CASE STUDY: 200K WORDS IN 4 MONTHS

Doug Cunnington of the Niche Site Project and the Doug Show, has contributed a case study following his experiences with Niche Website Builders.

ABOUT THE SITE

Started July 2020

This was just after the Amazon Commission rate change in April 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. I initially started with 50/50 informational articles vs product reviews, even with the new commission rates.

CONTENT

I published the first 50 articles fast — within the first month. Then, I worked with Mark and Adam at Niche Website Builders to publish about 15 to 20 articles per month for the next several months.

There are 238 articles, about half from Niche Website Builders. 33% are product reviews, 67% are informational content.

The average word count is 1,470 words. Some of the content is 4k to 5k words long, but there are a lot of articles that are about 1,000 words long.

A LONG SANDBOX PERIOD

I’m not going to lie: I was nervous! It took a while to start getting much traffic.

There was a trickle right away, since I used a lot of Keyword Golden Ratio Terms in the first 100 articles or so. But I didn’t see significant traffic for about 8-10 months.

And it took 10 to 12 months to hit 3K page views per month.

In January 2022 it hit 62K page views. The traffic growth was pretty much steady through January 2022. February and March have dipped a little bit, but it could be a seasonal impact for the niche.

LINK BUILDING

Niche Website Builders worked on a shotgun skyscraper campaign from the first month. The Domain Rating went from 0 to 48 in 6 months or so. It’s in the low to mid 50s right now.

There are a few links from HARO out reach too, but less than 5 links.

There are several natural backlinks since the site ranks #1 for quite a for keywords.

TRAFFIC

Generally, been growing since the beginning, once out of the sand box.

• Dec 47.6k
• Jan 62.3k
• Feb 57.4k
• Mar 55.9k (projected)

EARNINGS – DISPLAY ADS AND AFFILIATE REVENUE

I didn’t monetize the site with display ads until January 2022.

Why? I don’t have a good reason!

It’s just when I finally got around to it.

EZOIC REVENUE, INCLUDING PREMIUM

Feb – $623 | EMPV $13.30 (high of $17)

Mar – $668 | EMPV $13.42 (high of $15)

Premium Ads contribute 20-25% of total revenue. So it’s well worth it to go for Premium Ads. There’s no downside to try — if it’s not more profitable, then you can stop using Premium Ads.

The site earns about $50 – $100 from Amazon Associate earnings.

AMAZON ASSOCIATES, PRODUCT REVIEWS, AND SLIGHT PIVOT

I started the site with 50% affiliate review content so it does earn a bit from Amazon. But after the long sandbox period, I noticed the informational content rank higher and faster.

So I decided to take feedback from the world and decided to publish more informational content.

Typically, I would have stuck with 50/50 info to product review content. But with the abundance of informational keywords, I leaned into it.

I discovered that I would potentially never run out of informational keywords. I learn a lot when I interview people for the Doug.Show Podcast

I’ve been hearing from a lot of people that publish a huge amount of informational content and do very well with display ads.

I can always go back and add more product reviews.

WHAT’S COMING UP?

Niche Website Builders is adding about 50k words of content per month for 4 months. That will be almost 50 posts per month.

I’m aiming for an average target word count of 1160.

TOMBRAIDER WAS GOOD BUT NOT PERFECT

Niche Website Builders will do their Tombraider strategy for you. It’s been highly effective for a lot of people, though I’ve never used it.

There were some duplicates in the list or the topic is already on my site, about 20%. So I used about 60-70% of the Tombraider keywords and the rest were from my list.

I knew duplicates were a risk so I asked about it early on and how Niche Website Builders check. Meg from Niche Website Builders Support said this:

We double check for cannibalization using two methods. We check the top pages on Ahrefs and SEMrush, and then we will search your site + the keyword on Google. As it is a manual process, when the keywords are different but have same intent we might have some slip through, but we aim to provide as many keywords as possible without cannibalisation.

So I asked about the duplicates that I noticed:

Some of the ones in your list were dups not just from my site, but dups in the list. How do you keep that from happening if someone is not going through each keyword like me?

Meg replied back with:

Regarding duplicates in our research, I really do appreciate you bringing this to my attention as I had thoroughly checked this myself against your top pages on SEMRush and Ahrefs, and only left in some so you could see what the competitor was doing. I should have indicated which these were on the sheet.

Duplicates are checked thoroughly before sending and also checked as we schedule in the keywords, so they go through a second check by us anyway in case these are not picked up on. While we do try our absolute best not to include them in the first place, it is a manual process and we are only human after all, so in the event a duplicate does make it through and is written, the article will always be replaced quickly to ensure no one loses out on content. We are also constantly reviewing out processes to find a more effective method to weed out duplicates or similar intent keywords.

I hope that all makes sense and let me know if you have any further questions.

So I was happy with that reply. It’s very easy to miss duplicates when the keywords and titles might not match exactly.

You should go through all the keywords anyway, just in case there is a topic that you don’t want to publish on your site.

As I type this, we are nearing the end of month 1. So I should have about 50 articles drafted in WordPress in the next few days.

In the next update, I’ll let you know how the content looks, what I do after I get content back from an agency, and what metrics I will monitor.