Passive Income: My First Niche Blog
As I wrote recently, I’ve been exploring ways to develop streams of passive income. One of my experiments is writing for eHow. Another is starting a niche blog.
For those that don’t know, niche blogging for income involves creating a blog on some topic, placing advertising on it, and earning money every time a visitor clicks one of the ads. There’s a lot to consider when developing a good niche blog. Choosing the right topic is very important, since the advertising will be related to the blog’s content, and I’d prefer a field in which advertisers pay a lot for clicks. Also, the niche has to be balanced between popular and unpopular – too popular and my content will be lost in a sea of other websites, too unpopular and I won’t have an audience. The trick is to choose a niche that’s juuuuust right.
The blog also needs to attract a decent amount of traffic, since more visitors means more potential ad-clickers. Then there’s the issue of content – the more the better, so long as it’s high-quality. The more information for people to potentially browse, the more traffic might visit the blog.
There’s a whole host of information about niche blogging out there on the web, some of it excellent, some of it, well, sleezy-feeling. What got the fire started for me was an excellent set of forum posts on the topic. From there, it was a matter of googling for details and reading the blogs of other bloggers who niche blog!
My Niche Blog
So what about my blog?
At this stage, it’s in its infancy.
- I have a domain name.
- I have a Wordpress blogging template installed.
- I have begun the process of accumulating content. I have planned to create about 60 articles before any are actually published. In this way, I’ll be able to post a steady stream of content should I become sidetracked by anything. I hope that regular content will go a long way toward retaining visitors in the beginning. I’ve used Elance to hire freelance writers for 20 of the articles, I have 20 more from article depository websites, and I will write 20 myself.
My Plan
I plan on starting to post content before the end of the month. I’ll post 1-2 articles per day for 1-2 months. I’ll promote the blog in a few ways too – social networking, making posts on related forums and blogs, contacting professionals and other bloggers who work in the niche field, etc. But my hope is that only leads to a fraction my traffic. If I have chosen a balanced niche, my blog should be near the top of many Google search rankings on the topic.
At first, I won’t place advertising on the blog. Once I establish a fair amount of traffic to the blog, around 100 unique visitors per day, I’ll put up ads via Google Adsense or another advertising source. By the way, I’m not going to reveal the name of the blog or its niche just yet, since I want to see if this experiment can work without traffic from Wrinkly Dollar.
I’ve set a short-term earnings goal of $5 per day by the end of July. $5 a day is $150 per month or $1,800 per year. Not much, but it will be a good start. If I can get there, I’ll have the motivation to grow those earnings even more. I’ll keep you updated…
