There many creative ways to make money with your niche website. This is why so many people purchase niche sites. Let’s explore what the 12 most popular revenue streams are that you too can use on your niche site:

1. Google Adsense
2. Banner Advertising Sales
3. Sponsorship Links
4. Physical Products
5. Digital Products
6. Affiliate Offers
7. PLR Products
8. Amazon aStore
9. Membership
10. Services
11. MarketPlace
12. Website Flipping

Those are 12 popular models you can use to monetize your Niche site. These methods are listed in a loosely order of effort required to make money, from least to most. AdSense being the easiest, and development of a profitable marketplace being substantially more difficult, but more profitable as well. Let’s explore each strategy in more detail:

The most popular and easiest way to monetize your niche site, and start earning is to add Google AdSense code to your site, and you get paid per every click a visitor makes. This is also referred to as contextual advertising, since each AdSense ad relates to the context of your niche it is presented in. Choose your niche wisely, as some niches pay more than others with this strategy. For example: financial niches will pay more per click than cake decoration niches.

This is another popular method amongst bloggers for monetizing a niche site. Sales of banner advertising is a form of direct advertising model which usually involves you approaching potential advertisers. If you have a quality site and want to avoid doing the leg work, you can sell your banner spots through an advertising network like BuySellAds for a percentage of revenue. Before you go ahead with this strategy, make sure your website content is highly targeted and generating a lot of traffic. If you prefer to avoid the middleman and go after advertisers directly, make sure the ad buying & selling process is as efficient as possible. Many bloggers use OIO Publisher Ads Manager Plugin for WordPress to automate the ad sales process. This saves bloggers a lot of time and makes managing ads a whole lot easier.

Selling sponsorship links is similar to selling direct advertising banners, except it doesn’t involve placing any images on your site. What is important to the advertiser is the anchor text used in with the link. These links are usually place in sidebar,blogrolls, footer, and in-context (i.e. blog posts, articles …) with in-context sponsorship links usually being the most valuable.

The age old model of selling actual physical products. Many large online retailers use this model successfully – for example, Dell sells computers, American Eagle sells jeans. Selling physical products involves listing one or multiple products for sale on your e-commerce niche website, facilitating a secure transaction and shipping the product. Keep in mind there are warehousing and distribution factors to this model unless you use drop shipping. Shipping to overseas destinations can also prove to be cost prohibitive.

Sell anything people can download – WordPress Themes & Plugins, eBooks, software, music, videos. Selling digital products is relatively easier, than physical products as digital products have a much lower cost of sale. Digital products scale much better, meaning the cost of selling one digital product is pretty much the same as selling a thousand copies, but the revenue is a thousand times bigger. Another benefit of selling digital products is that there is no physical warehousing, shipping or cost to reproduce the product. You can create your own products to sell, pay someone to develop a product for you, or promote other people’s products via affiliate networks (see affiliate offers section).

Promoting affiliate offers, also known as affiliate marketing can prove to be very profitable for everyday bloggers as well as professional affiliate marketers. Affiliate Marketing is probably the easiest and quickest way for a niche site to earn money. You don’t actually have to carry any inventory, being an affiliate means you act as a middle man between the consumer and producer, and try to sell their product or service offer. Once the consumer buys it, you receive a referral commission. You can also place banner ads on your niche site, or place links within posts with recommendations for products. Another tip is to develop a mailing list and promote affiliate products to your list, so you can make some income without visitors even coming to your website.

The easiest way to sell your own product using a niche site is to sell your own eBook. Don’t have your own eBook? Buy a PLR (Private-Label-Rights) eBook, you can rebrand it or sell it as is, keeping 100% of the revenue for yourself. A plus to this is that you keep all of the revenue. A con is that you have to make or rebrand the product yourself. Also it might be worth keeping in mind that most of the time, selling your own product is a bit more difficult than selling affiliate products because affiliate products usually have a better reputation.

By becoming an amazon associate you can sell amazon products on your own niche site, by integrating an
Amazon aStore. Although you start with only 4% commission, one advantage is that amazon is already an established brand that people recognize and trust, meaning that if your niche site traffic is well targeted your conversion rates will usually be higher as compared to some other unknown brand.

Membership sites make money by charging people a regular fee to have access to a secure “Members Only” area. This area might contain training material that’s updated or added regularly, or it might be a web based application. If you want customers to stick around and keep paying for the privilege then you need to make sure you provide unique and quality content.

The services monetization model encompasses a huge variety of offerings and usually involves customers paying for someone’s time. Selling a service may involve selling day to day tasks such as data entry as a virtual assistant or professional services such as accounting or personal training. Services can prove hard to scale, as usually you need to keep adding work-hours as your clientele grows.

Buy Sell Ads and Flippa are two great examples of the marketplace monetization model, as are dating sites, freelance marketplaces such as rentacoder and auction sites like eBay. Usually marketplaces make money by charging sellers a fee to list items for sale, take a percentage of the transaction, or from advertising if the site generates enough traffic. One of the biggest challenges with marketplace sites is attracting enough buyers and sellers to interact regularly.

The final option, to monetize your niche site is to flip it. By flipping the website, you are just selling it for more than you bought it for, resulting in a profit. Many niche web development companies now offer very attractive niche website packages for ridiculously low prices. Which means you can usually flip it right away for profit if you can find clients looking for affordable websites. However, to make the flip even more lucrative, the niche site should already be making an income or have some amount of traffic (or both).

So now that you know 12 solid ways to making money using a niche site, what are you waiting for? Buy yourself a Niche Package and get started today!

If you’d like to suggest any other great monetization methods or resources, leave a comment below