This November our niche website portfolio had a lot of ups and a few downs. One big event that was a pretty big scare happened right on the first day! More on that story below.
But luckily we ended the month with a record-breaking bang! And on that note, let’s get down to it starting with the part of these updates that everyone loves to see – our monthly income report.
Niche Website Income Report:
Here is my income report for November ’13:
NS1:
I’m very impressed that this site continues to keep showing month over month grow in revenue.
The big things I credit this month’s income increase to are:
More posts. In November we had 8 new posts get published. As I’ve discussed before, the strategy we’re using for this site is:
More content -> More ranking keywords -> More organic traffic
-> Higher potential for income!
Changing the website theme to be more Adsense friendly. I was noticing how other niche website developers with statistics and website size similar to my NS1 were making significantly more income each month from Adsense than me.
I decided to get my hands dirty by reaching out to a few of them to see what it is I’m doing wrong. I was very appreciative to receive a response from Jason at Real Online Income Reports. Basically he confirmed what a lot of us have probably already read – the Google “Heat Map” to some degree is still the best guideline for ad placement.
In case you’ve never seen it, Google used to publish a color-coded heat map of suggested placements for their Adsense advertising. (There is even a WordPress theme built entirely around it’s concept). Why would Google do that? Think about – the better you do with your ads, the better they do as well. Google has since moved away from this heat map concept and have some new suggestions for advertisement placement best-practices. In case you’d like to see what the old heat map looked like, here it is:
For my NS1 specifically, the problem it had was that hardly any ads were above the fold. So for the sake of experimentation, I went ahead and found a different WordPress theme that was more conducive to the layout he suggested.
Looking back at the increased revenue per individual ad, I’d say it certainly helped!
NS2:
First of all I’d like to point out that not all of the income for this month was from Adsense. I was very lucky to be contacted for a private advertising deal, and that certainly contributed to the big boost in overall income for November.
Despite publishing the same number of new posts on NS2 as NS1 (eight in total), I did not see quite the same increase in Adsense, traffic, or keyword queries when I compare the two. This is also despite being No. 1 for my targeted keyword!
One thing I will be looking at for next month is to try a new website theme (similar to NS1) that gives me better ad placement using the recommended ad sizes.
NS3:
NS3 continues to be the runt of the group. It still has the weakest of all my niche sites in terms of traffic, rankings, income, etc. It is also only on Page 3 of the search engine results page (SERP) for Google.
As many of you already know from my last update, NS3 isn’t much of a priority at the moment. This site started out as simply an experiment to see if I could build a micro-niche site that makes it out there on the Internet. It was a failure as a micro-niche, and so we’ve changed direction and decided to build this site up to a “small” niche website of at least 20 pages of content.
Using Elance, I was able to hire enough new posts to bring the article count up to 20. All of them are at least 800 to 1,000 words and very high quality (written by an individual who used to work in a field closely related to the targeted industry).
Throughout November I was allowing the new posts to drip in. As of last week they have all now gone live. So I’ll be anxious to see what December brings for this site as each of these new articles gets indexed and my regular array of back-links get built.
The HOTH:
Unfortunately, when it comes to money, I don’t mess around! So I decided to be very bold and try something new with NS3 that I’ve never tried before with any of my websites:
I bought a link building package from a service called The HOTH.
I first learned about The HOTH from reading the niche website progress of NickLeroy.com. His latest niche site attempts had had some success with this service. After a few emails back and forth with Nick, I decided to give it a shot. My NS3 was already performing pretty poorly, so from that perspective the only place we have to go is up! Right?
Next month I’ll let you know how this goes with The HOTH and if I saw any big effects from using it. For now it is too early to tell.
Uh, No! My Niche Site Was Click-Bombed!
On November 1st, NS1 was click-bombed!
In case you’ve never heard this phrase, “click-bombing” is when someone maliciously clicks on your Google Adsense ads in an attempt to mess up your account. This is a pretty serious offense to Google, and they will shut down your entire account if they think you had anything to do with it!
Can you imagine what that means for someone trying like me trying to monetize with Adsense? NO MORE INCOME! All that easy money we’re receiving from people randomly clicking your ads would suddenly disappear.
Unfortunately some troll somewhere decided it would be fun to click on the ads on NS1 over 200 times! Obviously this person knew what they were doing and either had something against me personally or Google Adsense in general.
You can tell you’ve been click-bombed right away when you look at your Adsense account and see a very high click through rate (CTR). In my case there were 219 clicks relative to 832 page views; that’s not natural!
To be honest I was pretty freaked out! Fortunately I remembered reading about these sorts of click-bombing attacks on Niche Pursuits and what you can do about them. Basically there are some plug-ins and services you could try, but nothing too definite that’s proven to work.
If there’s anything you CAN do, it’s fill out an Invalid Clicks Contact Form and submit it back to Google as soon as you discover the problem. This is your chance to let Google know that it wasn’t you trying to brainlessly manipulate their advertising earnings, and that you had no part in what was going on.
Going Forward:
I believe with all three sites, we’re at a point where I don’t intend to create or add any new content. NS1 will continue to auto-post the content I’ve already written throughout December until it reaches approximately 50 posts. NS2 is just about out of new material and will max out around 40 posts. NS3 is done for now at 20 posts.
The break in creating / posting new content will be good. We’ll give the sites a chance to just sit and mature.
In the meantime I will be spending more time focusing my efforts that will improve the profitability of each nice website. These efforts will include experiments like trying out different back-linking techniques, driving more traffic, testing alternate site layouts, ad placement, etc.
Preferably we’ll be working on one website at a time; most likely starting with NS3. With over $250 invested in this project, I’d like to start seeing some more promising returns!
In reality there really isn’t any reason these two sites shouldn’t be performing just as well as NS1. I can only imagine what kind of revenue figures I’d be seeing if we had all the cylinders of all three niche websites firing on full blast!
Readers – What do you think? Should we continue to work on developing NS3 and the others, or just abandon it and move on to other niche website projects?
Previous Niche Site Chapters:
- Starting the Next of My Extra Income Ideas – Building a Niche Website
- Niche Website Project Part 2 – The Unveiling
- Building My Money Earning Sites – Niche Website Update Part 3
- Building My Money Earning Sites – Niche Website Update Part 4
- Building My Money Earning Sites – Niche Website Update Part 5
- Building My Money Earning Sites – Niche Website Update Part 6
- Niche Website Update 7 – Site Number 2 Launched!
- Niche Website Update 8 – NS2 on the First Page Search Results Already!
- Niche Website Update 9 – Criticisms of My Second Niche Site
- Niche Website Update 10 – NS3 is a Failure (So Far) and I’m Glad
- Niche Website Update 11 – Doubling the Size of NS1 and NS2
Images courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net
That’s really amazing, great progress! I’ve thought about making a niche site several times, but haven’t had the time yet. Standard blogging is plenty for me at this point…
Standard blogging is a ton of work. Until you feel comfortable outsourcing, I wouldn’t recommend trying anything to build up a new site.
Great progress mate, it is great to see you getting some decent results for all the hard work and effort that you have put into this.
I have always been a little bit worried about getting click bombed, so it is good to know about that invalid clicks form – thanks.
I like that you have branched out and purchased some links, I think you will find you end up buying a lot more when you see the results.
If that link package works, there will be a lot more investments and experiments to come!
Nice progress and its great to read the detailed report.
I’ve never heard of click bombing before, but it sounds like you’ve taken the best course of action.
Looking forward to seeing the results of the link package.
Thanks! I’m hoping the link package yields some pleasing results.
My site has been slick-bombed on a few occasions. Google actually banned us from the program and we had to beg to come back. It sucked. I never figured out if it was a computer doing it or a real person. It was really weird.
Anyway, great job with your niche site income and I hope you don’t get click-bombed again any time soon!
I had considered that it might have been a spider-bot and not a real person that was doing the click-bombing. It seemed like an awful lot of clicks for such a short amount of time, and all on the same ad.
Thats horrible you were click bombed. I can’t believe people would do that for no reason. I would continue to focus on your efforts to monetize your websites. I am curious, did you buy your websites or did you build them from scratch?
They were all built from scratch. I did all the keyword research and site setup myself for each. NS1 and NS2 were half-half written by me or outsourced. NS3 was all outsourced content.
I think you should just give them a few months before you do anything I didn’t touch one of my sites for a few months and the next time I checked the traffic it had doubled! The site I bought recently I am trying a slightly different model than you. Since the site I bought had a PR3 I am trying to work on my DA and PA so that private advertisers would be interested. I’ve also thrown up some Google Adsense and an eBook with a mailing list an they are both, surprisingly, doing okay.
Not a bad plan getting a PR3 site for the advertising affect. Even though PR seems to be dead, advertisers still mostly snub most of my sites because they don’t have any PR. It’s sad because clearly a new site can be “better” than an old site with PR. But advertisers don’t always see it that way.
I’ve never understood why anyone would click bomb or hack your Twitter account or try to take over your website, at least if you weren’t famous anyway. I’m glad Google didn’t penalize you. I think you should keep working on all the sites. This seems like it has tons of potential.
I’m kind of leaning towards continuing to work on them. Until I see a few hundred per month from each site I don’t think I’ll be satisfied.
Sorry to hear about the click bombing MMD. I never understand why someone would waste their time by doing something crazy like that. Other than that, it looks like things are going well. I think I’d stay with NS3 for a while to see how the program you purchased helps out with traffic.
Agreed. Focusing on NS3 will probably be the next thing I do with these sites.
Wow, what a great month! With any luck December will bring in as much revenue as November, thus really increasing the bottom line as most of your expense outlay has been complete. It would be a nice mark to hit if you exceeded the $1,000 in total profit across all three sites.
You’re telling me! I’d love to see $1K per month (or more) consistently across the board. Hopefully I’ll be able to report that sooner rather than later.
I love the niche site updates and may have to ping you with a few questions, as I recently launched my first niche site. I would love to know what theme you are using.
I am not planning to monetize for another month or two, but seeing your numbers here is really motivational!
For NS1 I’m using Blue News. Honestly its not the greatest, but it had the layout I was looking for. I’m shopping around to upgrade to a professional theme soon.
Glad to see the progress. It is looking good. I haven’t done any niche sites and don’t plan to at the moment, but if I ever do, I will look back at these posts for guidance.
Thanks Grayson. It’s still kind of unreal to me that these sites are making a few hundred a month.
Impressive! I got click bombed and did nothing but the next month google canceled the extra clicks. it ended up being a lower month than usual but I’d rather leave it than spend hours tracking the malicious clicks.
I’ve had some of my clicks get erased or removed in the past. But in this case with SO MANY clicks, I didn’t want to take any chances. That would stink to have my account canceled and miss out on such easy money every month!
Glad things are panning out for you. Always interesting to see how your niche sites are coming along. Getting click bombed is totally dick… I don’t really understand people sometimes. What is the point?
Glad to see you got your site back online as well. The new redesign looks great!
I’m curious why you’d like to focus your energy on NS3 when it seems like NS1 is really the one with the potential to be big for you. Is there any thought given to the idea of focusing on your strength rather than trying to improve the weakness? In any case, the progress is really impressive. More than doubling the income from NS1 is an awesome accomplishment.
Normally I’m all about playing up my strengths instead of dwelling on my weaknesses. However in this case I have a different perspective. I see NS3 as low hanging fruit. Using some of the tricks I learned from NS1 and NS2, I should be able to take the site from $10 per month to $200 per month pretty easily. Compare that to the level of difficulty it will take to make NS1 go from $200 to +$1000 and I’ve got a lot of work to do! For example, my NS1 site and Pat Flynn’s SGT site are approximately the same size. However he made $1,873.39 in Adsense last month whereas I made about 10% of that. I’ll need to come up with some new strategies to try if I’m ever going to experience that kind of success.
Wow – great work this month, but I had no idea about the click-bombing thing! Do people really have that much free time on their hands??
Thanks for posting your progress along the way, it’s helpful for someone like me. I’d like to try to put together a niche site but am focused on my blog right now. Maybe in a few months I could do something about this.
And it’s good to have the head’s up about click bombing. Yet another thing that I didn’t know existed.
Good Job all the way 🙂 I have a a doubt regarding Click Bombing has Google considered your complaint & did you get any positive response from them.
Last time when I contacted them I didn’t get any response.
Regarding Longtailpro, I’m not sure how to get niches that may be successful, I’m seeing lot of keywords & not sure which to choose. Any help?
I actually did not receive any response from Google. But I also did not get my account shut-down. That was good enough for me. 🙂
Do you have LongTail Pro Platinum? That’s where you pay extra to get the “KC” or keyword competitiveness tool added. Really LTP is kind of useless without it. You could look at the top 10 results yourself using a toolbar extension like SEO Quake, but then you’d just be guessing at how difficult it would be to rank. The KC feature helps tremendously because it quantifies each search term based on several different factors, making it much simpler to compare search terms.