Niche site case study 2 year update.
November 20, 2009
Back in August of 2007 I decided to perform a case study by building a small, 10 page niche content site from scratch and see how well it performed over time. The prime purpose of that case study was to prove that my 3WayLinks.net network was a powerful way to get sites ranked in Google — and keep them there.
It's been a little over two years since I created that case study, and I thought you might be interested in knowing how things are going with that little content site. Yes, it's still up and running. Yes, it's still well ranked in Google. Yes, it's still making money. No, I haven't done any additional work to keep it ranked.
As a recap, here's what I did:
- I did some research and discovered a niche in the fitness market that I felt was ripe for the picking (today I use Niche Horde for that–it's a lot easier).
- I used my Instant Article Wizard software to create 10 unique articles that would make up the site content.
- I submitted an additional 10 articles to EzineArticles.com so that each of the inner pages would have a few links to it.
- I added the site to my 3WayLinks.net network to grow the backlinks to it.
When I setup this site, there were some dissenters. "Oh yeah," they said, "it does well right now, but Almighty Google is going to catch on and deindex the site, just you wait!"
Well, that's dissenters for you. Over two years later, here's my latest AdSense report from that little niche site that sits untouched, happily generating income for me month after month:
If you were around when I did the original case study, then you might recall that my goal for the site was $3 a day, or about $1,000 a year. As you can see from last month's AdSense revenue, the site is doing much better than that. It actually earned over $7 a day — more than twice my original goal.
But was that a fluke? How has the site done overall? Here's the total 26 month report:
Yup, this little 10 page site (which doesn't look very professional, btw, and only took about 5 hours to create) is about to hit the $5,000 earnings mark. That means that the site has earned, on average, $6 a day since I first created it — twice my goal. It also means the site will soon have earned me $1,000 for each hour of work I put into it.
It has required no extra work on my part, with one small exception: I had a 3-day server outage in January of last year that caused the site to drop out of the Google rankings until I installed a blog and threw up some fresh, relevant content for a couple of weeks. That would not ordinarily be required, but since the site disappeared for three days Google wanted some affirmation that it was not dead and gone, and fresh content was the ticket to get the rankings restored.
I just can't emphasize enough how many people threw up contrary opinions, proclaiming how the Google Deity in its all-knowing wisdom and power would discover and neutralize my 3WayLinks.net network. And yet the site still ranks #4 and #5 for its primary and secondary keyword phrases, and has done so consistently for the last two years — and it is not alone, not by a long shot. 3WayLinks is more powerful than ever since I've continually made improvements to the way the network builds and maintains links to your site.
You may not be able to live off of $5,000 in two years, but imagine building 50 or 100 successful sites like this one (certainly possible considering it only took five hours to begin with). Even if you could only spare 10 hours a week, that's two sites a week, or more than 100 sites a year. Even if you could only reach my original $3 per day per site goal, that's $300 a day, which comes to over 100,000 powerful reasons each year to start building content sites and putting them into 3WayLinks.net.
Please post your questions and thoughts in a comment below.
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How I got 46 page-one rankings in Google in 7 days.
September 29, 2009
I'm going to keep this post short and sweet. The bottom line is that I've got 46 sites ranking in the top 10 Google results for their primary keywords — and it only took me 7 days to achieve it.
How did I do it? Simple:
1. Research low-competition keywords that get between 1,000 and 3,000 searches in Google per month.
You want to target "low hanging fruit" for this method, so look for long-tail keywords that the AdWords Keyword Tool says get between 1k and 3k searches per month.
2. Make sure the top 10 currently ranking sites are mostly inner pages from big sites like Amazon.com or EzineArticles.com etc.
If most of the top 10 pages are inner pages with few links to them, then the pages are being ranked based on the site authority rather than the page itself. That means it's pretty easy to rank for those terms.
3. Register an exact-match .COM, .NET or .ORG domain name.
For instance, if the keywords are "small green widgets", then I register smallgreenwidgets.com or smallgreenwidgets.net or smallgreenwidgets.org. No dashes in the name, and no .info or .biz etc. domain names — only .com, .net and .org. Google gives a nice boost to sites whose domain name exactly matches the search query.
4. Create a small 5 page site around the content of the primary keywords plus 4 related keywords.
Nothing fancy required. Just about 300-500 words of content per page centered around the keywords for each page. I also have a site map, privacy policy and contact us page on each site.
5. The Magic Bullet: Get links to the new site from 1WayLinks.net.
I submit an article to my 1WayLinks.net network and have the article posted on 30-50 blogs in the network. The posts spread slowly, at an average rate of about 5 per day. The article I submit has absolutely nothing to do with the keywords I'm trying to rank the site for. It just has a small "about the author" paragraph that links out to the new domain.
I "spin" the links in the linking paragraph so that 50% of the links use the keywords I want the site to rank for as the link text, and 50% of the links use the domain name itself. Since each post in 1WayLinks.net can have up to 3 links in it, I spin the second and third link so that each of the additional 4 pages gets some links aimed at them as well.
The links from 1WayLinks.net are very powerful, especially since I've made some major improvements to how well (and how fast) each post in the 1WL network gets discovered and indexed by Google. I'm getting a lot of feedback from current users saying their Google rankings are on the rise thanks to these new improvements.
In 7 days of using and repeating this simple, four-step process, I now have 46 sites ranked in the top 10 Google results for their primary keywords. Each day more of the sites I've built come into the top rankings, and the ranking of the other sites continue to improve as more links get spread across the 1WL network and Google includes those links into its ranking algorithm.
Based on the results I'm seeing so far, I'm on track to build an AdSense network that earns at least $5,000 a month starting in October. That's right, in just six weeks I expect to have an additional $5k per month in my AdSense account using this method. Not bad 'eh?
Thanks to this simple method backed by links from 1WayLinks.net, it's possible to build a nice AdSense income fast.
Please post your questions and thoughts in a comment below.
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Do One Thing. Do It well.
September 4, 2009
While I was reading through the 1WayLinks.net forum, I noticed a post by a user to a Warrior Forum thread. If you have time to wade through a very long thread, I encourage you to do so.
If you don't have time to wade through it, let me give you the gist:
A user at the Warrior Forum is earning about $300 a day from 31 AdSense sites. He builds unique content and posts articles to roughly 5 article directories (EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com are two of them). He focuses on product-based keywords (e.g. keywords related to Toaster Machines, Ovens, Washers & Dryers, etc.). He targets only on long-tail keywords (three and four keyword phrases that get a small amount of traffic each month from Google).
In short, he's doing a form of what I did in my niche site case study. Focus on small niches and try to achieve a few dollars a day from the site (incidentally, the little niche site in that case study has now earned over $4,200 in AdSense from my 5 hours of work. It averages over $6 a day — twice my goal.).
The author makes a few very important points that I feel warrant repeating:
1. Don't listen to all of the "expert advice" you get from forums. This guy is breaking many of the "rules" you commonly hear about.
2. Don't wait until you find a perfect proven system to get started building your sites — there is no perfect system. Just build your sites and in time you'll fine-tune your own system. (Along the same lines, don't waste all of your time on forums — spend most of your time focused on your work. There's nothing wrong with participating at forums, but don't let yourself get sidetracked.)
3. Once you have a system, stick with it. The original poster made the mistake of getting himself side tracked for a while, and it slowed down his progress. Once he got back on track things picked up again.
4. It's not hard to rank for long-tail keywords. Just a few links will often get you ranked and keep you ranked for a long time.
5. Everybody fails. If one of your sites just isn't working, move onto another one. I can vouch for this myself. I've built many sites that are ranking fantastically, and others that aren't doing what I'd hoped. Focus on the ones that are working for you — don't spend all your time trying to figure out what went wrong with the ones that aren't working.
6. It's better to have a lot of small niche sites than one big earner. It's a lot harder to maintain your rankings for competitive keywords, and in the end you earn less than you would from building numerous smaller sites that take less work to rank and earn more collectively.
That's the gist of the thread — at least it's what I got out of it. It's a great thread, so if you have the time to read it, read it. But the bottom line is:
Do one thing. Do it well.
Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.
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Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits! By subscribing to my free Marketing Insiders email list, you will regularly receive special member-only insider information, discounts and freebies. You will also be notified when new articles are posted here at the blog. It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time. For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well! |
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
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