Niche Site Case Study Week 4
September 13, 2007
It's been one month since I first started this niche site case study. Week four was a good week, to be sure. The site is building nicely, growing in traffic from Google and rising in revenue.
Let's take a look at the overall traffic figures:
As you can see, the site has had a significant increase in unique visitors, with a total of 575 unique visitors in four weeks. More and more of that increase is beginning to come from Google, as can be seen in the next screen shots:
August
September
Compare that to the traffic from the articles at EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com:
August
September
Last week's results showed 28 visitors from Google and 62 from EzineArticles.com. This week the site received about 1.4 times as many visitors from EzineArticles.com as last week, but 2.75 times as much traffic from Google as last week. So the traffic growth from Google is starting to improve. As I said in last week's update, it usually takes two to three months for all of the linking power of 3WayLinks.net to really take effect, so I expect to see that growth continue in the coming weeks.
EzineArticles.com has really proven itself as a source of initial traffic, as can be seen from my member stats screen above. 1,194 views of the articles in less than a month, and 335 visitors from those views. The articles are spreading around the web, getting posted on a variety of sites, which is helping to build authority in Google's eyes (since more than just the home page have in-bound links).
Revenue is up, too. Week one showed a total of $0.91, week two $2.30, week three $8.27. This week, week four, we're up to $18.64 in AdSense revenue by itself. In absolute dollars it's not much, but it's a 225% increase from last week, which shows promise going forward.
This morning I added AuctionAds.com to the site as well, to see about earning some additional affiliate income from the site. It's now showing super-targeted eBay ads next to the AdSense ads now, so we'll see how that works as time goes by.
So there you have it. One month and the site is growing quickly in all respects. For the details regarding how I chose the niche and created the site, see the original case study post.
I am going to wait for two weeks before posting the next update, so look for it on the 27th.
Please post your questions and comments below.
Comments
57 Responses to “Niche Site Case Study Week 4”
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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. He is the creator of a suite of popular software tools, including: Jonathan L Leger 
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Sorry, but I have NO IDEA what you are talking about ..niche site case study… I signed up for your service because Eddie Smith recommended it to his writing students, and he thinks it is super. So far it hasn't helped me in writing Christian books; I just haven't come upon the right combination of words to use to get article material. Maybe as I experiment more I will. I plan to keep trying. I think it's a great idea.
Hi Jonathan,
from week 2 week I'm every time more intrigued following your case study: great job !
I suggest that you also tell us each time how many incoming links from the 3waylinks network are active.
ciao
alexander
Thanks Jon for the updates. I'm looking forward to the next weeks' results!
Marian
Hi Jonathan,
Any chance you could post a modified version of your by-line? I realize you don't want to give away the market you're working in to keep the case-study from getting skewed, but it would be very interesting to know the general structure of your by-line.
Cheers,
I am enjoying following your site buildout. It is good work that is educational, interesting, and quite helpful to me as my company plans some expansion of our product marketing mix!
Jim Beckman, MD/CEO Therapon Skin Health
Looking good Jon! I've started really anticipating your updates each Thursday!
) and I'm actively seeking some profitable niches to work on. I intend to follow the plan you've so graciously shared with us.
I purchased Niche Inspector earlier in the week, (through your link of course
One question, how do you think it would affect your results if you submitted your articles to a lot more of the article directories? Sounds like you're getting great results out of EzineArticles. It would seem as though you could improve those result exponentially if you submitted to 20 or 30 other directories?
Keep up the good work!
Hi Jon,
How exciting is that, in just 4 weeks, you are
already making money with a site that's brand new!
I love a good case study, thank you for sharing what
most gurus keep secret, and only allude to.
u da man!
Best Wishes,
Jeff Davis
Great work Jon!
I also wondered about submitting to multiple article sites. If you do that would you use the same article or multiple versions of the same article?
I know there's a lot of software out there to modify your articles to create multiple versions. If you use it, do you recommend any one version over the others?
Hi Jon, that's great that the site is now getting more traffic from Google. Yes, these case studies are fun to watch and I look forward to the emails each week!
Hi Jon,
Another week of amazing results!
I have a few questions, though. Are you not concerned about all that duplicate content being created from your articles? How will that impact on your Google — and other search engine — rankings? Will the incoming links from those sites not become worthless as they are relegated to the supplemental index?
I can't wait for your next update!
Cheers,
Nick
Chris:
I've thought about submitting to more article sites, and have had some suggested, but I haven't done that yet. It might be a good idea, though. If for nothing else but to get more inbound links into the inner pages.
Reverse:
I would use the same articles I spread to EzineArticles.com
Nick:
I'm not distributing the same articles that I am using on the site. So I have zero concerns about duplicate content.
Hi Jonathan. I am a computer engineer (java programmer) but I am new to internet marketing and this case study you are sharing with us is really motivating me to start my adsense career! I am learning very useful tips.
God bless you. I am soryy if my english is not ok, I am from Colombia
Hi Jon,
Amazing exponential growth here. I would like to see the 3way-links' role exposed.
Waiting impatiently for next weeks expose. Very interesting case study, entertaining and instructive.
Impressive, indeed.
I am as befuddled as Quinton Sherrer regarding the niche site case studies. My 3 advanced degrees just do not cover internet marketing, but I am learning. I am thoroughly enjoying the Instant Article Wizard. My use is very specific. I am looking for information to blog to professional carpet cleaners interested in low moisture cleaning. I have found the article wizard to be very helpful in this pursuit. Perhaps in the future, as I learn more about internet marketing, the site case studies will have more relevance to me.
Awesome Post Jon,
I think it is great how you are showing people to drive traffic to their websites. I use this type of traffic generation myself and feel it is the best way to rank quickly and see traffic from Google.
I can't wait for the next set of results.
Hi Jonathan,
This is a great way to measure the effectiveness of different traffic building methods. How long do you plan to publish the results? I'm sure you are inspiring many to try to duplicate or better your efforts!
Ted
Hi Jon,
Excellent case study!
Questions: have you so far been promoting the site by only using 3waylinks.net, ezinearticles.com, and goarticles.com?
Also, in general, is it beneficial enough to get backlinks by only submitting articles to article directories, or what else would you recommend in order to get better ranking and traffic? I mean, what other SEO/promotional methods do you personally use apart from article submissions?
Cheers!
Jon,
GREAT concept! The step-by-step videos are killer. QUESTION regarding site structure: I have a 50 page site with approx. 25 links on the home page. For articles, do I create a link for each article or create a link "Articles" and then link to each article from the "Article" link OR? Really confused!!
PS: I bought IAW via your link. It's great!!
Jer
Hi jon,
It seems that writing and having your articles out there in the article directories still works a treat in getting some good traffic to your site - and this is just the 4th week ;).very inspiring. I look forward to the next report thanks!
Jonathan, pretty impressive. I have started to run more article submissions to check the traffic and see if I get the same as you. I am submitting to around 25 article sites. Had been doing the big 5, but thought I would try this for a time. Thanks keep it up.
Steve
Hi Jon,
very impressed with your results,now for the results of my case study within a case study,I have found that results have been somewhat successful,I have added a blog to my site and I have submitted a couple of articles so far.The totals from adsense this week is 1.44, total of 65 unique visitors and 766 page views,google has spidered the pages 30 times and
there has been 11 hits to ebay and several hits to the blog and one person wrote a comment on the blog.I will submit a couple more articles this week and hopefully I will see the same results that you have had.
Hi Jon
Thanks for sharing a simple and concise system. I am doing what you have outlined and have had a jump in my traffic also.
My 2 cents
As I read some of the comments I have noted many questions asking what else could be done to improve the results.
Don't do it ….. just work this simple system. It's easy !!
Think about it. It's taken Jon a couple of hours to put this whole site together … writing, posting, site etc. He's already returned over $30 in revenue. Say $15/hr
If the income per week didn't increase any futher and stayed at $18.50 per week that's just under a grand for a year.
Hmmm that works out at $500/hr !!!
Do the maths … work this simple system. Do more than one !!
Systems don't fail…. people do. It's that simple
Have fun
Simon
Hi Jonathan,
Are you planning to distribute to Ezine and Go articles another set of articles around the original 10 keywords or rest with these.
I appreciate the case study. Your a breath of fresh air.
Terry
Really interesting to see how many people are getting inspired by your case study Jon. I think you are getting where you wanted. Keep up the postings.
Thanks again Jon for the ongoing case study. Your systems do work, but it is hard for many to find the patience to wait for these things to build up. Most people expect things to happen instantly on the internet and give up when they haven't made a fortune after a week or two.
Keep up the good work!
Great case study jon.
I was told somewhere that I would be better off NOT putting adsense on my site until all of my sites pages have been indexed by google. By waiting for it to be indexed, I will supposedly receive better adsense earnings per click, due to googles smart pricing policy. Does this make sense to you? Any comment would be appreciated.
Can you please tell me what exactly is the site you have been prmoting here ? I mean the URL of the site so that we can see which website it is in reality. I could not find a link to that site here.
Laughable results. Are you kidding? Ezine? Have you seen the rubbish they publish?
Superb bro love all your tips and this case study …… actually wouldn't mind a good chat at some point about getting you to be part of gurucentral.tv when I get it going
email me and thanks again
mark
I have been following the case study closely. I just want to ask. Did you submit all the unique articles to ezinearticles and goarticles at once? I mean did you sumit all of them the same day or you spaced it between days? Will be very grateful if this is promptly answered.
Thanks very much for showing us newbies what we can do within 5 hours of work. Please keep it up. I look forward more to the updates each week.
Hi folks
Yes, content is KING. After one articel published in Ezinearticles, i get a ezpert status as autor. This article was not writen by my self or someone ather,i made it whit a software.
I am new on this and need some help how to get inbound links to my inner pages on the site.
P.S. I dont get any traffic for the moment, we shall se.
Wow! Slowly but going surely hitting the revenue from google adsense. Not bad anyway. I am struggling than yours. Thanks for the report.
Been following along since day one. Article marketing is my favorite way to get started building traffic. Done right, such as this case study, and you can really get a site to grow.
Jon, a good case study.
My experience at launching a site went a little differently. I wrote an article that I thought would be topical and interesting - 7 Deadly Sins of Email - and published on my Tetsou site.
My traffic at the time was less than 100 visits a month. The article was then posted onto Digg by a well meaning friend one Sunday. On the following Monday my site received 8000 visits! Apparently my article had made the front page of Digg.
The traffic load became so great, so quickly, that my hosting provider had to take down the site until I could tune it to cope with the traffic! At the end of the month my site had received 24,000 visits and had been linked to 234 blogs and related websites.
I wrote up the experience in a follow-up article called the Digg Effect if readers are interested.
Looking forward to your next upate.
Tetsou
Hi Jon,
Congrats on the results so far, I hope it continues. I have a question about the revenue you've made so far. When you say you're now upto $18.64 is that in total for the 4 weeks or just for week 4? I'm not sure if you're posting the amounts per week or the total that the site's made so far?
Thanks.
It's awesome Jon. Keep up posted.
Great improvement! Jon, I think the right strategies pay for itself.
Would you consider showing us the details of it and let us benefit from the strategies that you use?
I think many of us would like more details.
What do you think??
I agree. I write articles for online magazines, which require listings of resources. I found that most of the web links provided for the research were from blogs, not credible links for research purposes. In addition, several times I would find a sentence which provided a link to a previous sentence and noticeably not the correct link (eg., sentence regarding beaches referred to a link to a report on terrorism). It may be a glitch.
Hi again, Jon.
You said:
"Nick:
I'm not distributing the same articles that I am using on the site. So I have zero concerns about duplicate content."
I realise that you are using different articles for your site. However, as you are relying on your submitted articles being distributed around the Net to gain backlinks to your site, I imagine that sooner or later Google and other search engines will notice all the duplicate content out there. So all the sites that have used your articles will become penalised for duplicate content, which in turn means they will lose ranking or get de-indexed and hence your traffic will decrease/disappear. Isn't that how it works?
I guess what I am saying is that over the short term your traffic will increase, as it has been doing for the past four weeks, but I would expect the duplicate content 'slap' to have some impact over the long term. Maybe it will have a minimal effect on your traffic because your site is in the 3-way links network, or other factors such as the SEO efforts you have put into your own site. Is there any way you can give us a regular update of how much traffic you are getting due to the 3-way links network?
Cheers,
Nick
Oh man!!! Who told you that??? Did you know that placing adsense on your site will help it get indexed as quickly as possible! Adsense is Google's business.
Just place it and you won't wait long till Google goes to your site and get it indexed
Good luck!
By the way, Jonathan placed the same article into several directories, but those articles aren't from his site.
Actually there's interesting research into duplicate content issue and I think it is worth considering Are you afraid of duplicate content?
I would really appreciate if you share your thoughts, because this situation showes that dupe content is not so scary…
Hi Anthony,
Yes, I do know that placing AdSense on a site gets it indexed quickly. However, that has nothing to do with the points I raised in my post.
Your research is interesting but doesn't indicate how long these sites that you have identified as using duplicate content have been in the SERPs. Now if you can prove that their rankings have remained unaffected for six months or more, then that might be a different story. It's relatively easy to get on the first page of Google's SERPs — black hatters do it all the time, and use AdSense to profit from it, too! The real test is how long they remain there!
Nick
Hi Nick!
Yes I'm curious about it also, so I'll try to check the rankings of the site in a month or so. This will show if duplicate content is really a "no-no" or … We'll see
Good idea, Anthony. I will visit your blog and check out your findings.
Until then.
Nick
Hi Jon,
This has been an interesting case study to read, and has got me thinking about trying out the same when time permits.
Other than 3waylinks.net, ezinearticles.com, and goarticles.com, have you been using any other methods to promote?
Looking forward to the next update in two weeks.
Cheers.
Hi Jon
Love your case study - something that I, as a beginner can relate to and actually do. I use Keyword Elite - very happy with it, however I'm finding that trying to evaluate EACH keyword's top 10 websites that show up in Google's results pages very time consuming. I mean (using Keyword Elite's Project 4 function), to analyse each of those websites for their page rank, how many times the keyword is repeated throughout the text, the usage of the keyword in page title, h1 tags, bold tags etc - it takes many hours. So how did you do it so quickly? I presume you did analyse your competition thoroughly for each keyword you considered for each of those 10 pages on your website. With Keyword Elite (project 4 function), I can only enter one keyword phrase at a time, so if I want to examine 30 possible keyword phrases, I've got to do the 30 one by one.
Also, a question for Steve (tendinitis cure) - you mentioned submitting articles to more directories and that you "had been doing the big 5" - can you tell me what are the "big 5"?
Also Tetsou mentioned Digg - can someone please tell me the URL of Digg - I've Googled it but there are many different sites so I'm confused as to which one.
I've noticed that the issue of duplicate content has come up. My understanding was that the FIRST instance of an article that Google finds is earmarked by Google as being the original, and subsequent ones are condidered to be the duplicates.
I'm visiting because I received an email from you about the peel back ads, very effective may I add.
But after reading the week 4 case study of niche content sites, I couldn't find a link for the site to go and have a look, I must have missed it?
The tenor of most of these comments is this:
"Jon, did you try this?"
"Jon, did you try that?"
"Jon, I hear that if you do it this way, something different will happen. Can you verify that?"
"Jon, what are your plans for trying other things (or revenues, or ranking, or whatever)".
This is an EXPERIMENT, and it's very easy to reproduce. Jon has kindly given us 100% of the details we need to duplicate his experiment and try our own variations.
If you want to know if it makes a difference submitting all your articles to the article directories at the same time, set up two sites. For one, submit the articles all at once. For the other, submit them over a period of days. Document your results, and publish a $7 report.
If you want to know if it makes a difference with and without AdSense on the home page, set up two sites. Put AdSense on one but not the other. Wait until Google has indexed each site, then put AdSense on the other one. Document your results, and publish a $7 report.
If you want to know if something will affect your ranking in 6 months, try it. Hint: Google changes their algorithms two or three times a year, and that alone will affect your ranking. When they do, you're probably going to have to go in and tweak your sites anyway. So all bets are off at that point.
Jon has fully documented a very SIMPLE means of generating passive income on the internet here.
Most of the comments are like, "Dude, will it survive a Category 5 hurricane?" and "Will I be able to make $50 a week with this?"
Simply put, Your Mileage Will Vary! Is it worth 2 hours of your time to put up a site or three following Jon's formula and see how it works out for YOU?
Great point, David.
Great information. Easy to understand too.
Mandy said:
"I couldn't find a link for the site to go and have a look, I must have missed it?"
If you're trying to teach people how to bake a souffle, do you let them open the oven and poke their fingers into the dough every minute or so to see how firm it is? Heck, when my mom baked a souffle, she'd lock us outside to make sure we didn't keep coming in and going out the kitchen door and slamming it, lest we cause the delicate top to collapse!
Jon has been very polite in answering these questions, and is probably tired of addressing them by now.
Jon is running this EXPERIMENT where he's documenting the number of unique visits that a given set of CONTROLLED stimuli (10 articles posted to some article directories) generate to a web site over time.
The keyword here is CONTROLLED.
Now, what would happen if 4,823 of the thousands of people who are reading this blog started to visit that site???
That's like everybody in class poking their fingers into your souffle while it's in the oven. Do you think it would make for a good demonstration if the souffle never ended up even getting cooked?
If people DID go to the site, what do you think his measurements would be reporting, exactly? Certainly not the number of visitors from those articles he posted! No, they'd be reporting the number of visitors who've read his blog here and want to gawk at his site.
Jon is trying to show us how a small handful of articles posted to some directories can generate a steadily growing flow of traffic. Of course, it will depend on the niche and whatnot, but there's no reason anybody can't expect the same kinds of results by duplicating his efforts.
Johnathan
I decided to follow along (Kind of) with your study.
I bought Niche Inspector and found the popular, high paying words. That was cool. I didn't there was such a thing. So I learned something already. I picked a different subject but I may do one the same as yours.
It has been up since the 1st of September and has had 61 unique visitors and made 2.00 on Adsense so far. Not bad I would say.
I used different software to build the site. It is fast and does a good job. Now I may get your article making software if I get time. Meanwhile I am following along as possible.
Bob
Jonathan,
1 question: With regard to duplicate content, when you wrote your original 10 articles that were submitted to ezine.com, did you also write another 10 articles for the website that were on the same topics but NOT duplicates of the articles submitted to ezine?
Thanks,
Mike
Johnathan,
Forget my question above…just found the answer above. Missed the first time I read your replies.
WoW
This is way coooool.
Keep up the goooood work
Man! I have been reading since day one.
I CAN'T WAIT for the next report!
This could easily be a report I would pay for to read.
Thanks for making it free.
Keep it up.
Oh!, I am also in the 3waylink network, and hope to see great results soon!
Jon,
That is amazing how much traffic you have gotten off of 10 articles!
What are some other ways to get traffic?
Thanks,
Dirk!