Best ways to monetise industry-specific site

First off, you need to get the word out about your site.

Be a busy body and blog, then distribute that content onto directories, spread it through social media and whatnot.

My Experience (Chinese Blog)
Post high quality articles like tutorial, review, latest world news ...etc.
3 - 5 Articles per day.
You will get more traffic and revenue.

Hi Andrew,

In the Resources sector, you could also create and sell short, laser-focused reports on specific topics e.g. "Special Report: China's Radical Rethink On Steel in 2013-2014" or research reports on specific companies in the sector like BHP Billiton.

With a good Analytics package like GA or Statcounter, you'll be able to see what your current visitors are already interested in and create reports along those lines e.g

Is there software your industry uses? If so, and I suspect the software merchants don't have formal affiliate programs, approach the leading software providers and arrange a referral deal.

I did this in a very niche industry and do very well with it. If the software is cloud software and they charge clients every month, be sure to require recurring commissions where you get a % every month from every referral. A decent % for SAAS cloud software is 20 to 35% RECURRING. In fact, I'd only promote recurring commission software. In 2 years you can have a full time income just from this if your blog is an authority in the industry.

Also, ask the merchant for a small, exclusive discount for your readers. This way you can promote the heck out of it to your readers and come across as a good guy by offering the discount. I also did this and it's been an excellent selling feature.

If the merchant says "how do we track referrals" ask them to simply set up a landing page for your referrals. It's old school but it works. They also provide you a discount code your readers provide which tracks sales to you. Yes, this works ... I'm doing it with 2 merchants.

Other products ... think about what your target audience uses. I'm assuming they are businesses. The sky is the limit ... consider:

Insurance (many industries have niche insurers)
Credit Cards
General business services - marketing, software, etc.

Can you promote physical goods? If so, check out Amazon and CJ.com.

Businesses need so many things/services and if you're an authority within the industry, it's super simple to build a loyal audience. Treat them like gold. Give away killer info on your blog and via email marketing. It works.

Excellent guys, thank you so much for your insightful comments. I've laid out the changes I want to make in the blog (add a news aggregator and write an editorial 1-2ce/week, an international company directory, a jobs/education reference, and an investor's area with updated stock quotes, etc). Hopefully all this extended, continuously updated information will bring in a steady #viewers and a nice passive income; my concern now is how to automate the inflow of information so that the site only requires part-time hours as I plan to maintain my offline work the main one, at least for the middle run. Is it realistic to create such type of site and expect to maintain it, say 1-4hs per day?

Thank you all again for your very valuable comments.