Niche Website Income Report 35 – $661 for October 2015

Hello and welcome to the monthly niche website income report and status update.

Blogging has been one of my favorite ways to earn some money on side while I work at a full time job.  These niche site updates are my way of sharing with you what’s been going on, what’s been working, and what hasn’t.  Ultimately, my goal is to take in as much revenue as possible so that we can achieve financial freedom as quickly as possible.

This month I spent almost 100% of my time working with niche site #2 (NS2).  I published 7 new pieces of strategic content as well as working on some of things like internal backlinking and site speed which I believe will help rank my content better over the long term.

And, I may be making a very BIG decision about the future of NS1.  More on this below.

But first, let’s see how our income was for October.

Niche Website Income Report – October 2015

Here is my income and expense report for the month:

Income Breakdown:

Here’s a closer look at my income sources for the month:

• Amazon = $34
• Clickbank = $168
• Google Adsense = $235
• Web Hosting = $0
• Personal Capital = $0
• Private Advertising = $225

Expenses:

None to report this month!

More New Content for NS2:

In keeping with my latest initiative to really hype-up niche site 2 (NS2) and turn it into a bigger money-maker, I’ve been concentrating on creating new content that satisfies two main objectives:

1. The subject has to fit the main purpose of the site.

In other words, the new content has to be a page that will support something either from the main page or enhance another related post.  For example: If I write a post about why I like a certain affiliate program, then a supporting post might be about strategic ways to promote that affiliate program.

Although that may sound obvious, writing content in this way will help build links (which I’ll talk more about below).

2. It has to target a very low competition keyword.

This is a fairly stand-by SEO strategy that I was delightfully reminded on in a recent Niche Pursuits post.   Spencer was sharing six examples of sites he’s created with long tail keywords and their success, and #2 caught my attention.

In case #2, Spencer demonstrated how he was writing content around target keywords that were getting as little as 70 searches per month but had a Long Tail Pro keyword competitiveness score (KC) in the 20’s (meaning there was hardly any competition for that word).

This was in direct contrast to the RankXL approach of going after high volume keywords and somewhat ignoring the KC score.  If you remember a few months back, I was all geeked-up about RankXL’s approach after having a look at the massive monthly income he was pulling in from his Adsense site.  However, when I tried to replicate the same strategy on NS2, it simply wasn’t working.

Though it’s a little early to tell, I know from previous experience that this “lower volume, low competition” approach does work, and I’m willing to bet that it will give me a better edge over time.

All in all, I’ve added X new pieces of content to the site bringing it up to a respectable +70 pages of content.  From most of the niche site authors I read, 75 to 100 pages of content (or more) seems to be just the right size to start achieving income levels of +$1,000 per month.

Other Improvements: 

Adding new content wasn’t the only thing I began working on to try to make NS2 better.  Two other things I tried were:

1. To improve the site speed.
2. To boost internal linking.

Improving Site Speed: 

Improving site speed is something Chris from Rank XL and Matthew Allen from Dumb Passive Income have been really big on promoting … and for good reason!

As you can probably guess, the length of time it takes for a webpage to load is one of the many factors Google considers when they decide where your page should rank (for a comprehensive list, see Backlinko’s Google’s 200 Ranking factors post).

Makes sense, right?  No one is going to use Google if the top pages it recommends take forever to load!  All things the same, Google wants pages that load as quickly as possible.

So from a web builder perspective, making your website load faster = better rankings = potentially more traffic = more $.

Both Rank XL and Dumb Passive Income really turned me on to a plugin called CloudFlare that works to help load your page much faster.  I’m not even going to attempt to explain CloudFlare myself; do yourself a favor and read the Rank XL article here.

In addition to using this plugin, Matt from Dumb Passive Income also gave a whole bunch of really good suggestions for other plugins that can additionally help reduce your page load time.

Better Internal Linking:

Internal linking is something that lots of webmasters like Neil Patel from Quick Sprout really promote often.

The benefit of internal backlinking is that you use the authority of your older pages to give a boost to your newer pages.  Since you control all the links, it’s extremely easy and gives you the ability to choose what kind of anchor text you wish.

Since Google values links and anchor text, you’re giving yourself a better chance at ranking higher = potentially more traffic = more $!

In addition to that, internal linking also creates a better user experience for your readers because it makes it extremely easy and enticing for them to visit other pages on the site.  And as we know, the more pages and time a reader spends on your site, the better your site will rank in Google.

Rank XL just had an awesome post on how Wikipedia is the prime example of internal backlinking, and why it dominates the top ranking search position for just about every subject imaginable.  Do yourself a favor and read the whole post here.  There’s definitely a lot to learn from such a simple strategy!

Selling One of My Niche Sites?

On a different note, one of the things I’ve been giving some very serious thought to is selling one of my niche sites; particularly NS1.

Ever since the very beginning of my blogging career, I think I’ve always secretly had this fantasy that someone was going to come along and offer me a million dollars for one of my websites.  Though that may sound completely insane, at the time it was a reality for websites like Get Rich Slowly and The Simple Dollar (see a whole list of others here).

While I’ve since come back down to Earth and have much more realistic expectations now, I do still feel this is another avenue for earning an income that I should take advantage of.

Not only do I like the sound of an up-front guaranteed payment, I have a feeling that seeing what potential buyers do / don’t like about a website you’ve created will help me shape the way I create them in the future.  For example, from just the brief little bit of research I’ve done already, I can already tell you that one major misstep on my part was NOT having a name collector and building an email list for the site.  Buyers like it when they can acquire a site with a ready-to-go list of people who are strong candidates for a new product they may wish to promote.

I will be totally honest and tell you that another part of my wanting to sell a site has to do with a run-off of ambition to keep it going any further.  With NS1, I’ve done just about all that I know how to do, and I’m not completely sure where I can take it next OR even if I’m the right person to take it to the next level.  Right now my mind is convinced that if I were to start a similar project but incorporate all of the lessons learned to date, then I might have a much better chance of getting my material to rank.

Readers – How many of you have had an opportunity to sell a website?  How did you go about it and what was your experience like?

Featured image courtesy of Robin Hamman | Flickr