5 Niche Website Examples: How to Make Money With a Niche Site

Are you thinking of starting a niche site? If you are unsure of what a niche site looks like, how profitable it can be, or how to design a niche site, this article is for you. 

Today, I will be analyzing five unique niche sites. This list includes niche sites of all types — both large and small, in all different niches. 

Not all the sites use the same monetization methods. Some use affiliate marketing, others sell courses, and others rely on ads to earn money. 

While you shouldn't copy a site outright, you can use this list to get ideas of which niches to focus on and how to design or monetize your site. Let's get into it. 

Here are five niche website examples to give you inspiration and motivation.

1. Garage Gym Power

Given that home gym equipment, especially large machines, tend to be costly, Garage Gym Power is probably earning substantial commissions. If you are promoting expensive products from Amazon, you need fewer sales to make a significant profit. 

The site design is rather basic — it's nothing flashy. 

However, I liked how they broke up the buying guides by placing each product in its own box, each with a large orange CTA button. That helps improve readability and increase conversions.

2. Do Yoga With Me

I found Do Yoga With Me particularly interesting because it uses a broad range of monetization methods. Here are some of the ways Do Yoga With Me earns money: 

• They write yoga-related buying guides with embedded affiliate links.
• They place ads in the sidebar.
• While guided meditations and yoga instructional videos are available on the site for free, they also sell albums and video downloads. 
• The monthly premium membership gives members ad-free access to videos, classes, challenges, and programs.
• Teacher training courses are available for those who want to become yoga teachers. 
• In-person retreats take place in Mexico. Tickets are sold on the website for $500+.

Just one of these methods would be enough to earn a full-time income. Combining a few different methods allows you to monetize a larger portion of your visitors.

While not everyone will pay for a premium yoga video guide, they might click on ads or buy a yoga mat through your affiliate link. 

Do Yoga With Me did a great job finding excellent keywords to target - keywords with low difficulty scores, low competition, and good monthly search volumes. 

While it gets around the same monthly visits as the previous site (Garage Gym Power), it only ranks for a fraction of the keywords that Garage Gym Power ranks for (16k vs. 100k). In other words, it ranks for higher-volume keywords (or is getting a higher click-through rate). 

Here are some keywords that Do Yoga With Me ranks for: 

• Senior yoga - 5.4k searches, 1st position
• Yoga Nidra sleep - 4.4k searches, 1st position
• Breath exercises yoga - 1.6k searches, 1st position
• Yoga - 368k searches, 16th position (second page of Google)

Do Yoga With Me managed to get to the second page of the results for the keyword “yoga” due to its high authoritative value. It has a Domain Trust rank of 77 and over 30,000 backlinks, including from .edu and .gov domains.

What can you learn from this? If you consistently put out valuable content that others will want to link to—like the guided meditation and yoga instruction video guides—you will get backlinks, and your rankings will soar. 

3. So Very Blessed

The health and weight loss niche is one of the most saturated niches. However, there are still sub-niches that you can target. Just look at So Very Blessed, a weight loss site explicitly targeted to Christian women. 

So Very Blessed takes a faith-based approach to weight loss. In addition to standard weight-loss topics, like recipes and lifestyle advice, So Very Blessed provides devotionals and uses sources from the Bible to motivate religious women in their weight-loss journey. 

So Very Blessed uses several monetization methods: 

• It promotes products from Amazon Associates.
• It earns money from ads in the sidebar.
• It sells a 30-day weight loss devotional e-book via Amazon.
• It has a monthly weight-loss program membership, costing $54/month.

Becky, the owner of So Very Blessed, also gives away free 5- and 7-day weight loss challenges, as well as printable cards with Bible verses for weight-loss inspiration, to encourage people to sign up to her email list. 

So Very Blessed's target audience is obvious - Christian women (often middle-aged) who are trying to lose weight. 

It ranks in the first or second spot for high-volume keywords, including:

• Bible on fasting - 6.6k
• Confidence Bible verses - 4.4k
• Scriptures for fasting - 4.4k
• Christian music workout - 2.4k

So Very Blessed is an excellent example of taking a saturated niche, such as weight loss or finance, and looking at it from a different angle to target a very specific sub-niche.

4. Dollar Sprout

Along with the weight loss niche, the finance niche is one of the most saturated niches. Both niches address problems that most ordinary people face: 

• Saving money
• Earning more money
• Managing a budget
• Losing weight
• Staying healthy

As opposed to So Very Blessed, which targets a specific sub-audience within the weight loss niche, Dollar Sprout focuses on the entire finance/money niche. The site covers topics like: 

• Side hustles
• Passive income
• Earning money by blogging
• Freelancing
• Online businesses
• Banking services
• Savings accounts
• Money and budget management
• Credit cards
• Investing apps
• Online brokers
• And much more

Dollar Sprout has been around since 2014, and in the past few years alone, they have built up a considerable audience. With a Domain Trust rank of 65 and more than 295,000 backlinks, Dollar Sprout is consistently getting more than 400,000 visits a month.  

How do they do it? In a saturated niche like finance and money, you need to become THE source of information in the niche. Visitors should find all the information they need to know on your site, without visiting competitors. 

Dollar Sprout stands out from other finance sites by writing complete long-form guides such as 189 Side Hustles to Try in 2021 and 50 Freelance Jobs Websites to Find Your Next Remote Gig. 

By focusing entirely on providing useful and COMPLETE content, Dollar Sprout has slowly built itself up as an authority in the finance niche. 

When Dollar Sprout first started out, it was earning just $15/month from Adsense revenue. It has since switched to affiliate marketing and is now earning well over $200,000/month. 

It’s essential to have a long-term plan in such a saturated niche, as success can take months or years. Notice how traffic only started going up towards the end of 2018:

Here are some things that stood out to me about Dollar Sprout’s content: 

• It’s long-form content — the “189 Hustles” post had over 20,000 words.
• The font is easy to read.
• The content is broken up. In the “189 Hustles” post, each hustle is color-coded for earning potential, length, and ease of work.
• It has outbound links to valuable sites like Entrepreneur. These types of outbound links help your readers and can boost your SEO rankings

This value-based approach has enabled Dollar Sprout to rank on the first page of Google for keywords such as:

• Online jobs - 165k searches/month
• Places to cash a check near me - 90.5k searches/month
• Online jobs for teens - 33.1k searches/month
• Free Amazon gift card - 22.2k searches/month
• Paying survey - 18.1k searches/month

Notice Dollar Sprout’s clean design. There are no distracting ads, and they don’t push any courses or e-books. Instead, they earn commissions from products they review and promote, as explained in their How We Make Money post. 

Jeff Proctor, founder of Dollar Sprout, did an interview on Niche Pursuits in 2019. Some interesting things that stood out from the interview: 

• Around 80% of traffic comes from organic SEO, with the rest coming from social media and other sources. 
• Although there were 230 blog posts published on Dollar Sprout at the time, 40 posts got most of the traffic. It can really be a hit and miss with SEO. Not all pages will end up ranking — that’s just the reality. That’s why you need to keep posting consistently, even if you don’t see results yet. 
• Dollar Sprout has a link building strategy that involves manual outreach and guest posts. They aim for three to four backlinks a month, and the rest come organically. They never did an automated blast in an attempt to get tons of backlinks at once. 

Dollar Sprout also posts consistently on YouTube. Although its YouTube videos are shorter and not as comprehensive as the blog posts, they attract a decent amount of views.  

5. Dog Food Advisor

Dog Food Advisor has an authoritative ring to it. Perhaps that's why while Dog Food Advisor reviews dog food brands, other websites are reviewing Dog Food Advisor and its trustworthiness.

One thing I noticed about Dog Food Advisor is its strong social media presence. It has over 145,000 likes and 150,000 followers on Facebook. The site also encourages discussion, and the comments section at the bottom of each dog food review can get lively. There is also an on-site forum.

Building a community is important, as it will help you get more repeat visitors. Encouraging discussions and allowing people to share their views helps build a community. 

Dog Food Advisor is a simple site. It has a running list of its top dog food recommendations for various dog breeds, a directory of all reviews published on the site, and a list of recent dog food recalls. 

I really liked how they made each review easy to read, with quick buying tips, dog food recipes, and nutritional information.

Dog Food Advisor gets an average of 2.2 million visits each month. That’s quite a lot! It ranks in the first spot on Google for keywords like: 

• Dog foods - 135k searches/month
• Best dog foods - 90.5k searches/month
• Best puppy food - 40.5k searches/month
• Best dog food brands - 27.1k searches/month

It’s hard to say how much revenue Mike Sagman, the founder of Dog Food Advisor, makes. He seems to make money by promoting Chewy in the sidebar. 

However, since he is getting 2.2 million hits per month, many of them from fans who look up to Dog Food Advisor as their trusted source of dog food advice, Mike is probably earning a full-time income.

Here’s something interesting: Dog Food Advisor relies entirely on organic traffic, with $0 spent on paid traffic. 

With over 360,000 backlinks and a Domain Trust rank of 75, it doesn’t need to spend any money on Google Adwords. With that many quality backlinks, high rankings are almost guaranteed.

I do think Dog Food Advisor hasn’t utilized the power of social media to its full potential.

While it has over 150,000 followers on Facebook, it seems to have neglected its Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube channels, and it has only a small following on Twitter. 

What You Can Learn From These Niche Website Examples

There are so many other great niche site examples that haven’t made it to this list. However, I didn’t choose these sites because of their size, content, or fame. 

Instead, I tried to show you sites in various niches that achieved success using different monetization methods and SEO techniques.

Hopefully, this list will help you see the potential for niche sites, regardless of which niche or monetization method you choose.