4 Reasons Why I Decided to Start a New Niche Site

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Written by Liz

Just your regular 27-year-old, queer, super-introverted, FIRE-chasing, frugal Singaporean, who lives a pretty good life while earning only a modest salary, but still plans to retire at age 40 with $1,000,000. Click here to read more

July 26, 2020

I’ve been intrigued with the idea of starting a niche site since 2017, ever since I read Brendan’s (from Bren on the Road) guide to building a micro-niche site that makes money from day 1.

What is a Niche Site?

A niche site is just a website that talks about a very specific topic.

Examples of common niches include:

  • Budgeting;
  • Gardening;
  • Journaling;
  • Beauty; and more.

There are many, many, many niches out there, and you can choose a niche based on anything that you’re passionate about.

Why this Blog isn’t a Niche Site

In case you’re wondering, I don’t consider this blog a niche site, even though it is “technically” a personal finance site.

I view this blog more as a personal diary, documenting things like monthly net worth updates, yearly dividend updates, amongst other updates to eventual financial independence. These aren’t things that people actively search for on Google, and they’re not particularly helpful to anyone unless you’re invested in following my journey to FIRE on a modest salary (for those of you who are reading this because you’re invested, thank you).

So, after more than 2 years of deliberating (or rather, being lazy), I’ve finally decided that it was time to start a niche site.

4 Reasons Why I Decided to Start a New Niche Site

1. Monetisation

Right off the bat, I’m going to admit that I would love to earn some money by creating websites. Websites are a semi-passive, online method of making money, which would be incredibly helpful in quitting an office job (which is an active, commute-laden method of making money) that I don’t love.

How much money can you make with a niche site?

Creating a specific niche site is a great way to make money online.

For example, in Brendan’s guide that I linked to above, he explains that he made $60 in his first 2 months, which is a great chunk of spare change. A year in, he started making $100 a month. His most current update shows that after 2.5 to 3 years of starting his niche site, he’s making $300 to $400 a month with minimal additional effort.

And I have no doubt that his income will only continue to increase as more time passes. How cool is that?

Learning new monetisation skills

As for this blog, I don’t monetise it and I don’t plan to do so for the foreseeable future, because I find it difficult to do so. For now, I want to keep this blog as simple as possible until I figure out a way to monetise (if ever). This means that I would not be able to pick up new skills as to monetisation.

For a niche site, on the other hand, monetisation comes a lot easier. There are already affiliate programmes that I am looking to join in the near future, and this means that I get to pick up a bunch of new skills as well.

Office Job

2. Search Engine Optimisation

One new skill that I’ve been dying to learn is SEO, or search engine optimisation. It’s about optimising your posts such that readers can easily find your website through Google.

For example, if you type in “how to build a micro niche site that makes money” into the Google search bar, you’d find that Brendan’s guide comes up as one of the top searches in Google. This allows many readers to find his guide organically, without him needing to market it actively via email or social media.

 

Niche Site SEO

This is something that is very appealing to me, particularly because I’m social media-averse. I don’t use any social media at all, and I would prefer to not have to use it.

If I’m able to get the hang of SEO, I could gain a lot of free, recurring traffic with minimal additional effort.

3. Diversification

I recently came across a statistic that millionaires typically have 7 streams of income. While I’m not sure as to the accuracy of this statistic, I do believe in the philosophy behind it – mainly, diversification. If one income stream disappears entirely, you’d still have a few others that you can rely on to pay the bills.

At the moment, I currently have only 3 streams of income – my office job, my tutoring side hustle, and my dividend income. The only income I actually enjoy having is my passive dividend income stream, and I can foresee my active office and tutoring income streams disappearing in the near future.

As such, it is important for me to find other income streams that I rely on, and that I enjoy at the same time. And I feel that starting a niche site (if successful) might be a good income stream in the future.

In addition, once I pick up the required skillset to creating a successful niche site (if that happens), I can easily replicate the success with more and more niche sites in the future. By having more niche sites, I have more income streams, and therefore higher diversification.

quit working full-time

4. Resume Benefits

The last reason I decided to start a niche site was because it could help to pad my resume. As for this personal finance blog, no matter how much work I put into it, I couldn’t reveal the site to anyone else (I’m completely anonymous), let alone put it in a resume. It contains too much detailed information about my financial life to want to reveal to anyone.

However, with a niche site, I wouldn’t have this concern, as my niche site has nothing to do with personal finance and my detailed financial journey.

Going Forward

I started writing for my new niche site only this month (July 2020), so I’ll just use this month as the date that I “officially” started my niche site.

Going forward, I plan to post monthly niche site updates.

It won’t be too exciting for the first few months because I most likely won’t have much traffic or money coming in for at least 6 months. Perhaps even more. 12 months, even.

However, beyond that, I hope to provide in-depth updates as to traffic, advertising income, affiliate income, and more.

Ultimately, I don’t know whether this crazy endeavour of mine will pan out. Maybe it would, and maybe it wouldn’t. If it’s successful, I’d be the happiest person. If not, I know that I’d at least have learnt a few important lessons (and I’ll share them here so that you can learn from my mistakes if you ever want to build a niche site).

Either way, this will be an enriching experience, and I want to be able to share that with you.

Are you interested in starting a niche site? If you are, Brendan has a fantastic and free guide to starting your own niche site. (He’s an incredible guy.)

As always, thank you for reading and supporting this blog.

Become a Millionaire and Retire Early on a Modest Salary Book Cover

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2 Comments

  1. Budget Life List

    I look forward to the updates! Thanks for taking us along in this journey!

    • Liz

      Thanks for stopping by BuLL! It’s my pleasure 🙂