Niche Site Case Study Week 3
September 6, 2007
I'm back for the third week's results from my niche site case study. The overall traffic is doing well, as you can see:
So far I've received 367 unique visitors and 1,468 page views. That's an increase of 173 unique visitors — almost as much as the last two weeks combined. This is due in large part to the traffic I'm receiving from the articles, as you can see from the external link traffic:
August
September
The articles are still getting a lot of attention at EzineArticles.com as well, with 900 views generating a total of 233 click-throughs:
Google has now indexed 8 of the content pages, and Yahoo! has finally indexed the site as well, though MSN/Live still has not. Google is steadily sending traffic, which I expect to increase as I get more and more links into the home page from 3WayLinks.net and more links into the inner pages from the articles (which are still being spread around the web).
August
September
The site's AdSense revenue has risen from $2.30 last week to $8.27, due to more clicks and Google's SmartPricing granting the site a higher value per click. Very positive news there if the site can hang onto that EPC as the search engine traffic grows. It usually takes 2 - 3 months before a brand new site really starts to catch on in the search engines, even with a good number of links coming in, so we have to be patient.
My click-through rate was rather low, though, just under 5%, so I've made some modifications to the templates and uploaded the changes to the site. We'll see next week if it helped increase the CTR without causing a down-swing in the click-value (which sometimes happens).
You can read all about how I created the site and what I've done to optimize it for the search engines in the original niche site case study post.
I'll post the next update next Thursday. Please post your thoughts and comments below.
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.
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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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