Niche Site Journal for January 2013

Adding a few pages My last post on my Niche Site experience was almost 3 months ago. A lot has happened since then not relating to the Niche Site.

As many of you know, my wife gave birth to our first child, we ran a successful Kickstarter campaign, and printed our first comic book.

In other words, we have been insanely busy.

This is why I hope to master niche sites. The opportunity to work on my art and spend time with my family with out worrying about money would be a dream come true. That is why I am trying to make this work and build a passive income portfolio.

Make sure you know why you want to make passive income through Niche Sites. It makes the long hours and lonely nights more bearable.

Thank You to

J.D. Meier (sourcesofinsight.com/)
jenny j
Ben Troy (getfreepremium.com/)
Raul (gedtesthub.com/)
George (seekdefo.com)
best dress shirts
Control Track (inventory control tracker)
Izzy (izzbox.com/)
David (withu.co.uk)
dbrkkpbxg
Athena
Viera
Don

All of you commented on Niche Site Journal articles and have shown me people are interested in these posts. For that I wanted to thank you and hope you share your Niche Site experiences with me.

The Numbers

Time Breakdown: 0 Hours (Total to date: 111 hours)

I did no work on the site. I did check the traffic numbers every once in awhile and updated the site to the current wordpress version once, but nothing that took more than 5 minutes.

Costs: $0 (Total to date $351.30)

Spent no money.

Search Engine Ranking:

The Keyword I am trying to rank for is “Maternity Belts”. I used Market Samurai to get the following numbers.

From Market Samurai Ranking Checker

I don’t actually now what to make of these numbers. It looks like my position with google was doing well. It got as low as 17th position and than jumped back up to the 30’s. This could be because I wasn’t adding content or some other sites have continued to work at SEO and I stopped. I am not sure.

For some reason I am not ranked with bing or Yahoo, but on Jan 17th I jumped to the 9th spot in Bing, then disappeared. Not sure if Market Samurai has a glitch or the search engines just do weird stuff? I am still trying to figure it all out.

Traffic:

Here is my traffic numbers (from Google Analytic) for the site from Nov 1, 2012 – Jan 31, 2013.

Visits: 81
Unique Visitors: 49
Pageviews: 318
Pages / Visit: 3.93
Avg. Visit Duration: 00:06:22
Bounce Rate: 37.04%
% New Visits: 56.79%

Nov 1, 2012 – Jan 31, 2013

Traffic Source

Traffic Sources from Nov 1, 2012 – Jan 31, 2013

Income: about $.09 (Total to date $1.59)

Since I last posted my numbers (November 17, 2012) I made $.09.

Thoughts

Why no income?

As it goes in this experiment I have put in a total of $351.30 and 111 hours into this project have a total income of $1.59.

Even thought I am disappointed with these numbers I am not giving up on the concept of niche sites. I did make some income with only getting 1 or 2 visitors a day. This means if I could get 100’s or 1000’s visitors a day my return would start being worth the effort.

Also I have learned a lot from my experience with my Kickstarter campaign on how to utilize social media to get traffic to my site.

Did my Backlinking Strategy Fail?

I wanted to address the fact that I used a backlinking strategy but still have low ranking in Google and no ranking on other search engines. This does not mean the strategy did not work because I never finished implementing the strategy.

I put in Anchor Layer with links from sites I created on 3rd party sites (View list in week 8), but I never sent mass links to the Anchor Layer. This means to see if this strategy works, I need to start getting mass number of backlinks to those 3rd party sites.

My Future Niche Site Journals

I have decided I need to continue experimenting with niche sites but that this is not the website to do it on. I want the JasonLovesLife site (this site) to be more focused on my comic book and building my name in the webcomic community.

This means I will be starting a new blog. I have already purchased a new domain and will need time to set it up and start posting. I will update this site with the new location and I hope all of you who are following my Niche Site Journal will make the transition over there.

I have also been asked a lot about what the web address is for the niche site I am working on.

You can check it out at: www.onmaternitybelts.com
Let me know what you think of the site in the comment section.

My Niche Site Journal:

February 1, 2013 by Jason Love

Eric Wainwright

Feb 10

Hi Jason

I’m glad you finally mentioned your site name, I don’t know if it is significant but Pat Flynn mentions his at every opportunity as does Mark Mason of the Late Night Internet Marketing podcast, so perhaps you should do that in your updates.

I’ve only just started to explore affiliate marketing, so I’m no expert but I think if you put the benefits of the product on the first page it may help – for example if you had a sub-heading (H2 link) with the title “Maternity Belts Relieve Discomfort”

Also perhaps putting a category list or recent article on the front page (just using the wordpress widget) may help too.

I also noted the site load speed could be quicker, I found when configuring the w3 total cache that there is a company called cloud flare, they cache web content so it will load quicker because they have data centres all over the world and they do this for free with their basic service and they also provide a safeguard against your website being offline – if your website is quite static then using them may improve load speed and allow you to have better graphics etc.

Eric

Jason Love

Feb 10

Hello Eric,
Thanks for the great feedback. I probably should have named the site earlier, but I wanted to make sure my traffic numbers were not effected by this website. In reality, it doesn’t really matter because Analytics allows me to see where the traffic comes from.

I will be making some changes to the website at some point during the year with your suggestions of putting the posts on the home page. My goal with the site is to get people on and then off again through advertisement, so I will have to play with Google optimizer a little to see what is best.
I will also be checking out the cloud flare company you mentioned.

Thanks for the feedback and helping me on my journey. We will be moving these posts to a different URL. This will take a few weeks, but I will post it in the comments when it happens.

Jeff

Feb 13

Jason in my experience you have to push the traffic to pretty high levels to bring the traffic in to begin with. With out selling something content becomes what you are selling so its no longer passive. You either need new fresh content or to spend on ad dollars to generate ad revenue. You only get a google check when you hit $100. Like you said you are already in for $300.

I love that you are doing the experiment and I’d monetize the shit out of this section of the blog.

Jason Love

Feb 14

Good points.
It seems silly for me not to try and put more ads on this part of the blog since it is what the post is all about.

I am hoping to do a series of experiments and hopefully see what works for me including niche topics in general.

I know you are crazy busy working, but if you start working on a blog I would love to get a group of people trying to monetize blogs/niche sites to do a weekly Google hangout to say what is or isn’t working. Let me know if you are interested or know anyone who might be interested.

Jason Loves Life

Living as a form of Art