Niche Site Project 4: October 2018 Monthly Report

The time has come for another monthly report for the niche site project!   If you have been following along with this case study, this is a project where I built a new website from scratch with the goal of ranking in Google and making money.

I've been documenting all my strategies along the way.  In addition, several hundred people are participating on their own as they build a niche site as well.

Today, I'll dive into what I've been up to over the past month along with sharing the results in terms of visitors and earnings.

A Quick Timeline

As a refresher, I thought I would go over what's happened so far in this project.

• July 31st, 2018 – I publicly announce Niche Site Project 4
• August 22nd, 2018 – I decide on a new niche (after selecting one I didn't like).  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.
• Sept. 10th, 2018 – First article published on my new niche site.

So, even though I announced the project way back on July 31st, my site has only had content on it since Sept. 10th.  So, I've got a site that is almost 2 months old now.

Traffic and Earning Results

Unfortunately, I did not make any money during October.  I was hoping to have my first sale or two via Amazon, but alas, I didn't get any buyers!  Here's a quick screenshot showing that I did get a few clicks, but no takers.

In total, my Amazon associates links got clicked 32 times.   And in fact, the big spikes you see are most likely me testing my own affiliate links to make sure things worked.

The traffic to the site is slightly more interesting than the lack of earnings, but not overly impressive.  Here's a quick look at October:

In total, the site had 342 visits, which is a little more than September (258), so that's good!

Above is the breakdown of where the traffic came from.  Just 69 visitors from Organic search, which is what I'm mostly trying to build.  Most of the traffic came from social sources (Pinterest), which is something I just started in October.

As you can see, the organic sessions actually took a dip, which is not what I was hoping for.  But I do know several of the organic sessions were me in September as a I was checking how my site was showing up in Google.

My Thoughts on These Results

My honest thoughts?  I wish the results were better.  I was hoping for at least one sale, and was certainly hoping for growth in terms of organic search.

However, I think it's super important that I publish my results live as they happen and don't try to sugar coat things.  Building a site from absolutely nothing is hard.  I've said all along that it takes a few months for your new site to really start to pick up steam.

So, right now, I'm experiencing that.  And the reality is that my site is really only about a month and a half old, since I published the first article on the site on Sept. 10th. So, it could be a couple more months before I really start to see some better rankings and results in Google.

However, my goal isn't to see how much money I can make in six months.  If that were the case, this would be incredibly frustrating.  My goal is to see how much money I can make from this site after a year, 18 months, 2 years.  

That's when sites start to get really interesting, once they have a little bit of age.

I can also see that most people reporting for their Niche Site Project sites below are in the same boat without any earnings.  My advice is to not give up!

Speed Up the Process?

Could I speed up the process if I did more link building?  Yes, I probably could.  However, I haven't ventured into building links up to this point outside of leaving a few comments.

I'll be considering some link building strategies this month, because I do know that the sooner I build up the authority of the site, the sooner my articles will start ranking better.  I'll share the strategies I settle on in a future post.

What Was Accomplished in October?

I didn't get quite as much done in October as I was hoping.  If my Niche Site Project 4 site was the only thing I had going on, I'm sure things would be quite different, but alas, I run several other websites and sometimes I get stretched a bit thin.

However, I was still able to get 12 articles published and get a good system in place for my writers.

I also got my Pinterest account set up and a process in place for that!  The silver lining of this monthly report is that I'm seeing a least a trickle of regular traffic from Pinterest.

A total of 144 sessions from Pinterest is nothing amazing, but this is after my first month with a brand new account, so I only expect growth from there.  I've got a Canva template set up, so for each new article written, I create 2 new pins with these templates and pin them to Pinterest.

I'm hopeful that Pinterest will continue to grow, and will eventually lead to secondary links from other sites that might notice my pins.

Another area I worked on during October was actually narrowing the focus of my site a little bit.  When I first picked this niche, it has the opportunity to go somewhat broad.  However, in order to establish better topical authority over a particular set of subjects, I decided to eliminate some of the categories I had originally intended to cover on my site.

I wrote an entire article here on this subject.

In addition to eliminating these categories, I've decided I need to write a couple of better “Pillar” articles to help Google better understand what my site is all about.  I've done lots of Amazon comparison type articles (best xyz…), but now I'm going to go back and do a few more large info type articles.

These will be “listicle” articles that will help me better establish myself as an authority in the niche.  These Pillar articles will then link out to each of the “best xyz” type articles, and each of those articles will link back to the Pillar article.

Plans for Future Growth

Overall, I plan to continue publishing content targeting low competition keywords.  As my site grows in both topical authority and domain authority (links), the site will start ranking for more keywords and making money.

In addition to narrowing the focus of my niche site, I'll also be publishing at least a couple of larger Pillar articles that are not monetized, but are purely there to establish the topical authority and relevancy of the site.

I'll also continue to grow my Pinterest following.   Even though the visitors right now are not extremely valuable, over time I expect the traffic to grow and at some point I may ad display ads where each visitors will be worth something.

Pinterest also works as a secondary link building strategy.  So, even though there are technically no follow links coming from Pinterest, I expect that over time other websites will find my content on Pinterest and then link to my site from their site.

Finally, I know the site needs more links to gain authority.  So, I plan on doing a bit of outreach to see what type of link opportunities I can drum up.  As I develop a strategy that I decide to follow, I'll share those details in a future blog post.

However, I'm also patient.  As much as I'd love to have my site take off after just a couple of months, I know that the real money is made after the first year.  I'm not going to be happy with something that makes $500 or $1,000 a month, I'd like something much larger.  And for that to happen, I have to be patient and just stay consistent.

So, overall my plan is to stay consistent with content, Pinterest, and now a few outreach opportunities here and there to build links.

Niche Site Project 4 Participants Report

I'm also excited to share the reports from the participants in Niche Site Project 4!  Below you will find the earnings, traffic, and a brief summary of what each of these participants did for the month.

Looks like Jae Jun continues to grow his business!  

And congrats to the others that are beginning to see a little bit of earnings…

<td data-sheets-value=”{“1″:2,”2″:”Published 4 Articles, set up social media channels and got 20 more easy to rank for keywords for more articles in November. Still catching up (started end of September)”}”>