From 0-50,000 Session/Month In Just Over A Year

This site was started in March 2020.

It’s in a niche that I discovered while doing some keyword research for a different site.

When I looked into it further I found that there weren’t really any dedicated content sites around it.

There were huge content sites that had sections dedicated to this particular topic, there were also a few forum sites and other microsites which had no solid content strategy.

So I saw an opportunity to build a focused site specifically around this relatively small niche.

I started doing some keyword research and got writing, I also hired one writer that I found on Facebook.

My content strategy was very simple.

I’ve got about 10 different topical clusters of closely related articles, I simply find as many keywords as I can within each cluster, check what the search intent behind each keyword is to do this i just search it on Google and see what type of pages are ranking top, if it’s something I can replicate then I get it written up.

My keyword research strategy was also very simple for this site.

I mostly used the alphabet soup technique.

I used keywords everywhere to check the volume, if the suggestions had at least 10 searches/month I’d get an article written for it.

At the moment I’ve got just over 200 articles on the site.

On average I’m paying $25/1,000 words, a lot of these articles are quite a bit shorter than 1,000 words because they’re answering very simple questions that don’t need long answers.

I’ve got about 190,000 words on the site at the moment, the bulk of those were written by the writer I found on Facebook. A few of the earlier ones were written by me, recently I’ve also used Jasper.ai to write some of the simpler articles.

Articles, Traffic & Revenue

My total spend on content to get to this point has been $3,223.68.

So at the end of June I hadn’t quite turned a profit, however in July, it finally moved into the green, it’s now made more than I’ve spent on it.

Why The Sudden Growth Happened

You can see that from February 2021 onwards traffic on this site started to grow very rapidly.

This was because of a freak stroke of luck.

A news story broke in February in my niche, one of the sites that first published the story linked to one of my few top ranking articles to give a bit of background information relating to the general topic of the story.

This was then syndicated by around 200 other news sites.

At this point my site was getting about 300 sessions a day.

I remember checking analytics and seeing a big spike of around 1,500 users in a day. 

I just thought it was some sort of bot spam, then seeing a spike in ezoic earnings thinking hope they dont ban me, then having a look on ahrefs seeing a big spike in referring domains and thinking oh no it was a spam link attack.

Then a few days later having a closer look and realizing they were all actually pretty decent links.

A few days passed and traffic dropped down to normal, but then after two weeks it started growing and growing.

Over the next 4 months it skyrocketed from 11,000 monthly users to 48,000.

As I said in my previous post, despite the huge impact links have had on this site I’m not going to go out and change my strategy any time soon.

I don’t have the budget to replicate that type of link building at that scale.

I was lucky because I focused on content and the small amount of content that I did have ranking just happened to be in the right place (number one) at the right time (when a journalist was looking for it).

Without those links I am confident the site would have continued to grow…just not at the same pace.

Currently it’s getting around 1,800 users visiting it everyday.

Based on my experience of growing sites in the past I think that without links it’d could’ve got to 1,000 users per day based on the volume of content that was added to it.

What I’ve Learnt From This Site:

A few key things that I’ve learnt from this site:

• There are still underserved low competition niches out there that you can make good money in.
• You don’t have to be writing 1,000 words+ for every tiny article. I’ve got loads of articles on this site that are less than 500 words that rank in the top 3.
• The right links can make a big difference…however they are either very time-consuming or very expensive to get, so I won’t be changing my strategy of not focusing on links any time soon.

My goals for this site going forward are:

1. To keep adding content, I want to get it up to at least 300 articles, this niche is very small though so finding enough keywords is hard, and at 200 articles I’m starting to run out of obvious things to write about but I think 300 is achievable.

2. I want to increase affiliate earnings, I’d love to get affiliate earnings up to $500/month.

3. I’d like to sell an ebook on this site relating to the niche which would basically be all the key articles summarised in an concise and easily digestible way.

4. In terms of long term goals for this site I don’t think I want to sell it anytime soon because it’s a low competition, evergreen niche. The rankings really shouldn’t be that hard to maintain even if I stop uploading content for long periods of time. And I’m not reliant on one or two big traffic pages for most of my traffic, it’s nicely spread out across a lot of pages so it should be a safe asset to keep hold of.

So I think I’l be keeping hold of it for the foreseeable future, and I’ll try and see if it’s possible to get traffic up to 100,000 users/month.