Niche Site Case Study (Month 8)
- November Website Earnings: $2,511
- November Traffic: 33,360 Sessions
- Total Site Value: $90,396
Wow, it has been an incredible month for my new niche site and I’m excited to share it with you all!The above $2,511 differs from the Amazon Screenshot on this post this month because I also made some money from my other affiliates which is really exciting!
We Were Accepted For MediaVine Ads!
We surpassed the 25,000 sessions mark to add my new site to MediaVine (as a second website on the platform) which is a huge milestone! In fact, we blazed past the 25K mark and are on track to do 50K in December which would be enough even if it was my first site on MediaVine.
I literally just got the site on MediaVine on November 30th, so the above income numbers don’t even reflect any added revenue numbers from in-content ads.
Compared To Last Month:
↑ Traffic is up 49.2%
↑ Website Earnings up 57.8%
↑ Rankings 12%
✓ DA26 – DA26
The site has officially exceeded my expectations for the first year. I had said that if I got to $1,500 per month after one year I’d be happy, now I’m hoping to double or even triple that estimate.
If the site was earning over $5,000 per month within a year I would be very impressed. I follow a lot of top SEO gurus and niche site builders and I’ve only seen one other case study that has this kind of growth and the blogger is a leader in the industry and spent over $30,000 on the site.
Content & Work (Lifetime)
- Total Posts Published: 172
- Total Links Built: 63 (Do-Follow)
- Total Time Spent: 10 hours/week (Average)
- Total Money Spent: $9,201
As you can see I’ve spent a lot of money on the site in these 8 months, but like I’ve said before that’s only because I’m also running 3 other websites (4 now as we just launched our new niche site).
If this was my only site, I would be able to focus all of my time writing the above 172 posts and I would probably be able to handle 3 per week, which would mean it would take a little over a year to get to where I am now with the site if I didn’t spend a dime on it.
At a low multiple of 36, the site is worth $90,396 if I were to sell it, and has earned an additional $5,500 to date for a total of $95,896. Earning nearly $100,000 in a year isn’t bad!
Most sites earning income as passively as this one would actually sell for a 40-45X multiple. At the high end of that sale value the site is worth almost $113,000.
I know these numbers are nerdy! But it’s something to keep in mind while you’re building your site. You aren’t just earning the revenue, you’re earning equity in the business just like you would if you spent that money on a house or a stock.
What I did in November
In all honesty, I didn’t do much on this site in November because we’ve been extremely busy launching our new “niche website” (I prefer to call them “Micro-Authority Sites” as they aren’t just garbage SEO blogs but more on that later).
We hired an editor full-time in October so I probably spent less than 3 hours per week on the blog on average over the month of November.
I applied for MediaVine and got accepted. I believe that if I can get the RPM up to $20 (goats is around $22), this new blog can earn about $1,000 per month on MediaVine which will be a nice addition to the income.
One great thing that happened was I had my first offer for sponsorship. A manufacturer is going to send one of the writers a product to review! They might even sponsor the YouTube Channel moving forward. It’ll be exciting to have a diversification method like that.
The YouTube Channel is picking up! I just need 300 more subscribers to reach 1,000 and monetize that too which could be worth an extra couple of hundred dollars per month, plus it’s fun to make videos there.
We also had an offer from someone to buy the site this month. I’m not taking it because it’s in a really fast upward trajectory at the moment, but in the future, if the site begins to plateau as we reach the limit of our niche, I may consider selling it. I’m hoping it’s earning $10,000 per month at that point so we can sell for $400,000 and I can share with you guys what it’s like to sell a blog.
My Plans Moving Forward
We are going to keep doing our best to produce the best possible content for this site and keep having our experts do the reviews and create videos etc. I think the site is now getting a name for itself and it’s all about brand-building at this point.
This is why I don’t like the term “Niche Site”. It has a pretty spammy connotation from the days when people would buy domains like “BestMicrowaves.com” and try to get them to rank for microwave posts even though they don’t own a microwave!
This blog is written by experts and it’s all high-quality content. I prefer to call it a “Micro Authority Site” for this reason.
My Recommendations For You
- Try to optimize your existing Amazon posts for conversions. See my previous post in this group for tips on how to do that. I was able to increase my sales considerably by using Amalinks Pro for comparison tables.
- Keep writing affiliate posts that are trying to rank for affiliate keywords. Have more posts on your site that can earn money from affiliates so that your overall value per visitor goes up.
- Keep writing in Pillar Webs to grow your traffic. I’m still doing it 100% of the time with this site. Every post is SEO and every post falls within a Pillar Web. Get that traffic up so you can join MediaVine.
- Again, speed up your site. Google is making this even more of a ranking factor in 2021. Use NitroPack to get 90s and A’s on all speed tests: https://nitropack.io/#WSZTUG (that is an affiliate with a 20% discount code)
- Update Your Old Content: Search your site for keywords like “2020” or “2019” or even “2016” etc (depending on how old your blog is). Then go in and update any posts where you mention the date. Add 300-500 words and update the publish date, particularly on posts that are already on page 1. I’ll be doing this with almost all of my posts at the end of 2020 and the start of 2021.
I hope you guys are still enjoying these case studies! I try to make them as transparent as possible which is why there are so many income numbers and traffic numbers.I’m considering also publishing case studies for our brand new blog if you guys are interested in hearing about how that goes from month one as well, comment below and let me know.Thank you so much for reading!Keep up the solid SEO work. It works!
Nick
