How To Create A Niche Website Part 2

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Some 30 days ago, I shared with you how to create a niche website in less than one day. In that post, I showed you the exact steps on how I achieved this, by covering every aspect required, from the planning stage, keyword research, WordPress setup, up to the effective launch of the website. Back then, I also promised that I will be making an update of the experiment, as soon as one month has gone by. Today, I will be doing just that, give you an update of the project. Before I go further however, you may want to read that post first, in case you missed it. In any event, here’s a quick recap.

The Project – Create A Niche Website That Offers Free Online Publications

Essentially, I created a niche website whose objective was to offer free online magazines, business publications, guides, white papers, reports, eBooks, etc., while getting paid for it. For this purpose I used RevResponse (reff link), a pay-per-lead program, in which all I had to do was to offer “free stuff” and get paid for each conversion (lead).

The Assumptions Of The Niche Website

Monetization: Aside from RevResponse, I decided to run AdSense along with it and elected to use only one unit.

Content and Posting Frequency: Excerpts of the digital content offered by RevResponse’s vast catalog of free online publications. Planned to post two to three offers per week.

Marketing: Went solely for organic traffic and some occasional tweets using specific accounts. I planned on doing some minor link building through blog commenting, but I failed to do so. No excuses..

The Results

Traffic: Very poor. Main keyword for the niche site (free online magazines), although had gained good positions, as of today ranked #22 on Google. This is primarily due to the lack of any type of link building and more active online marketing, which I decided not to do. Anyway, I am happy the way the keywords I am targeting for are ranking, considering that the site has only been live for a little over 30 days. Still needs work though.

So, according to JetPack the website generated 244 visits. Main referral was this blog and Twitter.Create Niche Site StatsPrimary Keywords Position As Of Today

SEO Niche WebsiteRevenue: AdSense $2,63 (2 clicks), RevResponse $43,25 (22 requests, 11 leads) = Total $45,88

AdSense Niche Site

RevResponse Leads Niche Site

As you can see, the revenue is not as good as I expected. There are however some interesting facts about the first month of going live. AdSense, although bad, had a average CPC of $1,32 (higher than my initial predictions). RevResponse on the other hand had a CTR of nearly 4,5%, which is really good.

What Next?

Based on my initial plan, I have to admit that I am not very happy about the results. Nonetheless, and considering that I only applied basic SEO and near to zero online marketing, I feel encouraged to continue on with the project, only this time, applying the biggest challenge of them all – generate more traffic to the website. I believe that if I can increase the websites traffic, the revenue could increase accordingly.

Therefore, the plan for the next 30 – 60 days, in addition to the initial strategy, will be to apply the following:

Basically, all of the above should help Free Online Magazine’s traffic increase a bit. We’ll see how this goes and expect another update about this in the near future.

That’s it! What do you think about the experiment? Do you have any suggestions that you feel can “boost” the traffic performance of the niche site. What do you think have gone wrong? Your opinion is important, so fire away. Thanks!

DiTesco

DiTesco is a Business and Inbound Marketing Consultant, and founder of iBlogzone.com. iBlogzone's main objective is to help startups and small business owners achieve success in their online ventures. | More About Me and my Digital Marketing Services in SP Brazil.

34 thoughts on “How To Create A Niche Website Part 2”

  • Traffic is always the hardest part to any new site. With wordpress and all the cool stuff out there for syndicated content delivery, its easy to build a site up. monetization methods are also easy to implement, but you have to get traffic to see the income that you want

    Thanks for the Update DiTesco, look forward to seeing more progress as time goes by.

    • Hi James. You are so right. It is actually quite easy nowadays to build a WP site and put in the several methods there is available to monetize a site. The difficult bit is to get traffic and in this projects case, it is crucial that I obtain more and preferably organic. Thanks for leaving your thoughts and all the best

      • Hey DiTesco, the 22,000 searches a month was based on exact match search?

        Also, how did you analyze the competition.

        Considering you’re getting position 22 with no backlinking, is actually pretty amazing.

        • Hi Brian. Thanks for stopping by. I am slightly confused about your question.. 22.000 exact searches?

          • With broad match, the Google AdWords system automatically runs your ads on relevant variations of your keywords, even if these terms aren’t in your keyword lists. Keyword variations can include synonyms, singular/plural forms, relevant variants of your keywords, and phrases containing your keywords.

            This means you could see huge monthly search volume, but not targeted at all.

            If you do exact match search, then you are targeting the EXACT phrase and no alterations. You are seeing how many people type the exact word for word phrase per month, which is more accurate assessment of your market than broad search.

  • I agree James traffic is hardest part for new build site but its necessary for blogger to provide good content and attract visitors towards your blog.

  • Well, I think your 1st month result was really encouraging but if you would have done your link building better then your site might be ranking on 1st page on desired keyword.

    • I would want that so badly, being on the first page 🙂 Since this is an experiment, I am doing all things slowly to see which tactics do work and which ones don’t. Link building is important and I really have to do more work on that. Thanks for stopping by

  • Experiment is really successful and you’ve managed to earn few bucks that’s great.. I think you need to focus on your link building process and social media promotion as well.

    • Yes agree with you and also save your blog with google panda as i discussed in my Google Panda Tips post.Used unique content for increase traffic and search engine placement.

      • Sure I’ll read your post. 🙂

  • We are create a website for get better response for us in online marketing from where we can get business as well as good traffic for better PR in search engines.

    Beside that Keywords are play very important role in website if we have perfect keywords for our website then nobody can stop us to get better response for good impression in online marketing on other people.

    • You are right Sam. Good keywords are the lifeblood of good SEO practices. Without proper optimization, it won’t help much.

  • Those are pretty good results for a simple website on its first month, it could certainly had more traffic if you did a little more link building but it seems that RevResponse works pretty good and you get a lot more money than an average site of this size…

    Kostas | Opportunities Planet

    • Hi Kostas. Yeah, I hear you. The results although not I was expecting are not very discouraging. This is the reason why I decided to continue on with the project a bit longer 🙂 Thanks for stopping by

  • I am also struggling with the monetization on my blog, I am doing link building also but still revenue is very low, maybe I need to exert more effort in link building to top in major search engines.

    • Hi Herbert. Link building is just a part of a bigger picture and having traffic alone does not necessarily mean that your site will convert. They are important elements to consider but there is also the matter of “topic”. My project is intended to focus more on “free magazines” so it is easier than having multiple topics 🙂 Thanks for stopping by

  • Those are really helpful for me as a newbie. I am creating 5 Ebooks in every 2 months but my progress is very low because of some problems on creating a niche.

    • Wow, 5 ebooks every two months. Where do you get the “energy”, lol.

  • Other than writing relevant content, driving traffic to your website is also essential and it is not an easy task. It takes time and persistence to build online history and gain consistent traffic. No traffic, no money.

    • Yeah! It appears that this project of mine will be performing better if I can get more traffic. We’ll see how it goes

  • Why not consider a Facebook page for it. People love FREE stuffs and for sure, Facebook traffic will come along your way if done right. =)

    • Hi Ron. Thanks for the reminder.. I am working on it 🙂

  • We have many people to do the ebooks. lol

  • Non of your primary keywords is in the top 20, yet you got $43 from RevResponse – that’s pretty good. In the past I built tons of sniper sites – and for a while it worked quite well. But, it’s getting more and more difficult to get a top 10 ranking for keywords (with a min traffic potential) while using only lower quality backlinks.

    • Hi Robert. Indeed it is great that at the time the site was launched i still managed to attract some few leads. So to show you that a lot of traffic alone sometimes is enough. Perhaps the few I got where actually interested in some publications. BTW, check “free online magazines” now on search.. looking good 🙂

  • Hi Ditesco, Your stats do look very impressive, certainly on Alexa. We are somewhere on the same learning curve and, gaining momentum as more users share the content which is one of the main attractions to the site.

  • This is a very “lucrative” post (including part1) and I was thinking to do something similar and your post really helps.
    What do you mean with “Added product feeds for each category and other RevResponse widgets.” How do you add product feeds and where?

    • If you are using categories as “products”, goto to each category and copy the feed. RevResponse also has embeddable product feeds if you are using them.

  • Wonderful …. I am inspired by reading both the parts of creating a niche site ! Every time I try to create a niche, all my efforts go in vain but this time I’ll do my best

    Thanks for the share

  • wow how can you make more than $1 per click on adsense i have been blogging since 2010 and till now I never get that much per click. 🙁

    • Are you using the Adwords “contextual tool” to find “keywords” that have high CPCs? That’s a hint 🙂

  • I was thrilled to find this post while browsing your site – I’ve given myself the same challenge – to create a niche site in a day, and I’ve found that writing quality content (am a freelance journalist) really doesn’t cut it! You’ve got to do the seo work 🙂 I’m still learning but one of my recent insights was that perhaps its better to create posts, with tags and categories instead of just a page – If you google ‘face feelings innotab’ you’ll see how the whole first page of google search results links mostly to one site. And it doesn’t look like they’ve done any link building. So perhaps that’s helpful in getting into the first page in some way? — The use of categories and tags to give people more ways to find your content… I have the theory that if you do the keyword research, write great content, optimize your site very well, give it a few links, all in a day and submit it to the search engines, that it’ll rank somewhere in the first page straight away for your keywords when it gets indexed. Whether it maintains that ranking is another matter 🙂 Is there anything that you do once you’ve finished optimizing your site before submitting the url to the search engines to get indexed, to help it with ranking? I’ve read about pinging..Would be great to hear your thoughts, Thank you!

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