Niche Site Case Study: 6 months in

It’s been six months since I published my first niche site and, in a couple of weeks time, my other niche site will also hit 6 months old. My search results and Amazon income is not increasing as fast as I would like, but it is increasing nicely.

This is the seventh update in my case study about building three Amazon affiliate sites. You can also read my last update about how my sites were progressing in December.

In the last month, we moved out of our house and left Australia indefinitely. We also spent 3 weeks having a holiday combined with sponsored travel which means I had no time to do anything on my niche sites.

PBN and Link Building

I have not done any work in these two areas in the last month except to finally take ownership of all the sites I bought from Jon Haver’s done for you PBN service.  I checked all my PBN sites are still online and indexed yesterday. They are all fine thankfully.

I am becoming more and more tempted to try link selling on some of these sites. We shall see. If I can make good money from my niche sites in the next few months then I will not want to do this as I won’t want to risk them. Otherwise, I have spent so much money and time on this PBN that I need to get some type of return.

Site 1

My rankings over the last month:

• 949 queries with 22,240 impressions (these are just for web searches moved from 758 queries with 25,650 impressions last month)
• Main keywords average positions are 10 and 7.8 (moved from 8.6 and 9.2 last month)*.
• Secondary keywords: 1.9 (4.2), 1.3 (2.1), 4.8 (5.0), 9.5 (13), 10 (11)*

Page Views: 4,426 (up from 2,214)
Earnings: $102.03 (up from $61)

I am still ranking quite well for this site with many search terms on the front page. I still think that I started with bad keywords – basically eCommerce keywords rather than buying keywords. I have proven it is still possible to rank well for these types of keywords. However, my lowest rankings are for the buying version, eg “best” in front of the product, and the search volume on these is just not enough to drive lots of traffic.

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). From now on, I will refer to it as site 2.

My rankings over the last month:

• 1,800 queries with 26,164 impressions on web search (up from 1,357 queries with 16,109 impressions last month) and 420 queries and 10,355 impressions on mobile search (up from 242 queries and 3,484 impressions).
• Main keyword average position is 20 (up from 17)*.
• All my main secondary keywords are now ranking between 13 – 39 (last month was 26 – 40)*.
• Some of the longtail keywords I have targeted in articles are ranking at 3.1 (7.4), 4.7 (6.3), 5.7 (9.0), 4.7 (7.5),  30 (30), 13 (17) and 30 (39)*.

Page Views: 3,407 (up from 1,542)
Earnings: $124.11 (up from $98)

I am happy to see another income increase this month especially after worrying last month that my income boost came because of Christmas and not because I was seeing a sustainable rise. I continue to be happy with how my longtail keywords are going. They are driving the vast majority of my traffic at the moment.

What is disappointing is how my main keyword is performing. About 50% of my links target this page and they appear to be wasted. I was actually happy to end the month averaging at spot 20. It was worse a few weeks ago. Hopefully this means it is back on the way down. If I could crack the first page for that keyword then I could make a lot more money.

Expired Domain Niche Site

When I bought my expired domains to build my PBN, I came across one with good buying keywords in the domain with a reasonable link profile so I thought I would put up a few pages linking to Amazon with reviews to see what would happen. I then promptly forgot about it except for the occasional check which showed me it was not ranking all that well (around position 30 for the main keyword).

I had a shock this month when I actually made about 5 sales from this site on Amazon. I have only built one link to this site and actually use it to link to one of my other niche sites. I still think it is worth recording here what I have achieved.

• 27 queries with 133 impressions on web search
• Main keyword average position is 27 (down from 30)*.

Page Views: 25
Earnings: $22.56

I think this proves that you do not need many page views at all to make some money.

Next Steps?

In the next few days I plan to add another article to each of the main niche sites. I plan to add a couple of more links to the stroller site, probably to the secondary keyword which is performing best.

I’m hoping in the next month that search rankings and income improve even more. I can not blame the Google sandbox any longer!

* = 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.

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