photo credit: 401k 2013
We are building a niche site for two things, to provide some quality content and in the process… you bet… make some money, not just money but passive and recurring income. But how do we make money by simply creating niche sites?
Making Money with Adsense
The best and easiest way to make money with a niche site is serving Adsense ad which is by far the best ad network when it comes to number of advertisers and available ads. If you haven’t join yet, you can sign uphere, but there’s a long process to go before getting approved. You can read more about their policies here.
Advantages
Adsense is basically free but you have to share your profit with Google, you’ll get 68% and they’ll keep 32%. If you are lucky enough to be chosen as a premium publisher(according to rumors you should have at least 1 million page views per month), you’ll get more than 68% and additional privileges.
Google is the biggest online ad network, there’s almost always an ad for anything. A lot of hungry advertisers are bidding for your ad space that is ready to pay decent cash depending on the keyword. FYI, the highest CPC at the time I’m writing this article is “Tennessee Mesothelioma Attorney” You can get paid as high as $285.64 for just one click.
Disadvantages
It’s difficult to get approved especially if you’re based in Asia, if your niche site is relatively new, you have to wait for 6 months before they’ll accept you to the program. That’s not an issue before but due to high number of spammers (according to Google) they have to do this. Too bad for me and other people who happen to live in Asia. Good news for everyone else.
Getting accepted in the program is not the end of the story. With Google’s strict policies along with some people who want to harm your AdSense account, you’ll never know when you’ll get banned, whether it’s your fault or someone else. The only solution is proactively monitoring your Adsense click through rate and traffic. If you think there’s something abnormal you have to disable ads on the affected site, analyze your IP log, find the culprit and send it over to Google. That sounds like a lot of work but that’s how it works.
So far Adsense is still the widely used form of monetization, among bloggers, niche sites and even authority sites because of the advantages I just discussed.
Estimating Adsense ROI
As I’ve shared in my first niche site duel update here’s my formula on estimating Adsense revenue:
Local Broad Match x 42% x average CPC x 3% x 68%
that is..
18,100 x 42% x $2 x 3% x 68% = $310/month
You can read more about this formula on my first niche site duel update
Make Money with Affiliate Products
Depending on your chosen niche there may be a lot of products to promote. For example,searching for “dog training equipment” in amazon will return thousands of dog training equipments, 1,526 to be exact. We can promote books, clicker, dog leash, and other k9 training gears. If we are going to successfully sell any of these products, we’ll get 15% commission. If we are going to refer people to buy any Ray Allen’s k9 training equipment, we’ll also get 4% share. What I’m planning is I’ll promote Amazon products first, then once I ran out of product to write reviews, I’ll move on doing Ray Allen’s.
Estimating Affiliate Revenue
Based on the same formula we’re going to check our estimated affiliate revenue for the keyword “k9 training”.
Local Broad Match x 42% x 3% x Average Commission
that is…
18,100 x 42% x 3% x $5 = $1,140/month
- Local Broad Match is the number of search volume in a specified country (broad match format)
- 42% is the estimated click through rate if you reach number one in Google based on a leaked data by AOL
- 3% is the average conversion rate when promoting products
- $5 is the average commission for the dog training products (average price of products on the first page of amazon product listings multiplied by 15%)
Advantages
Promoting affiliate products is a good hedge or even a good alternative for AdSense earnings. There’s also a huge number of products you can make money from thru referral. You can join almost all ecommerce sites such as Amazon, Shopping.com, Walmart, Target, and the list goes on. You can also promote digital products from Clickbank, Commission Junction and ShareaSale.
In addition, you’ll not get banned easily with this popular affiliate networks. They have their own policies, but it’s more flexible. You can even build a niche site around one affiliate product without worrying anything at all. If you already have an AdSense based niche site, you can diversify your revenue by promoting affiliate products.
Disadvantages
Aside from I need to write a ton of product reviews, I don’t see any other disadvantage to it.
Conclusion
For this duel challenge I want to make money with my niche site using Adsense and promoting affiliate products. There are thousands of products in this niche, and good number of advertisements which is good enough to diversify income streams.
