Niche Case Study - Slow Months - Part 3

The Niche Case Study update is finally here! I originally planned to do an update for this once a month, but progress is very slow and so I didn't want to just post something for the sake of it. So this update is going to cover the last few months...

To be completely honest, my motivation and drive for this case study has completely evaporated. In my last update, my plan was to build links in order to try and boost the site's ranking in SERPs. The problem is that there is no immediate update. It can take months to see any real change and to be honest I felt like I was spamming my site rather than looking for useful ways to build links.

In total, I attempted to create around 50 different links to the site. Over 50% of these were blog comments on other sites, the rest were either links on social media, forums or other spammy methods. I didn't write any guest posts because my motivation dropped big time and so I never got any good links that way.

The good news is I've gained some new motivation to actually get this case study back on track. Whilst the timing is all off, I still want to try and grow it. The site itself is now quite a few months old, which should help me out with getting out of the Google Sandbox.

SERPs Update

I started to track some new keywords for my site back in October. These keywords were generated from my Google Webmaster report which highlighted keywords my site was showing up for. So I wanted to see if I could improve those rankings- to give me at least some small goals to aim towards.

Since then, I have actually seen some gains in these rankings. I'm almost on page 1 for a few of them and a lot of the other keywords I'm around page 2 or 3. I think my goal over the next few months is to push these keywords even harder and see if I can increase those rankings. 

There's been little to no movement on the original keywords I targeted. The only change was that my brand name managed to get to the #1 position on google. This is to be expected and doesn't bring in any traffic but it's a small positive.

Time Update

I've hardly spent any time at all on this project over the last few months and so I don't have anything to really show. I spent about 3-4 hours building links and then after that the project sort of took a hit.

I want to try and put at least 2 hours a week into this project. That is my goal; it's super small to hit but because I haven't spent any time on the project in the last few months, I want to try and make it a more consistent project to work on.

Google Analytics

As you can see, not much traffic change. As soon as I stopped working on the site, the site got pretty much 0 traffic. I am seeing a few hits here and there, which I never got before, so it looks like I'm gaining traffic from some places. Obviously this is not enough to make the Niche Site a success, so we'll see if increasing my new SERP keywords can help out with this department.

Cost Breakdown

The site is still only costing me $5 a month. So the total I've spent on this site is now at $34.84. I'm not too worried about this- all it takes is to make a couple of amazon affiliate sales and I'll be back on even.

Plans for next update

My plan is to write some fresh new content for the site. Since it hasn't had any new articles posted to it since September, I figured adding some new articles and content can give it a boost. These articles get automatically posted to social media too, helping boost the traffic too.

I'm also going to do something different. I want to try and write 3 guest posts for 3 different sites. I'll reach out randomly to them (In that I mean, I won't be using my friend's blogs or anything like that). I think these types of links are much better than the spammy ones I've been building.

I'll probably do a few other things such as change the blog layout, look into some more useful plugins and such. I'll hope to send the next update out within the next two months (sometime around February) and I hope I can report back some growth!

Apologies to anyone waiting on this update. I really want to show this experiment can work but obviously I can't do that if I don't put in any effort or work!

Niche Sites

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