Let's be honest: we all want money earning sites! And it's nothing bad about it.
You're reading the third post of my Micro Niche Site Challenge. The first one was about finding your niche, the shows how to create a website with WordPress.
Creating high quality content is crucial for money earning sites, because all money earning sites must rank well in Google and have a good SEO strategy.
I'm going to explain how you structure your content very effectively to make your website rank. There are several criteria and methods that you can use to make content creation easy. This is what all money earning sites have in common: they rank high for their target keywords and thus get free traffic from the search engines.
We will target one single keyword per page. On this way we assure, that the pages of our niche site don't compete against each other but provide comprehensive information on the topic we chose.
When I say "target one singe keyword" I mean, that that the text will contain one specific keyword at a certain density. The keyword density describes, how often a keyword is mentioned on a website. For example if I write 500 words and the keyword appears 5 times, I have a keyword density of 1%.
It is very important that you keep an eye on the keyword density, because Google uses it to measure the relevancy of websites. Obviously if a website contains your keyword, it could provide helpful information for the topic and thus Google will consider it in the ranking.
But please don’t make the mistake and stuff the text full with keywords! A keyword density of 1% - 3% is what I’m using on my sites. If you mention your keyword too often, Google will treat the website as spam! Google searches for natural structured texts and those texts don't use specific keywords over and over again.
Finding the right balance for the keyword density is a secret of all money earning sites, especially for niche sites.
This brings us to the next point. You don't write the text of niche sites for the search engines, you write text for humans! Do you know what all money earning sites have in common? It's regardless if they're monetized with Adsense, offering services, or selling products - they provide value to the reader.
In my eyes this is the most challenging part while creating a niche site. You have to reach a certain keyword density but you also have to assure that the text looks natural and provides helpful information to the reader.
The reason why your text must be high quality is quite obvious. People will leave your site directly when the content of your niche site isn't helping them. They won't even click on your ads but directly go back to the search engine's results page (SERP). Google tracks the time difference from the people opening your site from the SERP and people leaving your site back to the SERP.
If all the people leave your site quickly, that could have negative consequences for your ranking.
Otherwise, when you provide helpful information on your niche site, people will share your site and recommend them to others. Virality can be a massive boost for your website, so you'll want to make sure that people like your contents!
But what specific types of content can you create to fill your niche site, attract search engines, and make your visitors love your site?
There are several different kinds of content, some of them are easy to create while other require lots of preparation. If you look at some of the most popular money earning sites like Smart Passive Income, Social Triggers, or Niche Pursuits you'll find lots of those contents.
People love how-to's, guides. and tutorials. And this is pretty human, since guides and tutorials let people achieve goals without having to think for them. That is why guides and tutorials are a great form of content to publish on niche sites.
To publish a successful guide or tutorial you need to be aware of the problem your visitor is facing. Make sure that you understand the current situation your reader is in, because that's the starting point for your tutorial.
Than you can go through every single step your reader needs to take to follow your guide. Take care of every single question that may occur and answer them.
Explain the steps in a very detailed manner, so that people really understand what you want them to do.
Hand your guide to persons that have a level of experience in your field that is comparable with the knowledge of your reader. This is a good way to ensure that your guide is understandable and that it really takes your reader where you want him to go.
Explaining difficult or diffuse issues is a good way to make your niche site successful.
One reason for this is, that complex issues are sometimes good targets for niche sites when it comes to search volume and competition. The people interested in a complex subject are usually very passionate about it and thus interested in sharing knowledge related to the issue. Almost all money earning sites benefit especially from the sharing of content, because that's what makes them spread the world.
When you are able to explain the issue in a way that makes it understandable for people that are no expert, you've created great content for your niche site.
Product reviews can be found on 99% of the money making sites. And there are several reasons why you should consider writing product reviews for your niche site as well.
You can earn affiliate commission on products you review. If you feel good recommending a specific product to your audience, use affiliate links.
Also you state yourself as an expert when you review a product in great detail. People will understand that you know what you're talking about. If they can follow your argumentation and understand why you like or dislike a certain product, you've made a step towards gaining your trust.
When you're writing about trending topics in your niche, you'll see that you have something in common with other money earning sites.
Riding a trend will leverage your success and the virality of your niche site. Take a look into forums and social media and see, what people are talking in your niche. You could even create a custom Google Alert on your keyword and get emailed everytime Google notices your keyword.
When you have five posts completed, you're good to go to start ranking with your site!
SEO is the foundation for the success of money making sites. They all rank high in Google and they all have a decent amount of traffic.
To ensure that your niche site has good On-Site SEO, you can install the free WordPress SEO Plugin by YoaST.
This plugin allows you to analyze your content directly while you're writing it. It guides you through the most important aspects for On-Site SEO like keyword density, the title and description tags, links, images, and all other necessary information.
Don't worry, it's very easy to use. Here are some screenshots, showing the analysis of the post you're reading right now.
General Settings
This page shows you the general settings in the plugin. The box directly appears beneath the post editor and it updates while you're writing. You can define the focus keyword, which is the keyword you want your post to rank for. YoaST then analyzes your content, the title, and the meta description. I've blurred out my snippet preview and my focus keyword, but the green statistics show you, how often my keyword occurs on my page and in the most SEO relevant places.
If some conditions are not matched, you'll see that the small circles turn red. This is a pretty simply way to measure how well you've optimized your content. The most money earning sites will have a SEO score like this site, probably even better. Though SEO is only one part (others are Conversion Rate, Customer Targeting, User Experience, etc.) of the process, it's quite important.
Page Analysis
The Page Analysis tab shows you very detailed information about your page. You see that I have a keyword density of 0.76%, which means, that I should try to add the keyword more often. But if I can't figure out how to add the keyword without making the text hard to read, I won't do it - I'm writing for humans, not for search engines!
This site is the main reason why I love this plugin. You don't need to remember all those SEO aspects, the plugin does it for you. As I started I didn't even know those factors existed. I just installed the YoaST SEO plugin and it showed me all the things I needed to take care of.
And now I'm getting 300+ daily visitors on this blog. And probably 60% come directly from search engines.
Those are the two pages of the YoaST plugin I use. It has more functions, but I'm not familiar with those right now, that's why I'll explain them later to you.
I hope you've seen how important it is to have a good content strategy, when it comes to build money earning sites. Especially niche sites benefit massively from having high quality content!
Please leave a comment if you liked this article or have a question.
To your success,
Jan
