Niche Site Saturday 54 – Ideas For Niche Site Monetisation (Books)
Last week I wrapped up the Niche Site Challenge officially.
Of course, in reality we don’t just give up working because we’re not taking part in a challenge anymore.
Instead, we build more and try out different things that were previously against the rules.
In the next week or so, I’m going to be writing some short ebooks to go on my sites.
For the high-performing sites I have, adding a $5-$10 product will make the sites worth a lot more in terms of value and cash flow.
For the lower performing sites, a $10 product might turn them from time and money sinks into something actually valuable – or at least worth keeping.
Here’s the thinking behind this:
You’re more likely to make money with your own products than you are as an affiliate. Your readers might change their minds or buy the products you’re selling through another link at another time, and they can essentially get your affiliate product somewhere else. I’m not saying affiliate marketing is bad, far from it, but it is what it is. If you sell a unique product of your own, then you don’t have this problem.
If your website gets a few hundred views a month, say, 3-500 and you sell a simple ebook that’s maybe 50-100 pages, and convert at say 1%, then here are the figures:
$10 ebook * (300 (visitors) *0.01 (conversion rate)) = $30 a month.
We’re not lighting the world on fire or anything, but if your website only gets 300 visitors a month, then $30 isn’t bad. Remember that you’ll still make affiliate money on top of this.
Also, you might convert at 5% with a highly targeted product. You might get a boost of visitors that doubles it… in any case, having products to sell isn’t a bad thing.
On A Related Note
If you sell your own physical products or books or whatever, there’s no harm in using your niche site to promote those things – either with a banner, an ad box or in contextual links. (Though make sure you’ve got a heavy disclaimer if you’re writing sales letters for your own products.)
If you’re going to sell someone’s stuff, it might as well be your own if the margins are better.
If you’re looking to sell info products and ebooks though, I have you covered on creating a decent product that’ll keep your visitors and customers alike happy. Check out this three-part guide:
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/internet-marketing-scammers-can-help-make-honest-money/
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/make-honest-money-internet-marketing-part-two-finding-easy-niches-e-books/
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/create-better-product-quick-internet-marketers-part-three/
There’s a lot more to book creation than that, but it’ll get you started and it’ll honestly be fine if you’re not looking to turn your niche site into a bigger project in the future.
Timeline For Each Niche Book Project
I like to aim for at least 20,000 words – or 100 Kindle pages – for any book I write. These niche site books are no exception.
I prefer to hit 200 pages or 40,000 words. With backmatter and the like, it’s slightly less than that.
Anyway, that’s about 20 hours of work for me – less if I’m knowledgable about the topic and certainly less if I’m repurposing the material.
Hint: You can repurpose all of your niche site material if you want. It’s your intellectual property. You could do two-thirds “basic information about the niche” which is recycled and one-third just awesome, original information that you won’t get anywhere outside the book. People will pay for the extra and feel like they’ve got their money’s worth more so than if you released a 50 page pamphlet.
Anyway, I will write one book a week on this. Not sure how many I’m writing, but that’s the goal for this time next week.
I’ll price the books at $10 unless they’re really short or useless (they won’t be.)
The goal is to sell one to five a month, depending on how well the sites are doing.
The primal, what-do-you-actually-care-about goal is to cover all the expenses of each site several times over so I can extend the domain portfolio without incurring any “real world” costs. Also, 10-15 sites at $10-$50 a month each doesn’t hurt. That’s a lot of useless gadgets and other hobby money I could spend.
Hell, I might almost become interesting. Enough about me though; this is an easy blueprint for you all to follow.
Final Thoughts
Writing a quick book is an easy way to monetise even the most basic and low trafficked sites. One sale a month covers hosting and domains for the year and it gives you real world experience in delivering products, producing products and making money from them.
With all that the above entails plus your ability to do it all in a week, it’s an easy win.
As always, questions are welcome. Otherwise, we’ll continue with more niche site talk next week.