Building a niche website with key advertisers in mind

Building a niche website with key advertisers in mind

A lot of people will build niche specific websites when targeting specific keywords for AdSense, and this is similar, but you're going straight to the cow to get the milk instead of getting it at the store.  You will be creating a niche-specific website, building it up, and grabbing the attention of big advertisers within your niche who will hopefully pay you for ad spots.  If that doesn't work, there's always AdSense lol

Many of you reading this discussion have likely tried your hand with Adsense and made a few bucks or failed miserably.  The problem is that you get an undetermined amount of the profit from each click while Google is probably getting the majority share.  It doesn't matter if you're bringing in 10,000+ visitors a day and getting 500+ clicks on your ads, you may never see a huge profit, and that's why you need to go directly to the cow!


Know your niche before jumping in
You MUST do proper research before jumping into a niche.  You can't think, "Competitive basket weaving has to pay a lot of money, so I'll choose that niche!" because I can guarantee you it does not lol.  You need to think of specific niches, something where people are paying for ads, and then do research on the top 10 websites within those niches.

Yes, you'll be doing plenty of research beforehand, so you know if this is something worth chasing after if the niche you're targeting is going to crash and burn.

Find the top ten companies within each niche, figure out if they're spending money on Adwords, figure out how much they're likely spending, and if the value is high enough from at least 3 of them, then you might be in a good niche. 

You'll now need to figure out if anyone is doing what you plan to, sell ad space to these people, and that's not the easiest thing to do.  You can use a service like SpyFu to find all this information, but you'll want to use a paid version to get the best results, but the free information might be enough to give you a good idea of who's spending money.

Identify the bigger companies that buy ad space
When I talk about how they're buying ad space, I'm not talking about Adwords or Bing Ads; I'm talking about the companies who are wasting money on billboards and commercials.  A company that can throw away $20,000+ on a year-long billboard campaign is not only dumb, but they have plenty of money to throw around, and they may as well throw it at you for some ad space

These companies tend to be more "old school," so when you pitch to them, you will need to talk more about the numbers and less about what your website does and why it's awesome.  Tell them averages like you get 1,000 people per day to your website, or you're getting 500,000 pageviews each month.  They will then determine a price they're willing to pay you, which is likely a good amount since they pay for billboards and get a bad ROI, so I hope this can pull in a few clients easily for you lol.

Find the best affiliate programs within your niche
If you're having a hard time converting these targeted companies into clients paying you for ad space, think of switching up to affiliate marketing and push specific ads at people.  Some affiliate programs run lifetime commission structures, which is what I prefer using, so I hope you can find something similar to this on your journey.

Not everyone is familiar with affiliate marketing, so you might be able to put up a banner or link to get sales, but you might have to mask the links with URL shorteners, so people don't hover over it and see the root domain then enter that into their search bar. 

Generate traffic before pitching ad space to companies
Everything boils down to how much traffic you're getting and how targeted it is.  Sure, you could get 1,000,000 uniques per month to your site, but if none of them are converting, then you'll see your advertisers jumping ship. 

If you're working with bigger companies, ones who understand tracking their conversions, you'll want to make sure you're generating quality targeted traffic for your website, so it converts for your advertisers.  I would say to generate your own traffic through SEO and PPC methods, bring on a medium-sized advertiser, use 50% to 75% of their payments to boost your traffic even more, and then target bigger fish until you're at the very top and bringing in whales who want to throw loads of cash your way for a banner spot


Final Thoughts
Building and maintaining a website like this isn't difficult, there are themes specific for it, but you'll need to dedicate yourself to it if you want to be successful.  You need to have amazing content, your website can't seem spammy, and you need to get genuine traffic to your pages.  If you can do all of that and you're still not attracting a lot of advertisers, slap some Adsense on there and make some cash until you do catch a whale!


Thanks for reading


Tommy Carey
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/TommyCarey