Niche Site Case Study Week 2
August 30, 2007
It's been 16 days since my niche site case study was launched, and I'm back again for the second in my series of weekly updates on how well the site is doing. Here's the overall traffic screenshots from last week and this week:
Week 1
Week 2
As you can see, the traffic to the site has more than quadrupled in the last week. One major source of this increase in traffic has been EzineArticles.com. If you'll recall, I distributed ten unique articles to EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com, aiming one of each of the 'About the Author' links from each article to one of the internal pages of the site.
Last week I had 147 article views and 14 clicks on the 'About the Author' link. This week the total is 516 views and 114 clicks.
The above is the screenshot of my external referrers to the site.
In addition to the direct traffic from the article distribution, each of the 10 articles has been picked up by at least one or two other sites so far (according to Google). That's an additional 20+ in-bound links in the two weeks. As the articles continue to spread across the web, the combined power of all of the homepage links I'm getting from 3WayLinks.net plus the links to the internal pages from the article distribution should continue to build the site's ability to rank for a large variety of targeted keywords.
My search engine visitors are on the rise as well. Last week I had 29 from Google, and this week I'm up to 48. This week I got my first Yahoo! visitors, too.
What has all of this resulted in monetarily? Last week I'd gotten 3 AdSense clicks and earned $0.91. This week I'm up to 14 clicks at $2.30. The earnings per click (EPC) isn't as high as I'd hoped, but this is still the very early stages of this project. My daily earnings average is up from $0.10 per day last week to over $0.14 per day this week. I may add some affiliate links into the mix as well, or an eBay auctions ad set, to see if I can bring the earnings up. But remember, the site is still very new, and I'm not at all unhappy with the results. In fact, I'm quite pleased.
All this traffic for about 5 hours of work. Since that 5 hours, all I've been doing the last two weeks is siting back and watching my stats increase. The real increases are yet to come, though. The site is starting to appear in Google for a variety of long tail keywords, and that will only increase as the sites in-bound links continue to grow.
The site still has only 5 out of the 11 content pages indexed in Google, too. I expect to see a jump in traffic once those other pages make it into Google.
Don't forget that I'm using a set of very powerful tools to make all of this work as well as it is. For the full story on how I built this site, and what I'm using to get it ranked in the search engines, read the original post.
Your comments, of course, are welcomed and encouraged!
Niche Site Case Study Week 1
August 23, 2007
Well it's been 9 days since my niche site case study site was officially launched, and I wanted to give you the first update on how things are going. The site is plugging along well, with a few pleasant surprises.
Here's the overall traffic screenshot for week 1:
I'm up from 5 unique visitors (which were all me) to 47. I've only visited the site 2 or 3 times since it first launched, so maybe 7 or 8 of those visitors were actually me. That means I've gotten a good 40 visitors from other traffic sources. Those sources are shown a little further down in this update.
My EzineArticles.com submissions were not approved until two days ago. That's within their time frame of 2 - 7 days, though, so I really can't complain. Both GoArticles and EzineArticles have already generated some traffic, as you can see in the screenshot below (the link which is blacked out is from the 3WayLinks.net network, and is blacked out for security purposes):
According to the statistics that EzineArticles itself gives you, the article has been viewed 147 times. Not too shabby for the first two days:
My site was partially indexed by Google within three days of being live, and it now has 5 indexed pages listed. So far neither Yahoo! nor MSN have indexed any pages. However, the site itself has been fully spidered by all of the big 3 (Google, Yahoo! and MSN), as seen below.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that Google has actually started sending a little bit of traffic to the site despite its newness:
What has all of this resulted in financially? AdSense reports that the site has gotten 115 page views and 3 clicks, which have resulted in a total of $0.91. So I'm averaging 10 cents a day, though of course at this point I'm not expecting any real revenue at all. It's kind of cool that it's already gotten some clicks, though.
Well, that's it for week one. I'll post a further update next week. I'll try to keep my updates coming on Thursdays, though it may vary somewhat.
You can read about exactly what I did to build the site on the original case study post.
Please leave your thoughts and questions about this case study in a comment below.
Niche Site Case Study
August 14, 2007
Well I promised you that I would be creating a case study on building a niche content site from the ground up so that you could see exactly what it takes to create a profitable content site. I wanted to have the initial details in front of you last week, but I was having some work done on the house (which, as is usually the case with contractors, resulted in one disaster after the next). So I finally had the time to sit down and put it all together so you can see exactly what I'm doing.
For this case study I am using the following tools (all of which I highly recommend):
- Niche Inspector - This desktop software tool helps you find profitable niches to create sites around.
- HypreVRE Gold - This desktop software tool is what I'm using to create the niche site for the case study. I'm using the Gold (paid) version, not the free version.
- Instant Article Wizard - This desktop software tool is what I use to create all of the content for the site super fast. You need unique content if you really want to rank well, and IAW is the tool I use to create it (even if I know nothing about the subject).
- 3WayLinks.net - This is the service that I'm putting the site into to get it ranked in the search engine by building up link popularity while I sleep.
Here are the steps that I've taken so far.
- Step 1 - This video shows how I used Niche Inspector to select the niche I have created the content site around, and also shows how I used HyperVRE to build the site itself. The niche that I decided on is "rowing machines".
- Step 2 - This video shows me creating the headliner article for the site in just a few minutes, using Instant Article Wizard.
- Step 3 - Now, in the video for step 2 I said I would create a video on getting links to the site using 3WayLinks.net. Afterwards I realized that a video isn't necessary, since there's really nothing to show. So let me tell you what I did.
I added the new site to the 3WayLinks.net network so that it would start building links to its home page to get the site ranking for my target keywords. You won't get anywhere in the search engines without links, and my sites in the 3WL network are doing phenomenally well (as are the sites of hundreds of other people).
I didn't stop there, though. I wanted to get links to the home page, sure, but I also wanted to get links to the inner pages of the site. This helps not only rank the inner pages, but also reinforces Google's "trust" of the home page, which in turn will cause it to rank better as well.
To accomplish this, I had 10 articles written that I have distributed to EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com. Once those articles start to get picked up and spread across a variety of other sites, those links will begin to help the site to rank in the search engines.
For posterity's sake, here's a screenshot of the traffic the site is currently getting. This also helps you know that I'm starting from zero here:
All of the "traffic viewed" is from me working on the site. The "traffic not viewed" stats are from the AdSense bot crawling the site.
All in all, I spent about 5 hours building the site, including writing the on-site articles and submitting the second set of articles to EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com. I will post an update to the site's progress once a week so that you know how well this system is working.
In case you were wondering, I'm not revealing the domain name to prevent skewing the stats by having everyone go to the site to "check it out."
Please post your comments below, letting me know what you think, and if there's any information about how I'm doing these things that you'd like to know. Ask your questions and I'll post my responses in the comments 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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