100K Project: Episode 6 (End of Q1)

100K Project: Episode 6 (End of Q1)

September was a busy month for my Project 100K site. It was a busy month because it marked the end of phase 1 or my 3 phases of building the niche site to 100K.

Let’s do a recap of the phases:

  1. Short term – Publish 200 articles on the site (July to September). DONE
  2. Medium-term – Optimize and expand the content based on performance (October to December) WE’RE HERE NOW
  3. Long term – Diversify monetization (December – February)

I’ve been trying to grind out the project to ensure I stay on track. The last thing I want is to end up abandoning this project half done.

With that said, I’ve just completed my first 3 months of working on the project. Cheers to me!

One of the reasons why I’ve been able to stick to this project is because of changing my focus. In July, I decided to abandon all my niche websites to concentrate on one. I have more than a dozen websites, which I’ve left on a freeroll. Among the sites is the one that was wrongfully DMCA’d by a competitor.

So, what did I accomplish in September?

September Goals Recap

At the start of September, I’d set to accomplish the following goals:

i) Finish the remaining articles to have a total of 200 published articles SUCCESS

ii) Find and set up WordPress themes on my Q&A and Pinterest-like sites SUCCESS

iii) Publish some content on the Q&A and Pinterest-like sites SUCCESS

Overall, I’m pretty happy that for the first time was able to finish all the tasks I’d set for the month. This is in addition to my daily grind writing content for clients of my agency, TheContentBear.

Let’s dive deeper into what I was up to in September.

Content Work

Finally, I’ve managed to publish 200 articles on the site. To be exact, the site has a total of 206 articles. This is quite a huge chunk for most people. However, in the grand scheme of things, I really don’t see the articles as many. In fact, they are a drop in the ocean when I compare what my competition has.

For perspective, here is a screenshot of the indexed URLs of one of my competitors:

competitor's indexed urls
Indexed URLs of One of My Top Competitors

Now, that’s some huge amount of content right there.

I’m not, however, aiming to have 100,000 URLs indexed. I mean, that could take years and I probably would need to niche up to get content ideas.

The long term goal at the moment is to get about 2000 articles written. The articles will cover everything in the niche, from informational queries to buyer’s guides.

However, that is a task for another day. For now, I’m done with Phase 1 of the project at this time, which was to publish 200 articles.

Marketing Work

I did not actively promote the niche site in September as I was more focused on getting the content work finished. However, I’ve occasionally been answering questions on Quora and pinning on Pinterest.

I’ve heard good things about Pinterest but I just can’t seem to get any reasonable traction from it. Since my account was banned in August, I’ve slacked down pinning on the image search network.

I’m still not out and down with Pinterest though. I’ve decided to educate myself and test various strategies to see whether I’ll get any traction.

September Stats

Here is how my site fared in September, as was captured by various tools.

SEMRush

More keywords are getting picked up by Google. This is despite the fact that I’ve not done any on-page optimization of the articles I’m posting.

I’m simply posting the articles as they come from my writers. I’ve planned to do on-page optimization as well as add images to the content this month.

100K Project; Semrush Stats September 2019
100K Project; SEMrush Stats October, 2019

Traffic

Traffic has mostly been stagnant. The site is only averaging about 15 visitors a day. In September, the site had 81 fewer visitors compared to August.

I’m not really worried about the traffic numbers at this time. I have a promotion plan in place that, when activated, will make it necessary to focus on the numbers.

For last month, here is what Google Analytics shows for the niche site.

september sessions
Niche Site Traffic – September, 2019

Earnings

I am monetizing the site with Amazon Associates program at this time. In September, the site earned $31.24 from Amazon. I also got $0.38 from VigLink

september niche site earnings
100K Project Niche Site Amazon Earnings September, 2019

October Goals

October is going to be, hopefully, the end of the run for doing boring tasks. For this month, I’m going back to the articles to optimize them for SEO. In particular, this is what I’ve planned to do:

i) Put Titles for all articles

I’ll be going through all the articles that have been posted and putting keyword-optimized Titles for each. I’m using Rank Math plugin on the backend. Therefore, putting the title tags would be easy.

ii) Uploading Images

I’m also going to be inserting images into all the articles on the site. I anticipate this will take quite a long time since about 70 percent of the articles I’ve posted are review- or buyer-type guides. With a typical guide having about 10 products, I’ll have to upload about 700 images!

Well, that’s quite a lot.

Each image will be optimized to load fast. I am using the ShortPixel Pro plugin to optimize the images.

iii) Proofreading Content

Well, this one won’t be completed this month. Instead, it will be an ongoing venture for the niche site. My plan is to go through all the articles I’ve posted and proofread them. Apart from this, I’ll be optimizing the content with related keywords, header tags, and the like.

There we go, a quick recap of how my niche site fared in September.

Are you building a niche site? How are you progressing?

NB: I just formed a Facebook Group called Niche Site Vault Accountability Group. The aim of the group is to network with other niche site owners that are on the journey to building profitable online properties. Join the group to keep yourself accountable and see how much you can achieve when you have publicly declared your goals.

Until next time, may the winds be fair to my competition!

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