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NSJ Update #6 – First Couple of Sales!

It has been well over a month since the last Niche Site Journey update and I have started to see some great progress, even got my first couple sales! This site is taking a little bit longer to start taking off in terms of traffic and earnings compared to my other niche sites but it is slowly starting to come around.

My last niche sites started earning a good amount after about 1 month of PBN links but this site is taking a little longer. This has to do with the new Google Sandbox that currently keeps your site from ranking for a certain period of time. There is no exact length that it keeps you in this sandbox but all we can do is keep doing what we know works, which is PBN links and new content.

At first it was believed that the sandbox only lasted 30 days for new sites but as more and more people are experiencing it varies on the time that that sandbox lasts. I am not too worried about this because my traffic continues to grow and so do my earnings. So even though my main keywords are ranking on the first page I have a lot of longtail keywords that are bringing me in traffic.

It will be interesting to see when the site will get out of the sandbox or if it even will, I will be able to learn a lot about how this works from this site. Make sure you all follow along so that you can see all of the findings that uncover with this site. Now let’s get into the numbers of the site!

PBN Links

I have continued to add new PBN links to the site about every 5 or so days. I like to wait after I add a new PBN link to see the boost I get from it before I add a new one, this way I am able to see a couple of things. The first thing we can learn from this is the strength of the competition for the keywords, for example after a new PBN link as added and it only moves up 2 spots then it is usually some tough competition. (Note: If you are in the top 10 and it moves up 2 spots then it wouldn’t be considered tough competition, I am talking about new sites that are still ranked in 30 – 100 range)

By waiting until the PBN link is noticed we can also see the power of our PBN and we will be able to get an approximation of how many more PBN links we will need to rank in the top 10. The sandbox kind of threw a wrench into this but we still can use it to give us an estimate.

Another thing that I want to discuss is the types of PBN sites that I have pointed to this site. The majority of the links are from PBN sites that are non-niche related or sites that were not related to the niche but have related content on the site. This has worked good for me in the past but I have been trying some new type of PBN links.

The last 3 or so PBN links that I have added have been sites that were related to the niche before. What this means is that before I had these PBN sites they were used as a niche related site for someone else. For example, if my money site is in the sports niche then the PBN site used to be about baseball.

Now you might be thinking, duh??? Why wouldn’t you be doing this the whole time????

Well the answer is most of my PBN sites are pretty strong in terms of page authority and domain authority and that is all I used to care about. I never cared about what niche the site used to be in before it expired. I think that relevancy is starting play a much larger role than it used to and I am really trying to emphasize finding niche relevant sites for my PBN.

It is much harder to find high PR sites that are related to your niche but I have been able to find a TON of related expired domains with decent power. I am talking about sites with PA of 30 and DA of around 15 – 20. I think it is better to have a PBN link from a niche related PBN that has a PA of 3o and DA of 17 then a link from a PBN that is unrelated but has a PA 35 and DA of 25.

That is what I am going to be focusing in from now and I think that it will give a nice boost to my sites, it also makes your PBN look a lot more natural and your PBN links look more authentic since it is coming from a site that is related to your money site.

Enough of that, we will now get into more details about this site. If you have any questions that you need answered about this topic leave a comment below!

PBN Links Added 

PBN links

I have now added a total of 16 PBN links to my money site and I sent six new links during the month of August. Six new links a month is a pretty good rate and I will probably add the same amount in September. Slow and steady(Natural) wins the race. Remember that all of these links have been pointed at the same 3 pages on the site and that I have another 3 pages that I am going to rank but I just haven’t pointed any links to yet.

I am now going to start mixing the new pages in with the old pages when I link out from my PBN sites. This way I can slowly start to rank for my other keywords on the new pages while still ranking for the old keywords that I have been targeting for the last couple months.

It will be interesting to see how these new pages handle the PBN links. The content has been sitting on the site for the last month but they don’t have any links pointing at them so I am excited to see how quickly they rank compared to the first batch of keywords ranked n the first pages that I targeted. I think they will rank a lot faster as the content has been sitting on the site for over a month now but we will see!

Rankings

With a total of 16 PBN links pointing to the site let’s see how the rankings are doing.

rankings

 

A lot of the rankings are still stuck around the 30 -40 range with a couple of the keywords now sitting in the 20’s. It is ranking a bit slower than I had expected but they are still going up. Ranking a new site is a much slower process now a days and you have to a lot more patient with your sites. I still feel like this site is in the dreaded sandbox but it doesn’t bother me too much. The way I see it, while I wait for my main keywords to get out of the sandbox and rank, I have a ton of longtail keywords bringing me in traffic and making sales.

I will keep adding PBN links so that whenever the sandbox let’s out my site it will hopefully shoot right to the first page of Google. If most of my keywords that I am targeting to shoot to the first page of Google then you can see from the amount of monthly searches how much traffic this site will have. The plan is to be patient and let Google do it’s thing.

Traffic

With the rankings that you see above you probably wouldn’t think that I would get very many visitors on a daily basis. But thanks to long tail keywords I am able to get a decent amount of visitors each day. A lot of my PBN links focus on long tail keywords with the main keyword mixed into the anchor text so I am slowly starting to see more and more long tail traffic come to the site.

The screenshot from Google Analytics below shows the traffic from the last update until now.

traffic

You can see that the site is starting to slowly gain more and more traffic each day. The most visits the site has had from one day is 46 and the average daily visits is around 30 since the beginning of September. Before September the average amount of daily visits would be around 15-20. So the site is definitely growing as more and more long tail keywords are starting to rank.

I also keep track of my site in Google Webmaster Tools as I like to see how many search queries my site is getting in the SERPS. The more search queries that show my site the better and I see it as a good way to show the growth of my site. It also keeps track of clicks from Google and a lot of other cools things.

GWT

 

You can see that in the last month I have gotten 343 clicks from Google and 580 queries. Just to have something to compare that to, in the last update which was over a month ago there was 23 clicks and only 142 queries. So in the last month the site has seen some awesome growth in terms of exposure in the search engine.

Earnings

Like the title of this post says I have made a couple of sales! The first couple of sales for a new site is always exciting and it proves to you that the site can make money. All you have to do now is scale it! Let’s take a look at the earnings for the last three months of this site. It actually isn’t a whole three months, it is the end of July, all of August and the first week of September but you will see three months on the screenshot below.

earnings

I have earned a total of $55 from this site so far and I am so happy about that! You might also notice a couple of other things about the stats above, one being that I have already sold the same amount of items in the first week of September as I did in all of August. The other thing that you might notice is the average sale amount which is relatively high. In August the average sale amount was over $140 and this month is around $64 so you can see that I am selling some high priced items.

The conversion rate is a little low but there isn’t a ton of data to base that off of right now. The conversion rate is going to be a little bit on the lower side though because I am selling such high priced items. The low conversion rates get made up for in the commission per item.

Another cool thing on the screenshot above is the “EPC” column. EPC stands for earning per click, so for every click to the affiliate site it equal to a certain amount. You can see that for September I have my highest EPC yet of $0.17. Basically that means that for every visitor that I send to the affiliate site I earn $0.17 which is a pretty cool stat to me. Obviously it isn’t going to stay at $0.17 and will vary month to month but it is something interesting to keep a note of.

In August the site earned $36 and already in the first week of September it has earned a total of $16 so you can see the earnings for the site are in a nice uptrend and I am hoping that it continues.

Overall I am happy with the earnings of the site so far and I see a lot more sales coming in September and future months. It will exciting to find the true earning potential for this site and see how much this site can earn. I am very optimistic for this site and see good things coming from it in the future.

Spending

Domain – $95

Hosting – $45

Six 1500 word articles – $200

Pillow Links  – $175

Facebook Likes – $5

Total Spent – $520

Total Earned – $55

Total Gain/Loss – $465

Conclusion

I am now starting chip away at the total amount of money that I spent on the site so far which $520. With total earnings sitting at $55 I can now subtract that from the amount that I spent and that comes out to a total of $465. So I now I have $465 to go until I can break even on this site and start generating some revenue from this site. It is on the right track right now and I hope to break even in the next 3 months. That might be a lofty goal but it is never bad to have those. Like the quote says, “Shoot for the stars and even if you end up on the moon it is still cool” (Or something like that :))

I am excited as to the path that this site is on and I hope that you all enjoy reading these progress reports. I know that I love reading everyone elses income reports and niche site updates so I hope that I can bring the same joy to you as those did to me. If you have any questions whatsoever please leave a comment below and I will be around answering any questions you might have. Thanks for reading everyone!

Continue on the Niche Site Journey here with update #7

Comments

6 Comments

Ram

Good job Josh, seems like you have had a busy month! It is always motivating to see someone else’s journey, give’s me motivation to carry on!

I’ve just launched a new website this week, making my website launches to 2 in 3 weeks. Hoping to roll out another 2 of my niche sites in the next 2-3 weeks. Taking my website launches to 4 niche sites in roughly 1-2 months, keeping my team of content writers busy haha.

Just noticed with 2 of my new sites they are hovering around page 3 in 1 week of launch hoping to post more articles on these sites this month, around 10,000 words this month to increase rankings and see how it goes.

Are you working on a Christmas niche this 2014? I’m trialling one out for the first time lets see how it goes! Is there anyway I can connect with you on Facebook or LinkedIn, always good to chat with people doing the same thing as me.

Thanks,
Ram

Josh
Josh

Hi Ram,

I am not specifically working on a Christmas niche but all of my niche sites sell products that would be great Christmas gifts so I would expect my earnings to shoot up during December! Good luck on your own sites and it sounds like you are really putting in the work. You can add me on Skype, my username is Jshosho.

-Josh

John

looking forward to your september income report

brady

Hey Josh – awesome site! my wife is pretty heavy into FBA (does about 20k per month in sales) but I really like the idea of expanding into Niche websites, like you.

my question as I read through your niche journey – you have 16 PBN sites linking to your money sight so far, but there isn’t any hosting cost listed for those? are you not counting those hosting costs into your money site costs? if so, why not?

Josh
Josh

Hi Brady,

Thanks for reading and awesome to hear about your wife’s success!

As for the PBN hosting, there are some costs but many of the PBN’s and the hosting are used for all of my niche sites so the costs are split between each site. I probably should have included them into the expenses but it is relatively small compared to the other expenses.

Tracy

Hello Josh,
Congrats on your success!
I just would like to know what is PBN? I am very new on online e-commerce, I hope you can elaborate more on these.
I saw you said you are paying $280 for two months article (3 per week),
My question is:
If i would like to establish a new website now, is it possible for me to copy and paste those articles and put it into my website to attract the traffic?

Thanks.


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