My last post on my Niche Site experience was almost three months ago. A lot has happened since then not relating to the Niche Site.
As many of you know, my wife gave birth to our first child and my wife, we ran a successful Kickstarter campaign and printed our first comic book.
In other words, we have been insanely busy.
This is why I hope to master niche sites. The opportunity to work on my art and spend time with my family without worrying about money would be a dream come true. That is why I am trying to make this work and build a passive income portfolio.
Quick Lesson
Make sure you know why you want to make passive income through Niche Sites. It makes the long hours and lonely nights more bearable.
Thank You to
- J.D. Meier (sourcesofinsight.com/)
- jenny j
- Ben Troy (getfreepremium.com/)
- Raul (gedtesthub.com/)
- George (seekdefo.com)
- best dress shirts
- Control Track (inventory control tracker)
- Izzy (izzbox.com/)
- David (withu.co.uk)
- dbrkkpbxg
- Athena
- Viera
- Don
All of you commented on Niche Site Journal articles and had shown me people are interested in these posts. For that, I wanted to thank you and hope you share your Niche Site experiences with me.
UPDATE:
I moved all the articles and links to this new site away from jasonloveslife.com. This means everyone’s comment is still on the other site because I am not moving them over manually.
The Numbers
Time Breakdown: 0 Hours (Total to date: 111 hours)
I did no work on the site. I did check the traffic numbers every once in awhile and updated the site to the current WordPress version once, but nothing that took more than 5 minutes.
Costs: $0 (Total to date $351.30)
Spent no money.
Search Engine Ranking:
The Keyword I am trying to rank for is “Maternity Belts”. I used Market Samurai to get the following numbers.
From Market Samurai Ranking Checker
I don’t know what to make of these figures. It looks like my position with Google was doing well. It got as low as 17th position and then jumped back up to the 30′s. This could be because I wasn’t adding content, or some other sites have continued to work at SEO and I stopped. I am not sure.
For some reason, I am not ranked with Bing or Yahoo, but on Jan 17th I jumped to the 9th spot in Bing, then disappeared. Not sure if Market Samurai has a glitch or the search engines just do weird stuff? I am still trying to figure it all out.
Traffic:
Here are my traffic numbers (from Google Analytic) for the site from Nov 1, 2012 – Jan 31, 2013.
- Visits: 81
- Unique Visitors: 49
- Pageviews: 318
- Pages / Visit: 3.93
- Avg. Visit Duration: 00:06:22
- Bounce Rate: 37.04%
- % New Visits: 56.79%
Nov 1, 2012 – Jan 31, 2013
Traffic Source
Traffic Sources from Nov 1, 2012 – Jan 31, 2013
Income: about $.09 (Total to date $1.59)
Since I last posted my numbers (November 17, 2012), I made $.09.
Thoughts
Why no income?
As it goes in this experiment, I have put in a total of $351.30 and 111 hours into this project have a total revenue of $1.59.
Even though I am disappointed with these numbers, I am not giving up on the concept of niche sites. I did make some income with only getting 1 or 2 visitors a day. If I could get 100′s or 1000′s visitors a day, my return would start being worth the effort.
Also, I have learned a lot from my experience with my Kickstarter campaign on how to utilize social media to get traffic to my site.
Did my Backlinking Strategy Fail?
I wanted to address the fact that I used a backlinking strategy but still have a low ranking in Google and no ranking on other search engines. This does not mean the plan does not work because I never finished implementing the strategy.
I put in Anchor Layer with links from sites I created on 3rd party sites (View list in week 8), but I never sent mass links to the Anchor Layer. To see if this strategy works, I need to start getting a mass number of backlinks to those 3rd party sites.
My Future Niche Site Journals
I am moving all my old articles from JasonLovesLife.com to NichSiteJoural.com (UPDATE: now they are part of compulsivecreative.com). I have already purchased a new domain and will need time to set it up and start posting. I will update this site with the new location, and I hope all of you who are following my Niche Site Journal will make the transition over there (UPDATE: I’m glad you made it to the new site).
I’ve also been asked a lot about what the web address is for the niche site I am working on.
You can check it out at www.onmaternitybelts.com (now part of compulsivecreative.com).
Let me know what you think of the site in the comment section.
My Niche Site Journal:
- Week 0: Explaining Niche Site Journal
- Week 1: Choosing a niche
- Week 2: Wordpress Site Theme and Launching the Blog
- Week 3: WordPress Site Editing & Content Creation
- Week 4: Add Plug-ins, Add Widgets, and Adjusting the Theme
- Week 5: Back links and Article Marketing
- Week 6: Getting Indexed, Writing Content, and Waiting for Google
- Week 7: Back linking Strategy
- Week 8: We Made Money!
- Jan 2013 Update
Hello Jason,
I read your journal after following a link from Pat’s ‘SmartPassiveIncome’ niche site challenge, and was interested to see how you got on. For a while I have been mulling over starting something of my own – but I haven’t yet. Now I have had a look at your site. You ask for comments so I hope you won’t mind if I add my twopenny-worth.
After a quick read-through of the site, a few things struck me. First, there are a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes; things like ‘what to where over your belt’. Now I might be biased (my main line of work is editing!) but I find that sort of thing off-putting, it looks careless and unprofessional, and makes the whole site seem amateurish. Secondly, there doesn’t seem to be all that much content. Obviously there’s only so much you can say about maternity belts, but you did mention expanding into other areas. No matter how much SEO you put in, I think there still has to be something worth reading on the site. Third, I don’t understand the advertising links. Now as I said I am new to all this so am only just beginning to grasp the concept, but I thought the idea was that relevant ads would appear on your site. At first glance, your site doesn’t appear to have any ads, which is odd as I would have expected block ads to appear at the sides (not from any knowledge of the subject, just because that’s what I have seen on other sites). Then I noticed the little arrow and ‘Ad choices’ under the header, but when I click the links under that, only a few options come up and they are all totally irrelevant to the subject of maternity belts or pregnancy at all – things like long-haul holidays, bank accounts and press releases. What’s going on there? And finally, I think an important aspect of a popular web-site is reader interaction, at least a place where readers can add comments or, even better, a forum where they can swap experiences and ask for advice. Have you thought of something like that?
I hope you don’t think I’m being overly critical but you did ask what we thought! I hope perhaps it might help and I will be interested to see where you go next. Well done to you both for seeing the project through with all the other things that have been going on – and of course congratulations and all the best with the baby!
Thanks for reading the blog and commenting. All feedback is appreciated.
For the most part, the maternity belt site only makes me a dollar or two a month. Which means putting in a few hours to make correction is not worth it.
Also, the site is a micro niche site that I have no want or need to update. The point is to put up 5 to 10 articles, try and get a top ranking on Google and then collect income from AdSense. My goal with the site is to get people on it and then click off to one of the ads.
The problem with ads is that it is run by Google. Google will often take a look at the viewer’s past searches and put ads related to that. Meaning for someone who is searching for Maternity Belts, they will get maternity belt ads.
I turn off all comments or interaction with readers because I just want to create articles that are helpful, publish the site, set up a back linking strategy and then wait for the money to trickle in.
I focus mostly on my main blog which is http://www.jasonloveslife.com where I focus more on being an authority and I monetize with affiliate links.
Well done! I have been considering a niche site, but I am afraid that I won’t stick through with it the same way you did. That said, great job staying focused and seeing it through!
I laughed SO HARD when I realized what was going on in the picture there. Hilarious.
Anyways, I think you are spot on with your attitude that if you made money with 1-2 people on the site, you can make more money with more people on the site.
More content and more SEO my friend!
Best,
Lir