Niche Site Project 4 Monthly Report: August 2018

The first full month of Niche Site Project 4 is now in the books!  Now it's time to provide a monthly report for what happened last month.

However in addition to my update on my site for Niche Site Project 4, I'm also providing an update on everyone else that is participating!  Nearly 800 people signed up to participate in Niche Site Project 4, and below you will find those people that sent in a report for the first month.

But before I dive into the participant reports, I'll give a full accounting of what I've been up to with the project.

A Quick Timeline Re-cap

• July 31st, 2018 – I publicly announce Niche Site Project 4
• July 2018 – I selected my first niche idea before announcing the project, but write about finding a niche here (in early August).
• August 7th, 2018 – I buy a misspelled domain name for my first niche idea.  Whoops.
• August 16th, 2018 – I buy a correctly spelled domain name for my first niche idea.
• August 20th, 2018 – After more in-depth research, I decide to scrap my first niche idea and select another one.  Luckily before I had started my website.
• August 22nd, 2018 – I decide on a new niche.  I also reveal what my “old” niche was and why I didn't select it here.
• August 24th, 2018 – I buy the domain name for my new niche.
• August 24 – 30th – I had found 50ish great keywords that I feel like can do well.
• August 30th – Hired first author for the site.

Overall, I think the above quick timeline shows you exactly where I am with the site.

I have my niche selected that I'm very happy about.  Then towards the end of August I finally got my domain, found a bunch of keywords, and hired my first author.

I did not have anything published in August, hence no traffic or earnings for the month.

So, for my official report, there's nothing too exciting.  I only owned the domain for about a week during August…so there are no visitors and no earnings to report.  However, that's just fine…right?

The site is being built, I have authors in place, and I'm excited to start getting some visitors.

Since August…

I am already 13 days into September at the time of this writing, and I'm happy to say that I've officially published 2 articles on the site and 2 more will likely be published today or tomorrow.

I've hired 5 writers and I'll keep the ones that do a good job.

The initial set of articles are all Amazon affiliate type articles (best product xyz).  However, I'm also working with one author that is producing non-affiliate articles that are more image heavy type content.

I've given her a batch of 10 articles that are more informational that she is working on.  These will be the start of my venture into Pinterest.  I expect Pinterest to be a key element of my site.  I might get around to actually creating my Pinterest account in August and start pinning some images.

First I'm getting a logo done…on Fiverr.  Yep, Fiverr.

I've got my GeneratePress Premium theme in place and may tweak the look and feel a bit more once I have my logo in place.  Once I have my “branding” down, I'll figure out how I want my Pinterest pins to look to match this branding.  Then I'll be ready to rock and roll on Pinterest.

Overall, 4 of the writers I have are all working on Amazon affiliate type content.  The 1 other writer is producing more image heavy/informational content.  This will ensure I have a nice balance of both affiliate content and informational content.

Additional Questions?

I recently asked in the Facebook group if anyone had additional questions about Niche Site Project 4.  So, here's a few quick answers to those questions.

(These are the exact questions submitted on Facebook).

How will you tackle link building ?

I'll dive into this in much more depth in a future blog post.  But to start I'll go with some basics just to get the ball rolling: blog commenting, creating social profiles (FB, twitter, etc), resource page links, and Pinterest.

I'll only create social profiles on sites I plan to keep posting to.  (I'll find a solution to auto-post content to my social profiles).  Blog commenting will be less about expecting great links and more about just getting my name out there and potentially connecting with a few people in my niche.

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I'll discuss more advanced link building tactics in the future when the time comes in the project.  I plan on looking at what links my competitors have and then trying to replicate.  That's not my entire strategy, but that's a big part of it.

How to incorporate amazon products? Make sure you discuss them in your posts?

Yes.  If my article is “best razors”, I'll find the 5 to 7 top razors on Amazon and review/link to them.

To piggyback off of this, is there a certain amount of amazon products you should not go over? Amazon products disappear all the time and it can be tricky to do audits all the time to make sure those links are still working

I like to shoot for 5 to 7 products when I'm doing a “buying guide”.

Do you consider price history charts worth including on product pages??

I've never done this.

What did you do to make your “best pages” convert better? I already have some getting #1 here in Brazil, but I want to improve my conversions. What's the best type for conversion? Can you give us some tips?

Here's an article I've published in the past on how to increase your amazon affiliate earnings.

What are you using to create beautiful tables? And, do you intend to use CTA buttons from EasyAzon? Or something else?

I'll be using Table Labs to create beautiful tables.  I'll be using AAWP to create callout boxes/buttons.  See my full AAWP review here.

What is your schedule for articles?
– Are you writing the articles yourself or are you outsourcing it? 

I'm outsourcing, and just publishing my first 50 articles as soon as possible.  No specific schedule, just as soon as they are written and edited, I'm hitting publish.  I expect that to be about 5 articles a week.

what exact requirements do you give the writer? Any references/research?
what is your budget per article?

I have an entire process set up for writers including keywords to target (and sub-keywords), article length, and then exact templates/instructions that I've given.  This is a more in-depth answer.  

I'm paying authors hourly.  But I expect most articles will cost between $40 to $100.

Monthly Report from NSP4 Participants!

Now I'm about to try something that could be really awesome or really difficult to read.  I've had over 100 people report on their site for Niche Site Project 4!

If you'd like to join the project and get notified when it's time to report for next month, please join the email list here.  Please note that only sites that were created after July 31st, 2018 are sites you should be reporting on.

Overall, the project should getting more interesting with each passing month.  The first few months are the hardest as my site and your site could take a little while to start ranking in Google and making money.  However, I expect that many of the people reporting below and hopefully me will start seeing more and more earnings with each passing month.

Be sure to sign up above to get to report next time.

Enjoy the monthly reports below.  Looks like a few people are starting to get visitors and a few sites even made some money!

<td data-sheets-value=”{“1″:2,”2″:”kw research, teaching myself how to research and write review posts, setting up plugins – Amazon Associates Link Builder, EasyAzon, created better logo and branding, started writing review posts”}”>

<td data-sheets-value=”{“1″:2,”2″:”I got a good hosting company, installed wordpress and important plugins, did keyword research, published 5 posts”}”>