Damn, this Covid-19 thing. Fear. Lockdowns. Apocalypse?
I hope you are safe wherever you are and are practicing social distancing and self quarantine, plus basic hygiene.
The Covid-19 (popularly known as Corona virus) scare has brought entire nations to a standstill. My heart goes to the people of China, Italy, and other areas that have been hit by the illness.
I’ve been meaning to write an update of the $100K Project for some time now but have been distracted. And since it’s just about 10 days to the end of the month, I wouldn’t want to step into April without providing an update of what happened to my niche site in February.
For the most part, I left the site on a free-roll in February. You know, life happens. I’ve been busy with some offline projects trying to get things moving.
Still, I wanted to pop in and provide an update.
Before we look at the stats, let’s do a recap of February’s goals.
February Goals
Like I indicated in the previous post, my goals in February were:
i) Optimize 60 articles based on SurferSEO recommendations
ii) Get 10 links through guest posting, 5 PBN links, and 100 links through the Shotgun Method
iii) Continue promoting the site on Quora, blog comments, and forums.
Unfortunately, I’m ashamed that I did not complete the goals as I’d planned. The excuse? Life happens.
I get bored. I get frustrated. I have those moments when I think, “I’m putting in a lot of work but not seeing anything in return”.
Anyway, the only goal I checked was building PBN links. This was easy since I have access to the sites.
I host my PBN sites at NonameInternet. If you are interested in hosting your own PBN sites, I recommend going with the company. Here is a review I wrote about the service.
I built about 20 PBN links from my network. And I’ve been steadily building the links this month.
My goal is to have all the PBNs linking to the niche site by the end of March so that I can concentrate on other link acquisition strategies in the coming months.
The results? Well, you’ll have to wait for the next update. But overall, I’m happy with the links.
Now that you know what work I put in February, let’s check the stats.
Google Analytics
Traffic to the site continues to grow. At this point, the site is past the “sandbox” stage and Google has started showing it some love.
In February, there were about 2600 visitors to the site. This is a welcome increase from 2300 visits in January. However, I still don’t like the bounce rate and session duration.
SEMrush Stats
Coming to SEMRush, more keywords are getting picked. However, the numbers did not really go up as much as I would have loved. This is probably because I left the site on a free roll.
Here is how the chart looks like:
By the way, the site seems to be favored by all the micro updates that Google has been making of late. However, I still don’t want to 100% rely on Google for traffic. I learned this the hard way as I outlined in this post. This is why I’ve been building the site’s brand on Quora, Yahoo Answers, and various forums.
Earnings
Coming to earnings, just a slight improvement. Amazon earnings were nearly the same as last month. The site generated $372, which is $1 more from last month’s $371.
I also made $11 from Svorn (formerly known as VigLink). I’m pleasantly surprised at how well Svorn works. In fact, I prefer it to Google Adsense.
Total earnings were $383.
My biggest earning goal at the moment is to reach $500. I’ll need to put in the work if I’m to reach this number by the end of June, which will be one year since I started the project.
March Goals
The main activity I’m doing in March is building PBN links to the site. It’s just 10 days to the end of March and I’ve been consistent with this goal.
I’ll make an update on how the site performed when April sets in.
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