100K Project: Episode 12 (Above Average)

And in the 9th month, it happened!

Welcome to my monthly Project $100K update. March was my 9th month into the project and I am ecstatic with how things are going.

When I started the project, I wanted to hit $1000 in earnings in one year. The end of June, 2020 will mark my first year of working on the niche site. While I haven’t attained my target yet, I’m halfway there, as you’ll see from the stats below.

Let’s start with a recap of the goals I’d set for March.

March Goals

I wasn’t really in the mood of working on the site in March. I mean, with the Covid-19 thing going on, it’s easy to get worried and distracted with lockdowns, loss of income, and so on.

Still, I’ve been trying to keep my head on the ground and put in some work.

My goal in March was to build PBN links to the site. I accomplished this goal.

I built over 40 PBN links to the site. Apart from this, I had one link exchange with someone I met in a private Skype SEO group.

With that said, let’s get to the visuals.

Google Analytics

Traffic to the site from Google and other search engines has been steadily increasing over the past months. Just over 5000 users stopped by the site in March. The majority of the users are coming from Google.

This is a record for the site.

My only concern is that I’ve concentrated too much on Google traffic, which is dangerous in some way. The last thing I want is to have only a single traffic source (Google), which can get shut down due to an update or a penalty.

I need to diversify my traffic sources.

So far, I’ve been working on Quora. I’d taken a break from Pinterest but I’m ready to jump in. I figured out I wasn’t pinning content that resonates well with people. Here’s some advice I got from Flipping Websites Facebook group.

I’ll create new Pinterest-focussed content and report with the results by the end of June.

SEMRush Stats

More keywords are getting picked up by SEMRush. The site went from having 4.2K keywords on SEMRush up to 14.8K. Gooda!

My goal is to reach 50K in keywords tracked by SEMrush by the end of June.

Earnings

And I finally broke the $500 mark. The site made $537 from Amazon and $20 from Svorn. I’m happy with the $557.

And here is the Svorn dashboard.

As you can see from the Amazon earnings image above, there are about 80 products that are yet to ship. Perhaps I could even have made $600? I don’t know.

Anyway, the next milestone would be getting the site to earn $1000. Timeline? The next 3 months.

April Goals

In 3 months, I will be one year into this niche site project. Therefore, I wanted to write a 90-day plan for the site. Here is what I’m planning.

New Content

It’s time for me to write some new content for the site. I will mostly be focussing on informational content rather than commercial intent content. My goal is to drive new visitors to the site and then monetize them through display ads.

In my niche site journey, I’ve been slacking on display ads, mostly due to the experience I’ve previously had with Google Adsense. I mean, they pay peanuts.

However, today there are different ways of monetizing info content. I’ve heard good things about networks like Mediavine and Ezoic. I want to get my traffic numbers up and then start monetizing the site with Ezoic.

Content Optimization

I’ll be going through all the content I’ve previously published and optimize them with SurferSEO. I’ve been hearing good things about the software so it’s time to test it.

During the content optimization, I’ll also be noting down any interesting keywords that I come across that I can write about in the future.

Dropshipping

Perhaps I’m putting too much on my plate? I don’t know.

I’m planning to set up a dropshipping store on the niche site. This is one of the monetization avenues I can quickly implement.

Emails

I’ve been gathering emails for the site since the start of February. At this time, I have just 83 subscribers. However, my goal is to have 2000 emails by the end of June.

There are various strategies I’m employing to gather emails. One of the ways is by simply offering lead magnets (ebook) on the site.

At the moment, I think my conversation rate sucks. Check these starts from Bloom plugin by Elegant Themes:

I’ll be putting more lead magnets on the site to grow the subscribers to over 2000 by the end of June.

I was also thinking of doing a giveaway using Vyper.io but I’m not sure whether this is the right time. I mean, with the Covid-19 scare, I need to be strategic with the plans I implement.

Backlinks

Backlinks are still the foundation of ranking on search engines. I will work on building more backlinks to the site. I’m going all out, getting any good links I can, whether it is through outreach, resource link building, guest posts or other methods.

My goal is to have at least 300 referring domains to the site by the end of June

What Next?

So, I have my 90-day goals laid out for me. I just need to work on them. I will continue updating this case study every month, just to stay on track with my goals.

Here is how my whiteboard looks like 🙂

Do you have a niche site? How is it doing?

Damn, I feel for my competitors.