Can You Make Money Without a Niche?

Many experts have claimed that having a clearly defined niche for your site is extremely important when you want to develop accumulative income from all your websites.

We’ve previously looked at how niche markets are related to making money and now I’ll like to deal with the subject of making money without a clearly defined niche.

Before that, let’s take a look at how most people generate income by positioning themselves within a niche. While there are many ways to make money online by going niche, they all commonly involve creating websites for various purposes.

These include the referral of interested visitors to other websites in order to earn commissions or the use of your own site to make money through advertising or the promotion of services and products.

Ways of Making Money Within a Niche

Here is a short list of ways people use to make money within a niche. While these apply to niche businesses or sites, one should note that these methods can be equally applied to websites without a defined niche, although the results may differ.

1. Create a product within a specific niche and get other affiliates to promote your product. Alternatively, set up your own online retail store and sell the product directly or distribute it to major online retailers like Amazon.com




2. Establish multiple niche mini-sites and landing pages around specific keywords/topics and make money by referring visitors to the merchant’s webpage. This does not involve regular content creation and largely involves link building and getting traffic to completed websites.




3. Develop blogs in multiple niches and update them regularly. You should eventually generate income through the display of contextual advertising, direct ads, affiliate programs and the sale of editorial content.




4. Sell your services through your website. This is suitable for web-based services like web design, programming or copywriting and online businesses or firms specializing in client-specific work.




5. Build online communities around a specific niche topic (e.g. amateur filmmaking) and then generate income through the usual monetization channels. Paid subscriptions work especially well for online communities or websites with a loyal following.

Can You Make Money Without a Distinctive Niche?

Jon Dyers, a Dosh Dosh reader recently asked if it was possible to make money from a website without a niche. Like many other bloggers, Jon’s site is mainly personal in nature and contains content on a variety of diverse topics.

These sorts of personal or general websites do not have an apparent theme, although regular visitors do have a good grasp of what the site is all about. My answer to his question is yes, it is possible to generate some real income even if you don’t have a website with a clearly defined niche.

But….There is no Such Thing as a Niche-less Site

Every site has a niche. Even the personal blogs which are full of random content about everything. You’re not niche-less. You’re just at the far end of the Long Tail.

If there is a computer gaming niche, there is a “22 year old American male passionate about movies and gaming” niche. If there is a Yoga niche, there’s a “50 year old woman taking yoga for the first time and keeping a journal” niche.

It’s slightly more obscure and less cookie-cutter, but there is an audience out there that will look at your website and classify it into a mold which suits THEIR interests. Your site might look like a mess of unrelated trajectories to you but to someone else, it makes perfect and coherent sense.

Generating Income from a Site With a General Niche

The idea of niche markets is sometimes overrated. Some internet marketing experts stress that niches are very important and keyword or niche research is essential before starting any website. Niche selection is useful but it doesn’t ultimately determine how much money you can make from every website.

The amount of web traffic you get and how you take advantage of the attention you receive is far more essential for making money from any website.

Two key factors should be considered: Traffic building and Audience Loyalty:

• Traffic is Money. The more traffic you have, the more money you will make from your website. Because of its general content, these sites can and should be marketed to everyone. Boing Boing is a good example of a profitable general interest blog (over $1 million/year).

  General or personal sites can do very well with social websites like Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon. Correspondingly, not all niche sites will work well with these social communities (unless a viral link bait is used). Take advantage of a non-niche site’s ability to work the social media crowd.




• Audience loyalty. Getting a supportive and loyal audience is very useful when you want to target specific niche markets with other projects in the future. Leverage your existing site traffic and funnel it to your other sites.

  Traffic and income flows in from multiple locations once you have your foot in several related niches. Use your general site as a launching pad and establish a symbiotic relationship between your online properties.

How to Quickly Position Your Website Within a Distinctive Niche

Here are guidelines for webmasters who might want to position their site, in order to better connect with a niche market. These tips are very easy to implement for both new or old websites.

• Change Your Site title or tagline. This is the quickest way to develop a niche for your website. Taglines and title tags for site homepage have a strong effect on how visitors and search engines perceive your website. Add a tagline to your header or logo and you’ll immediately be positioned within a niche.




• Revamp Your Internal Site Structure. The second most important point to note here is to determine how visitors access information on your site. If you are narrowing your focus, remove irrelevant webpages and shift general content into one overall webpage or category. Create new categories and webpages which indicate your focus on the niche topic.




• Connect with Your Niche Community. The third step is to spend more time networking with other webmasters or business owners in your niche. Promote your website within niche online communities like social websites or forums. This is essential for getting new audiences who have never heard of your site before or overlooked it previously, because it wasn’t what they needed.

More to Come on Niche Marketing

Webmastering is a knowledge-based practice and the more you learn about topics like search engine optimization or marketing, the more you come to have different views of your own websites.

There is a lot more to be said on niche marketing but these are some of the key points I wanted to highlight on the topic of making money without a defined niche.

Perhaps future articles will elaborate more on how you can effectively promote your site or business to a niche market.

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