, my link has gotten thirteen clicks.
Thirteen clicks from seventy-two readers.
That’s why we learn all about copywriting and writing product reviews and all that good stuff… the average blackhat marketer will never get a click-through rate of nearly 20%, because spamming links is never going to give your reader the sense that it’s a good idea for them.
(The click-through rate is the amount of readers that click through to your offer. In this case, 72 readers, 13 clicks. CTR = 13/72*100 = 18%.)
So, we’ve got the amount of readers. We’ve got the click-through rate. Let’s work out the rate at which the sales pages convert.
2 sales/72 readers = just over 2.5% conversion rate.
That’s pretty good… but it could always be better. Of course, this wasn’t a direct sales letter, so we didn’t push for a sale (which would raise the conversion rate considerably.)
However, 2 sales out of 13 clicks = 15%.
That tells us that a reasonable amount of people who clicked the link found the offer good enough to spend a lot of money on. If you get a ton of clicks and no sales, it’s probably the product you’re selling (or its sales page!) which isn’t converting.
Either way, my point here is that you can get a reasonable amount of useful information from the smallest amount of data.
The most important data point here is that you don’t need a lot of traffic to make money from a niche site. A good sales page that converts at one percent only needs a hundred views to make money.
A good sales page is an hour’s work.
Not So Final Thoughts
Niche sites will make a varying amount of money. It won’t be constant and it’ll have ups and downs (roll on Christmas.)
However, that’s not the point of the article. The point of the article is that niche sites are really quite low maintenance, and over time those little pieces of effort build up to a pretty reasonable return.
(It took me probably 90 minutes total to make that $150. I’ve probably spent less than eight hours total on that site.)
You don’t need a huge amount of traffic. You don’t need to do anything magical. You get a ton of data and knowledge from doing it. All the benefits we’ve talked about a billion times before.
Niche sites are like little investment piles, and occasionally they’ll pay you dividends.
I’m cutting this article short (ha ha!) because I planned on adding in a section about thinking about niche sites like a game. I’ll write about that tomorrow because this article is already too long.