There are loads of great reasons to set up a niche website: whether to generate some passive income, to branch out from an existing site, or simply for the pure enjoyment of writing about your passion!
Once you’ve reached the stage where you’re constructing your new site, it’s important to take some steps to ensure that the content and the website itself are relevant to the niche market you’re aiming at. Often, just making a few little tweaks can result in significantly more visitors or higher conversion rates.
Here are the things to take into consideration when designing your niche website.
Choose the Right Hosting Service
Start with the basics: getting the right hosting service for your needs. The performance of your website is crucial regarding the audience experience; if your pages load even a few milliseconds slower than expected, this can significantly impact whether your visitors stick around.
When choosing a hosting provider, it’s also essential to consider security, versatility, and the nature and number of plug-ins available. WordPress hosting services are an increasingly popular option due to the fact that their loading speed is extremely fast and they tend to offer lots of features. These include SSL certificates for enhanced security, free domains, email accounts, free site migrations, one-click installs, and automatic updates.
Asses Visitor Profiles
Discovering the goals and needs of your target audience is vital to ensure that your website is relevant to your niche. To this end, assessing visitor profiles is extremely useful – use analytical tools to find out as much as you can about demographic, behavior on your site, and where the visitors have arrived from.
Most businesses will have two or three different types of visitors coming to their websites. Understanding exactly what these people are looking for and how they use your site can give you valuable insights and allow you to make any changes needed.
For example, if your niche website focuses on table games such as poker and blackjack, you may find that a proportion of visitors will be beginners to a game looking for an easily understood guide to getting started, while others may be seeking advanced tips and hints for gambling strategies. A third group may be looking for a community of like-minded players to join. Understanding these three distinct needs can help you craft your niche site to perfection!
Undertake Thorough Keyword Research
By finding out how your target market uses search engines to call up the sites they’re interested in, you can further check the relevance of your site. Plus, you’ll discover the SEO you need to use on your own site to drive up organic traffic finding its way to your virtual door. That is called Niche Driven SEO.
You can find many free keyword generators online, or there are paid options for those looking for more significant insights. Take a look at online communities relating to your niche – such as a relevant Facebook group or Quora thread – as these can also be goldmines when it comes to finding out the questions or interests your target audience has.
Google Trends is a helpful tool, too, which allows you to discover whether anyone is actively searching for a specific topic and whether interest in this topic is currently increasing or decreasing. To analyze trends rather than numbers, Google Trends is invaluable.
Give Visitors a Reason to Stick Around
On average, a visitor to a website will hang around for only thirty seconds before deciding to leave or keep reading. Your landing page has to be stellar and offer your audience a strong value proposition to keep readers on-site.
To ensure this, think about the best ways to engage your niche – the visitor profiles you assessed, as per the above, will help with this. To help you get started, describe (succinctly) who you are, what your website does, and how it’s different from other sites, and give your readers a clear next step.
Connect with Hearts and Minds
To really engage with your target audience, you’ll need to win over their hearts and minds. To do this, you’ll need to build an emotional connection with your visitors. Make your content personal, tell stories and personal anecdotes, and concentrate on creating a unique ‘voice,’ mood, and tone.
Use images and other visual elements to help with this – building interactive elements into your site is also an effective way of pulling your readers into your world!
Check Out the Competition
It’s not cheating to check out the competition, to find out what they’re doing right – and gaps in the market that you could capitalize on with your niche website!
Pay particular attention to how other websites in a similar niche are monetizing their site and how successful these endeavors appear. Are they selling branded products, for example, or have they branched out into selling coaching services or online classes?
Taking Your Niche Site to the Next Level
Once you’ve built up a strong following and a loyal audience, you may want to think about taking the next step on your niche website journey. You could think about ways to monetize your site or consider affiliate advertising. The latter involves teaming up with another company and featuring a link to their product or service on your site – you’ll typically earn a small commission for every sale made by clicking through this link.
You may also want to think about branching out by creating a sister site that explores another related niche or partnering with successful, relevant influencers to boost your site’s visibility even more. The options are endless!