That’s exactly what I’ve been up to this month – trying to figure out creative ways how to do things better. Though I’ll get into more detail about it below, I’m confident that the things I’m doing will have long lasting positive benefits on my niche websites.
Even though I declared in my last Niche Website Update that I wasn’t going to invest much more effort into my latest niche site #4 (which I call NS4), ironically that’s the one that I’ve been working on the most when it comes to “experimenting” with a few new strategies.
Before we get to all of that, let’s check July’s earnings.
Niche Website Income – July 2014:
Here are my earnings for July 2014.
Using My Competition to Make NS4 Better:
In June I was pretty frustrated with my latest niche website NS4. I had built a big, resourceful site. It has a ton of great content on it. And yet it was making hardly any income.
I had decided I wasn’t going to spend much more time working on it. But the prospect of passive income from Amazon was still overly intriguing me! Read any niche website blog and you’ll see just how powerful Amazon Affiliates can be.
To recap, the site is monetized by promoting products from Amazon that sell for somewhere between $200 and $500. If you consider Amazon’s 4% commission rate, that’s a payout of $8 to $20 every time I make a sale. With income potential like that, how can I resist?
But the reality is that it’s not making much money at all. It makes a little bit ($24 this month), but not as much as it should. So what’s the problem?
In a word – traffic. I only get a few clicks per day here and there on a few select posts. With over +30 posts and a killer front page, my traffic numbers should be a heck of a lot more!
The main reason behind this traffic problem is that I’m not getting enough organic traffic due to poor Google rankings. Almost all my keywords are ranking on Page 2, 3, or somewhere way off. In the niche website business, you want your posts ranking on Page 1! Why? Because hardly anyone clicks on posts beyond Page 1.
So what am I to do about this?
Last month I opened my niche website post talking about the 80-20 rule and how you can use this theory to put the least amount of effort into getting the largest return. So with that logic in mind, what is the least amount of work I can put into NS4 to get the best results?
- Add new content? Nope – too time consuming and there is no guarantee that it will help the posts I already have.
- Buy links from Lightning Rank or Rank Hero? Nope – too expensive. 5 posts will cost $300 in just one month and my budget is pretty tight.
- Build a million social media links? Nope – that probably won’t be very effective anyways.
- Write a bunch of guest posts? Nope – too much work!
So then what’s the answer?
Simple – I tried doing what my competitors did!
How to what your competitors are doing –Copying their links!
Not many bloggers know this, but you can actually see all the links that point to any website just by checking it on Open Site Explorer.
How is that useful? Because as any SEO knows: High quality links will help raise the placement of your website in the search engine results.
Better visibility = more traffic = more income potential.
While searching Google using my main keyword, I was able to identify a number of competitors’ websites that were out-ranking mine and take a look at their link profiles.
So what did I find? A lot of the websites that were ranking to my competitors actually had resources already setup for doing link exchanges, blog mentions, guest posts, etc. That’s extremely good news for me!
I reached out to approximately 5 of these sites just to see what would happen. Within a week at least 3 of the websites agreed to put a link to my niche website on their site. That’s great!
So just like that – I had secured three free niche-related dofollow links for nothing more than reaching out to the owners of these sites. If I had done the same thing by buying links from Lightning Rank, that would have set me back about 3 x $60 = $180. Nothing against Lightning Rank; I’m just pointing out the equivalent monetary value that this sort of effort produced.
If I can secure 5 to 10 of these types of niche links per month all for doing about 2 hours of work per month, not only would that help my rankings improve, but that would truly be a great example of putting in the least amount of effort possible to get the most results!
How to what your competitors are doing – Copying their keywords!
Oh, the Internet if full of lots of good resources. Not only can you see what kinds of links point to pretty much any website, but you can also use a site called SEMRush to take a look at what keywords their ranking for as well.
Again, that’s a pretty important tool because you can write posts that target their keywords and try to outrank them. The trick is making sure that the competition level will be low enough that you have a shot in the first place. Long Tail Pro Platinum can make short work of finding that out.
So in addition to snatching up a few of my competitors links next month, I’m also going to try writing at least one new post using one of their keywords. We’ll see how this strategy works for us in the next few months to come.
NS2 Continues to Surprise Me:
NS2 continued to be the front-runner last month in more ways than one:
- It got over 600 organic visitors per day.
- It made more money this month with Google Adsense than any of my other niche sites (over $400).
The ironic part – I’ve done literally nothing with it all month. A published a few extra posts I had and ma have wrote one guest post for a different website that linked back to it. But other than that, that was pretty much about it.
Another bright spot for NS2: I’m starting to get a number of inquiries from marketers looking to place banner ads or sign me up for some kind of affiliate marketing.
There have been a few of them I was thinking about trying out. So we’ll see next month if any of them can pad a few hundred extra bucks to the bottom line of this niche website.
NS1 Keeps Growing in Size:
I’ve now officially posted all the new content I had my writer produce for NS1 making it over 80 posts big. That’s a TON of material for a niche website and practically border-lining on being an official authority site by size alone.
As I mentioned before, I have a personal vanity goal to get this niche website up and over 100 posts. With so many great keywords left to pursue, I’ll have no trouble getting there before the end of the year.
One peculiar thing about the direction of NS1: You would think that adding a bunch of new content and adding new internal links would do wonders for getting my posts to rank even better than ever. That hasn’t seemed to be the case. In fact both website traffic and Adsense income have progressively gone down.
Back in December NS1 made $555. Last month it made over $373. This month we were closer to $235. With a site of over 80 posts large, I would expect it to be doing a whole lot better in performance.
So what’s the problem? A closer look at my Google Webmaster Tools report seems to show that I’m ranking really, really well for a lot of my chosen keywords. BUT my click-through rates are really low. What does that mean? Apparently even though my sites are doing well in the search results, I’m doing something contrary that is keeping people from actually wanting to see what my post is all about. This is another challenge I’ll have to give some thought to in the coming month.
Readers – Who else uses Open Site Explorer and SEMRush to get an edge on the competition? What are some other ways you try to find easy links and interesting keywords for your niche website or blog?
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Oh, you’re crafty! I think it’s a great idea to copy links- why not? It’s a cut-throat world out there!
With all that low-hanging fruit of easy links, why not?
Nice work MMD, especially with NS2 doing great with little attention given to it. I use both tools, though nowhere near the amount I should be.
The sad part is that I probably don’t use either of those tools as much as I should either. I’m sure there’s even more useful things I could be doing with them if I’d look further into it.
Good job on your income! I don’t use either of those, but I probably should.
Still just trying to catch up to your income report!
This is fantastic! Can’t wait to employ some of the knowledge I’ve learned throughout this process.
Thanks.
That’s awesome! I think I heard of this idea from…hm…I forget haha. Maybe Matt W? I dunno. But I never followed up to give it a try.
That is so good that you were able to get those links so easily. It goes to show the value of providing high quality content on your site and not cheaping out with low quality fluffy stuff. If your content really sucked, I doubt they would have been so eager to link to you. Good job. Very good.
Thanks Chris. I can’t claim credit for the idea. A lot of other niche blogs have talked about strategies similar to this. All I can do is vouch for the fact that it works. I was pretty happy to see those webmasters give me a positive response so quickly. I do agree – I’m sure having decent content and a professional looking website certainly helped to make those webmasters’ decisions easier.
Wow that seems pretty awesome. I’ve tried doing niche sites before, but could never really get the hang of it. I just think it’s pretty dangerous to rely heavily on Google SERPs for traffic.
Thanks Tony. I do agree that using the search engines is one very limited way to get traffic. At some point I’d like to experiment with gaining significant amounts of traffic from other sources; such as a concentrated effort using Facebook, Pinterest, etc.
I always get a tidbit of information I can use from these updates MMD – but I admit, you always leave me wanting more! I would love to learn exactly what you said to these other webmasters to get them to link to your site. Were they blogroll type links? In content links?
Sweet strategy. I have used both of those tools, but not for this reason. Honestly, even that seems too time consuming for me. But I may give it a try as part of my case study because I won’t be using my PBN to rank my case study site (can’t risk revealing any of my PBN domains).
To be honest the email I sent to these webmasters was very simple. Most of these sites already had some sort of “resources” page that I really wanted to be on. So I would just email them asking to get listed, and in exchange I told them that I’d be willing to help them out however they need.
Ah Thank You so much, I love open site explorer. Another wonderful site I use to do research for my own blog is ahrefs. I think with ahrefs the first 2 checks are free per day. I love how you havea stragegy that will work for you instead of focusing on crappy seo tactics.
Arefs is a wonderful tool! I use that one a lot to check my anchor text and how well my link building progress is going.