Servando Silva: This is a guest post by Hunain Ahmed. I was interested in his case study since he focused on pure content writing and he decided to ignore SEO to build a new niche site. He’s got some great results and it’s been less than 3 months. This all happened after the latest Google algorithm updates, so it should work for some of my readers if you do keyword research and aim for low competition searches.
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My 2 months Micro Niche site – 0 to 400 visits per day in 2 months
Micro Niche blogging has been told to be a really easy method to get some passive income using not much effort and with just proper on-page and off-page SEO.
There are many famous blogs who have described this method as an easy quick get passive income method of micro niche blogging. I was very much impressed by this post and decided to give this a try. After reading almost every possible article I could find about how to start a micro niche blog and earn money fast, I selected a niche that gave me hope and encouraged me to keep going on and on. The person who generally quits after a week or so of making a blog (that’s me) and publishing content has now successfully completed 12 months of constant blogging on a new micro-niche blog. I’m going to share with you the statistics and what it took me to achieve these stats, the lies about micro niche blogs that most blogs/people tell you, and certain realities I’ve discovered from niche-related blogging.
About my Micro Niche Site
I always wanted to have some extra money in my pocket but never really wanted to work hard for it. So after being introduced to the idea of a micro-niche site, I started doing some research. Since I had made and abandoned some sites before I wasn’t a newbie with WordPress, the CMS needed to run my site. But at the same time I had also abandoned so many sites because I could not get success with SEO and could not build traffic, so this was again a new challenge for me.
Now I had to decide on a topic of my choice to start blogging. For that I choose “Cydia and Jailbreak” as my topic. There were three reasons behind that topic:
- Because I could not think about the topic of my own.
- Because I owned an iPhone so writing about it was easy.
- Because the article and person I was seeking guidance from had the same niche.
Now for the domain name I settled on Yescydia.com from Hosting24. I registered it for 3 months and paid for 3 months. This was mainly because if the site showed no results of growth after 3 months I could simply discontinue my work. I bought my package on November 28th 2014 and activated it on November 29th, 2014. I made my first post the day after it.
My statistics from December (2014) to January 30 (2015)
My stats graphs are shown in the pictures below. Initially I did not think that my micro-niche site would do very well in a short period of time. I started many websites before but just gave up with in the first month. But now I have discovered a secret. I found a method to take any blog and grow it as soon as possible without any SEO knowledge.
My traffic is constantly increasing day by day. It isn’t growing super fast but it’s growing steadily. Initially in the very first week of my site, I had no traffic at all. After I started posting and time started passing by, my blog grew more and more. Here are my stats for the last two months (December and January 2014-2015).
My Micro Niche Site December 2014 Stats (Traffic/Views): 4020 Views
My Micro Niche Site December 2014 Stats (Traffic/Views): 5685 Views
Views in terms of Days:
As you can see there are some ups and downs in some weeks and days. But this is normal and I had no control over it. It’s organic and referral traffic, mainly from Google.
This was a huge hit for me. I also integrated Adsense to my micro-niche site to earn some money but it didn’t work. Let me show you my Adsense reports.
Adsense with my Micro Niche Site
The main purpose of these types of blogs is to make some passive income without any effort. And the easiest way to do it is to integrate Adsense into the website.
That was exactly what I did. But what I forgot was that Adsense needs traffic and 150-300 views were not going to get me more than 2-3 clicks which resulted in $0.7 USD per day.
My best and worst days with Adsense were:
A maximum of $0.71 in one day
A minimum of $0.01 in one day
As you can see that this isn’t much. This was just after two months of starting my blog and it didn’t have much traffic. I had around 100 visits per day in December, but that quickly increased to 200 per day in the last week of January and 400 per day for the last 2 days of the month.
What I did to achieve this
As you can see there were some certain rules and methods I promised to follow before starting my niche blog. These helped me improve quickly and encouraged me to go on and pursue more. I’m no SEO expert. I only knew how to do all the on-page SEO using SEO by Yoast plugin and mixed it with some keyword research inside Google Adwords Planner.
Here is a complete list of what I did and what I did not. This is a practical method that you could also test if you are planning to start a new micro-niche site.
1. Posted frequently
As described above, I purchased my domain name on November 28 and it went live the next day. I published my first blog post on November 30 and then published 10 quality 500+ words articles within the first 10 days and strictly followed my rule of posting at least 1-2 posts every 2 days.
I even wrote 3 articles per day if I had the time…
This was all to give Google the impression that my website was being updated with fresh quality content frequently and I could build some authority. You can go to my site (yescydia.com) and look into the archives to check the dates and get a picture.
At the same time, I didn’t have a specific time for publishing my posts. I would just start typing and publish it.
2. I rarely used the Google Keyword Planner Tool
The first post I wrote was from a suggested keyword I found using the Google keyword planner. The keyword was “How To Do iOS 7 Jailbreak” which according to Google had a good amount of searches, low competition, and had a decent cost per click (CPC) for Adsense ads.
But after some time, I stopped using the keyword planner because I didn’t know how to properly use it, and also it was giving me not much of an advantage. Now my plan was to search Google for a keyword related to my niche. Open the first two links/suggestions, read the whole article, and then publish it in my own words. When I was out of ideas on what to blog about, I would go to a top site in my niche category, look for the latest posts for topic ideas and write them in my own wording.
I did not abandon the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool completely. From time to time I used it. Another great keyword tool I used was Wordtracker. It helped me get low competition keywords with high potential.
3. Posted several articles for the same keyword
This is what I did to get ranked higher for a keyword. I published articles about that particular keyword 2-4 times.
For example, I targeted “installous alternatives” so I wrote at least 3 articles related to the keyword and added that keyword in the post’s meta title and meta description.
I think this helped Google realize that the blog knows about this topic and is liable to provide genuine and helpful knowledge. In the eyes of Google my content became good quality and my traffic started increasing. This helped me score a spot between 6-17 in SERPs.
4. Created Social Media Profiles
After a week or so the best thing I did was to create social media profiles. I knew social media was not going to get me good traffic but I did it for two basic reasons.
- To get reliable high Page Rank Trusted Backlinks
- To increase social media appearance
- To get some social signals necessary to gain trust from search engines
I created my blog’s profiles on 3 major sites: Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. I created a Google+ page where I added some descriptions and keywords about my site. I also created a Facebook page and shared it. Finally, I made a profile on Twitter and shared every article that I published on my micro niche site. Later on I created a Tumblr blog too and linked it to my micro-niche site/blog and shared my content on Tumblr.
After a day or two Google began to pick up those social signals and I started noticing a little bit of traffic in my stats.
Sharing everything on social networks was very easy. I just went to my WordPress dashboard/settings/sharing and connected my social media accounts.
5. Shared some of my posts on Reddit
As you know there are lots of methods and guides on how to score massive traffic from Reddit. In my opinion Reddit is just crap. Reddit is good if you want to get help, seek information or stuff like that. But for getting traffic, don’t bother.
The problem is that even if you are able to score 100 thousand visitors from Reddit, it will be temporal. After a day or two your site’s traffic will decrease & it will be back where you left it.
You can always share your blog posts on Reddit but just for the sake of a powerful backlink. Don’t get your expectations high about scoring traffic from Reddit. I also did that. I got 315+ views from Reddit for a single blog post after just 10 days after going live. But that happiness was just for a day. After two days I was back to where I was before Reddit. But I got a Backlink.
6. Didn’t build many backlinks except Social Media & Comments
Again, I am not much of an SEO expert. I had no idea of guest posting and I was afraid of my site being dragged down if I used free online backlink services. So in the beginning I did not make any backlinks at all. So yeah. I did not pay a fiver guy to make backlinks for me.
But whenever I felt the need to make a good backlink, I would go around a site or too, comment something like: “this is a really nice post”, or asked a question to get a backlink from the comments section. I didn’t go crazy dropping comments everywhere to create thousands of backlinks, instead, I just commented on stuff I read, leaving a link back to my micro niche website and moved on.
Google indexed some of the links. Reddit was not indexed before the first month and a half. It took a long time.
Yes, I suck at making backlinks. Like most people trying to build a micro niche site for the first time.
7. Didn’t wait for Google to index my site
I wanted success early. So after two days, I went to Google Webmaster tools, made an account, and added my site.
I didn’t wait to let my precious articles included in the search results by Google bots. It would have taken days. So from Webmaster tools, I went to Crawl —> Fetch As Google and indexed it manually.
Now, whenever I publish an article I’ll fetch it as Google from the Webmaster tools and index it. It became my strategy, publish and index, publish and index.
This not only helped me to get more traffic from Google but also grew my website in a short time.
What I didn’t do in those 2 months
I really wanted to make more backlinks and guest posts. But I had bad luck since every site I tried to post had guest posting disabled or I had to pay for it. I did submit an article to Ezine Articles that didn’t get accepted.
I didn’t make any backlinks using free online backlink maker sites and services because I was afraid that Google might penalize my site.
I didn’t publicize my social media presence. I don’t have more than 31 likes on my Facebook page, 2-5 followers on Twitter, and Google+.
What to expect before starting a micro-niche site/blog
You should look for the following things before jumping into micro niche blogging. These are cold facts that many bloggers forget to tell you.
- It takes almost 6 months to really get a suitable amount of organic traffic. After 6 months your traffic can skyrocket if you publish frequently and good quality content.
- It takes a hard amount of work. You will need to constantly update your website.
- You need to post content frequently. If you provide fresh content, you’ll gain more authority and respect in the eyes of Google.
- You will have to create organic/natural backlinks. Backlinks from free sites or fiver could destroy your SEO and rankings.
- This is 2015 now. If you want any niche blog to gain success, you have to work for it and give your best.
You should also keep in mind that you have to publish good quality articles. I would recommend you to not write below 500 words. Google gives preference to long content posts.
“So don’t just make a micro-niche site. Make it a quality micro niche site.”
Keeping 2015 in View: Lies About Micro Niche Blogging
- It will take less amount of time to get traffic
- You don’t need any major SEO
- It will not require any backlinks
- There are no topics left to blog about
- Social media is not necessary
- Content can be of any length
- It’s Easy
So this was the whole thing I wanted to let you guys know about micro niche blogging in 2015. This experiment was done in December 2014 after some of Google’s algorithm updates.
I will also be posting the monthly stats of my site, how much I’m earning, how it is going so that you know what to expect, and what not to expect. Don’t worry, my stats are pretty good for this short amount of time and if you are a beginner, I am a beginner too. Let’s help each other.
Beauty is not about making a micro niche site and earning from it. Beauty is to make a micro-niche site and grow it to an authority niche site later.
If you’re planning to start a blog read points above and apply the content and indexing strategies. Even if your topic is not Cydia (could be anything) you will get good results if you work hard.
Advice For Early Success: Try to publish at least 1 article per day minimum 400+ words. Even if you don’t do SEO/backlinks you will still succeed by constant publishing. And don’t forget to give it at least 6 months before deciding to shut down your site.
REMEMBER: Although I didn’t do much hard stuff here, don’t just go thinking that you can do the same too and achieve the same results. Everything is easy if you work hard. For me, the topic I chose was easy, because I was a tech geek from childhood.
If you want to try this out, you should make a site about a topic you’re comfortable writing for.
If you have any questions about anything related to micro-niche blogging please leave a comment below. I’ll be glad to help.
Author’s Bio: Hunain Ahmed is an enthusiastic learner in the field of Online Marketing and Blogging.
