Since most of my micro niche websites will be monetized with Google Adsense, the microsite design is very important. I need to find out what layouts and ad formats convert best, so that I don't leave any money on the table.
When it comes to microsite design and themes for niche websites, it's important that you choose self-optimizing themes and plugins. They can save you a lot of work and more importantly bring you money.
Your money rises and falls with the conversions and the click-through-rates of your visitors. The math is simple: more clicks mean more money! That's why you need to pay very close attention to your microsite design!
There are several reasons why the design of your microsites or niche sites is very important.
After all, the audience decides whether you earn money with your niche sites or not. Most times you want your visitor to do a certain action, that can be a click on an ad, the purchase of an affiliate link or the subscription to your mailing list.
Whatever it is, visitors will only do that action, when your site looks trustworthy!
Consider yourself as an example. If you open a website which is ugly and where it's obvious that the creator didn't put any efforts in the design or the look and feel. What does that tell you about the content on that site? You'll treat the content as crap and won't most likely even read it but leave the site immediately.
So, in order to make it easy for your visitor to do what you want him to do, make your microsite design look nice, smooth and trustworthy!
The design of your niche site or microsite is also very important when it comes to SEO. As I said, people will most likely directly leave your site when the design doesn't appeal to them.
Google tracks the time a user spends on a certain website before he returns to the search results page. A short time spent on a website is treated as a sign for low-quality or irrelevant content, because people spent more time on relevant sites with relevant content.
That's why Google ranks down sites with a high bounce rate and quickly leaving visitors. And a bad ranking can decrease all your money coming in, so pay attention to microsite design!
I want to present you two self-optimizing niche website themes with out-of-the-box Google Adsense integration.
What makes these two niche website themes so great is the fact that they help you to find the best converting ad layout, which is crucial for successful niche websites. Believe it or not, just through intensive testing of different ad layouts, I was able to boost the daily revenue on this blog by 300%.
Since there is no standard layout that works best in microsite design, testing different layouts should become a part of your weekly schedule. With these themes, you'll make this testing a lot easier!
Please note, that I'm no affiliate for any of these themes, I just love them and want to show them to you!
The Niche Website Theme is created by Spencer Haws, who also created my favourite keyword research tool Long Tail Pro.
Spencer owns 200+ niche websites himself and started building them years ago. Given his experience, he definitely knows what makes niche websites earn money!
His theme supports 10 easy to switch layouts, 10 predesigned color schemes or even a completely custom color scheme. You can define custom header graphics and custom fonts (via plugin) as well.
This way you can easily try different layouts and designs to figure out, which design gets the most clicks or the highest CPC and thus earns the most money.
My favourite feature is the ad rotation function. You can save multiple ad codes for one ad space and the theme randomly picks one ad to display. Ad rotation gives you the opportunity to easily find the ads that convert best and get rid of all the other useless ads.
Though the Niche Website Theme has some pretty good functions, it has one huge drawback for me. It doesn't support WordPress Multisite installations. If you're using just single WordPress sites, you won't ever experience a problem with it but it simply doesn't work properly on WordPress Multisite installations. That's the reason why I stopped experimenting with it and switched to another theme.
intelliTheme is created by EmpireFlippers and is the theme that I'm using on all of my niche websites. It supports WordPress Multisite installations, which is essential to easily manage multiple niche websites.
The intelliTheme is awesome, because it supports layout rotation (!) and not just ad rotation.
While the Niche Website Theme supports different layouts that you can switch manually, the intelliTheme supports automatic layout switching (also called split-testing) based upon conversion rates.
You can activate up to 5 different layouts, that will be tested upon conversion. Statistics will be tracked and with the split-testing functionality, you can easily see what layout converts best.
This function makes it stand out to all other themes and microsite designs I've seen before and that's why I highly recommend it to everyone who creates niche websites.
Of course there are functions like custom colors, backgrounds, etc. and with plugins you can easily change fonts as well. It makes the designing and layout testing for niche sites incredibly easy and you can see it in action on my first niche website (I won't directly link to it here, because I'm scared of a penalty by Google).
What do you think of these themes? What are your experiences with those and what themes do you use on niche websites?
Keep on rocking!
Jan
