Niche Site Case Study: 10 Month Update!

It’s now been ten months since I published my first niche site. It is exciting to be so far along this journey!

Until now, I have been approximately doubling my income every month. My income was quite good last month at about US$1400 – could I double it again?

It has been another great month with fabulous increases in my page views and income. I did not double it, but it did increase by about 50% to US$2,100 so I am not complaining at all! More details below.

This is the eleventh update in my case study about building three Amazon affiliate sites.

PBN and Link Building

We are still updating the PBN and trying to make it look as good as possible without spending too much time. I still have mixed feelings about trying to sell links on these sites which means it hasn’t happened yet.

I haven’t built any links in awhile and with site 1’s growth stalling last month, I put some effort into trying to discover what other ways I could gain links.

I looked at trying to buy links on other blogs in the same way as many people approach me as a blog owner. This was surprisingly hard work.

First of all, I had to find appropriate sites which was not easy. Then I put effort into emailing the bloggers (side note: you would not believe how many blogs do not have a contact page or email address on their blog!). I personalised them all which did not help time wise.

No one replied to me.

This is on hold for now. The numbers are going up again, so I will re-evaluate later. I have no interest in building spammy links.

Another task that has taken far longer than it sounds like it should is renewing our domains and hosting.

It is coming up to the time that I bought the majority of the PBN domain names as well as my niche site domain names and all of their hosting. It is quite a headache with so many sites to ensure we tick them all of, but I hope we are nearly there – or at least organised enough that none fall through the cracks. The cost of this is adding up as well.

The numbers in the brackets below indicate the result for that criteria last month. If there is no number in brackets, this means I have just added an article focusing on this keyword in the last month. 

Site 1

My rankings over the last month:

• 1,631 queries with 52,487 impressions (these are just for web searches moved from 1,434 queries with 42,386 impressions last month)
• Main keywords average positions are 8.1 and 2.5 (moved from 7.8 and 3.8 last month)*.
• Secondary keywords: 1.0 (1.0), 2.0 (2.0), 5.9 (5.1), 9.1 (9.4), 4.6 (6.1), 12 (19), 46 (77)*

Page Views: 13,194 (up from 8,909)
Earnings: $632 (up from $309)

I was very happy to see big growth in this site in the last month after it stagnating last month. Considering all I have done is add an extra review in that time, I am thrilled, especially as the page views are increasing on a nice incline – I expect a nice increase next month too.

I am particularly happy to see my last two secondary keywords on their way down in the SERPs. These are keywords that I am targeting that are in a neighbouring niche to this site. I am hoping I can expand these site sideways to grow it further and these are my test articles. Fingers crossed that they go down again in the next month.

Site 2

I have previously referred to this site as site 3 (as I did have a “site 2” that was de-indexed by Google). 

My rankings over the last month:

• 4,119 queries with 87,187 impressions on web search (up from 3,353 queries with 57,695 impressions last month) and 2,171 queries and 60,207 impressions on mobile search (changed from 2,801 queries and 56,951 impressions).
• Main keyword average position is 13 (down from 20)*.
• All my main secondary keywords are now ranking between 3.4 – 25 (last month was 3.3 – 30*.
• Some of the longtail keywords I have targeted in articles are ranking at 3.1 (3.1), 5.6 (5.6), 4.0 (4.1), 3.1 (3.3),  17 (20), 13 (15), 29 (32), 7.9 (9.1), 18 (24) and 13 (28)*.

Page Views: 17,569 (up from 12,116)
Earnings: $1,453 (up from $1,076)

I am very happy with the improvement this month especially as the page views for this site are also increasing sharply – I expect to be well over 20,000 next month. I find it interesting what a personal milestone this was for me with my travel blog, whereas for this site, I really just care about the earnings and just take it as an indicator.

It was great seeing some movement in my primary keyword – at last! – after it has been stuck around 20 for months. I am also happy to see the great downward movement from the last couple of longtail keywords that I am tracking above. Those articles have not been on the site for long so its great that they are already second page.

Next Steps?

I am continuing to add 1-2 articles per month per site. I am ignoring links for now.

* = All of the rankings that I list are based on the average search ranking over the last month. They are usually all ranking higher than this right now.

All dollar amounts are in USD.

I would love to hear your thoughts and advice…

Find more posts on my case studies and niche sites here.