Niche Site Case Study Follow-Up
Well, it's been 9 months since my original niche site case study, so I thought it would make sense to revisit it and see how the site is doing.
If you followed the original case study, then you know that my goal was to earn $3 a day with a small, niche content site. I tried a number of monetization methods, but AdSense was the only really successful one.
To get the site ranked in Google, I put it in the 3WayLinks.net network. I also distributed 10 unique articles to a few article sites (most notably EzineArticles.com). After my last post about the case study, I also submitted the site to a few dozen social bookmarking sites using this software. That's all the link building I've done.
The site has maintained a top ten ranking for 4 of the last 6 months. In January I had some server problems that caused the site to be down for a few days, and that knocked it out of its rankings for two months! That goes to show you how important up-time is to Google. Fortunately I was able to resurrect it by adding a blog to the site. That blog jumped the site back into the top 10.
The site is currently #3 for its primary and secondary keywords, and #5 for a third major set of keywords. To date, it has earned $757 from AdSense, or about $2.75 per day. My goal was $3 a day, and it's well passed that now, but the two months it spent off the first page of Google because of the server problems is currently keeping the overall average down. For the Month of May, the site has averaged $4.90 per day in AdSense, and is set to outpace its best month to date (December 2007) both in earnings and in traffic.
I know you guys like to see screen shots and charts, so here are a few:
May's Search Traffic
May's AdSense Earnings
It may seem amazing, but I'm still receiving some traffic from the original 10 articles I wrote. That's why I always recommend writing articles regularly. If 10 articles can keep traffic coming for 9 months, imagine what 10 articles per month could do for your site's traffic (not to mention backlinks and rankings)?
Lessons Learned
I learned a few important lessons from this case study. One lesson is that up-time is vital to Google. Google doesn't like to risk displaying sites in top rankings if it thinks your site may go down for a few days. That would be a disservice to the searchers, and so your site might get penalized for it.
Second, I learned that if that does happen, and Google knocks your rankings down, you can resurrect them with a blog. Just adding a blog to the site and "drip-feeding" fresh content to the site caused Google to launch the site to the #3 position for its primary keywords. I didn't do any additional link building to accomplish this.
Third, the case study has demonstrated what I already knew to be true: 3WayLinks.net is a long-term network. There were many nay-sayers in the beginning who just knew Google would tweak its algorithm to prevent 3WL from working, and yet, 9 months later it's going strong. The results I'm seeing and hearing from the 3WL members on the forum are nothing short of phenomenal. Are there risks involved? Absolutely. Is it worth taking those risks? I'll let you make that decision.
All in all this has been a very enlightening case study, and I'd love to hear what you think about it in a comment below.
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