As promised back on my 100 words post from the Income Press challenge, I’m creating a few quantity of new sites I’m planning to grow up and convert them into micro niche or niche sites. After reading some great guides from Sunil (extra money blog), Ana Hoffman (Traffic Generation Cafe) and even the Niche Site Duel series from Smart Passive Income, I’m in!
A few weeks ago I was talking with my girlfriend. She has managed to grow a blog in the last 10 months going from 0 to 200-400 visitors per day. It’s a very specific niche but it’s become difficult to monetize, Most of the visits come from Google Images, and after talking a little bit with Tom Ewer from Leaving Work Behind and doing some research on Webmaster Tools and other statistics tools, we found it would be very difficult to monetize. The visits are there, and they keep growing every week, but most of them won’t click anything (especially banners).
The blog is called Design Models and it gathers a few hundred of Vectors for graphic designers. Back on April, Maryam Sicard (my lovely geeky girlfriend) created almost 100 posts in 3 weeks or so. She was not patient, and failed to see results on a short term and practically abandoned the blog.
Until October…
When I finally pushed her to check the stats page to see if at least she had a few hand of visitors that would cheer her up. When we both checked the statistics via Google Analytics and Jetpack our jaws almost dropped to the floor. Instead of receiving 20-30 page views per day (as I was expecting), Design Models was receiving almost 200 visits. I almost felt bad because I’ve had a hard time to achieve 200 daily visits at Stream SEO (But I’m almost there) and I’ve been publishing a lot of posts lately.
Sure, not as many as the 100 hundred posts she did back on April, but at the end, my posts are 1000-2000 words long and gather a lot of information, whereas her posts barely have written content.
She basically did a niche site without knowing it, but a “difficult” site to monetize, and totally based on Google Image Search Engine. Still, a niche site with a good amount of traffic for the time being (9-10 months).
So, what’s our next step?
Niche Site Challenge!
I decided to do a big analysis and create 2-4 small niche sites and see how good we can rank them and monetize them. We’re barely starting the challenge, but we’ve done a good research and there’s confidence we can achieve it.
We already know it’s possible. And yes, that means we both had our doubts when we started a year ago, but Maryam’s site has 200-400 daily page views and Stream SEO is getting close to 200 page views. So, it does works if you are patient and keep working hard on your blog. I bet many of your feel the same, don’t you?
In fact, I was very confident at the end because I knew I could replicate what I did with my team back in 2006 where we created a profitable blog from our main passion.
So in the following months, we’re working on some niche sites (4 of them, to be exact) and we’ll see how much can we grow and monetize them in a short-mid term.
I want to go all over the process here at Stream SEO so you can follow us and see the results in real time. From my perspective, there are no better posts than Case Studies and Challenges, because it really creates engagement and helps people who are on the same level.
So, if you’re thinking on starting a blog or you’ve been waiting to create a niche site, this challenge is for you.
I’ll post an update on the niche challenge every week, so you can follow and replicate what we’re doing instead of just reading how we did it a long time ago. This will be the Niche Post series and I’ll post all the articles here:
Who’s in?
OK, no 30 posts in 30 days, but a niche site challenge!
Of course, this is a great opportunity to start your niche blog/website and follow us. Share some ideas and we’ll help each other to get the best results. I’ll be totally transparent on this challenge, so I’m revealing the domain name, keywords and strategies to get traffic.
Our idea is to monetize it via Google Adsense, but you can select any other alternative if you think it fits better. We already choose the domain and did the keyword research and market analysis, which I’ll explain to you in the second post of this challenge.
So, who’s in?
If you’re participating just let me know or post a comment below. You need to keep up with the updates because I’ll add your results and experience on my niche challenge series. At the moment, we’re 2 persons and we have 4 niches to start, so there’s a lot of information to share already. But don’t get me wrong. If you’re in, it will definitely be more interesting!
Oh, by the way!
I hope you all had a great Christmas and enjoy a happy new year!
About Servando Silva
I also love to build a micro niche site but have very poor knowledge on how to build one. Keywords, domain name and taking it to top in Google search is all I know about a micro niche.
Shall I experiment Silva may be if it turns fruitful like Maryam Sicard’s designs site I might well increase my adsense revenue as well as help new people about it.
I got this post in my newsletter but surprised to find that this post is way back in Dec 2012 I dint know until at the end I read merry Christmas.
If still your case study is going I will let you know if I plan to start one…
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Hello Vijesh.
I’ve been creating more Niche Sites every month. I probably have more than 10 right now. Some of them earning a few dollars, some of them not.
Until I really don’t find a way to make it so you guys can follow I won’t post another article about the Niche Site Challenge, I guess. I want you to spend some time over good stuff you can use (my articles) and not waste it on something else
Hi, any help would be greatly appreciated.
Hello Darlene. How can I help you?
Hi Servano
Great challenge…I totally agree on the patience issue. I have built the current site for the last 4 months without any income from it. Steadily the visits are picking up. I do the following every day:
1. Write one article for the website
2. Write a condenced article with the same topic which I upload to ezines ets.
3. My feed runs to Twitter, Facebook, Google etc on every change
4. I convert already submitted ezine articles into videos and post them on Youtube
5. I comment on blogs, twitter, facebook and ad my url in the footer of each message
All this for 4 months with no product sales. About 4 days ago I tried exploring the adsense issue but with no success. Google said I had copyright content but up to now don’t understand what they are refering to because they are not reachable. Then I went and registered with Chitika, Adbrite and Clicsor and placed the ads on my site. Since the 1st I had some clicks which mean income. Another thing I did was registering with Clickbank and got two affiliate licences for products within the niche but up to now no sales here.
So to come back to your challenge: I’m in
Lets see if we can make some real money.
Best regards
Peter
Ps. When I just launched the site the Alexa ranking was 18,000,000 but it came down to 723,000. I am also new to WordPress as I have used Joomla for my previous websites. I have registered a new domain and uploaded WP on CPanel instead of Joomla to give it a try. I like the look and feel of WP sites and at this early stage it looks like easier to use.
Hello Peter. That’s great!
Do you have any other blog where I can follow your process so I can link it here? Or you could send me your details at least once per month.
By the way, if you want to improve you Alexa’s ranking, download and install the Alexa Toolbar (Firefox or Chrome). Trust me, that will help a lot.
And finally, could you tell us about your Adsense experiment? 4 days seems a little but low for me to make a decision.
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Thanks for sharing your great ideas Servando! I have also a plan to build few niche sites and monetize them. I need some sophisticated plans like you for this.
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If you decide to start let me know. I’ll include your progress on my reports as well. What do you think?