100K Project: Episode 9 (6 Months In)

Happy new year everyone,

I hope the New Year comes with much success for you, both in your personal and professional life.

It’s time for an update for this $100K Project. December was the 6th month since I started concentrating on the project. It’s be a long and testing 6 months for me. I mean, getting to blog every month about the project is not something I thought I would manage.

But alas, inch by inch, life’s a cinch. I managed!

Bring the participation trophy for me, please.

Let’s start with a recap of the goals I’d set for December. The goals were to proofread at least 30 published posts, as well as continue traffic leaking from Quora and Pinterest.

Well, I never really got to proofread 30 articles as it turned out that my content writing clients needed more content in December than I’d anticipated. I was busy with my team at TheContentBear creating content for others.

However, on Quora and Pinterest fronts, I put in the work. I’ve made a habit of jumping onto Quora and Pinterest at least once every two days.

Sadly, I’ve not really been tracking the results from these two platforms. This is something I plan to change starting this new year. I need to know how much traffic is being generated from the platforms or how many eyeballs are seeing my brand.

With that said, I plan to stay on course with this project until June. I want to see how much the site would grow in one year. I’ve always had challenges seeing projects to the end. I intend to break the cycle of leaving projects half-way done.

There is no payday for a half-done project.

Enough with that. Let’s get to the numbers.

Traffic

I got my first traffic milestone in December. According to Google Analytics, about 1.600 visitors stopped by the website. This is a massive increase of 700 visitors from November!

Happy dance!

SEMRush

It’s always nice to see the SEMRush graph and the number of keywords that are getting picked up. Once again, the graph is on an upward trajectory. I like that.

Earnings

For earnings, I also had my record month in December. Of course, I cannot attribute all the sales to my efforts at growing the site. People spend a lot during the holidays. I guess I just reaped the benefits of the higher spending mood of the visitors.

I made $283 from Amazon, up from $46 in November.

January Goals

I had to step back and recap my plan for the site. From the onset, my plan was three-fold:

1. Short term – Publish 200 articles on the site (July to September 2019)
2. Medium-term – Optimize and expand the content based on performance (October to December 2019)
3. Long term – Diversify monetization (December – February 2020)

I managed to publish 200 articles by September, 2019.  However, on the medium-term plan of optimizing and expanding the site’s content, I’ve not stayed on schedule.

You know how it is; things don’t always go according to plan.

The long-term plan of diversifying monetization is where I’m supposed to be. However, since I haven’t finished the medium-term plan, I will carry on with it concurrently with the long-term plan.

After February, I will continue to test various marketing strategies to get the most value from the traffic coming to the site.

So, what are the goals?

i) Proofreading content

I’ll continue proofreading and optimizing the content I’d posted. This is a tasking job as I have to insert keywords, expand some articles, and so on.

ii) Lead magnets

I’ll also concentrate on creating lead magnets to grow my email base. This is critical, especially when it comes to marketing. As I indicated in this post, I don’t want to rely entirely on Google for traffic.

There are other things that I have in mind, which I plan to execute in January. Here is a rundown of them.

i) Build an email list by holding a contest. I’ll be using Vyper.io to run the contest.

ii) Focus on Pinterest marketing. I’m testing various traffic leaking strategies for Pinterest. I’m yet to drive any significant traffic from the platform.

iii) Build a couple of PBNs links to the site and index them.

iv)  Build the social media accounts for the niche site.

v) Make 2 YouTube videos for some products in the niche. I was contacted by 2 people that are interested in getting their products reviewed by us.

That is all for today.

How are you doing with your niche site? Let me know in the comments below.

By the way, if you haven’t joined the NicheSiteVault accountability Facebook group, here is the link. Let’s connect.