Regular readers will remember that I’ve done a couple of neglected niche sites.
The basic idea is that you write a niche site and then forget about it for months at a time. You might submit it to some directories, but other than that you do absolutely nothing with it. Eventually it starts to get some traffic, and earn some money.
The first neglected niche site I did earns about $30 a month from Adsense, and about $50 a month from affiliate sales. For about 8 hours of work over the last six months, that’s not bad at all. I wanted to see how a quality niche site built with the SBI tools compared to a neglected niche site.
So I did the keyword research to pick a niche I could write quality content for, and put together a neglected niche site using the same formula I used for the first. I used WordPress to create the niche site, and wrote just enough content to justify placing affiliate links. Total time spent, about 4 hours.
Once that was done, I bought an SBI site and started working through the SBI Action Guide. Over about four months I created content, and last month put some Adsense ads on the most visited 10% of the pages. I actually targeted a more competitive keyword for this site than for the WordPress based one, to give the SBI tools a test.
Both sites have been live for about the same amount of time. What have the results been so far?
The neglected niche site is still waiting to get out of Google purgatory and get ranked for its keywords. Total number of visits to the site in the last four months is 15, mostly from Google. This actually matches pretty well with my first neglected niche site, which started ranking well only after three or four months.
The SBI site in that same time frame has had about 2,000 visitors, split among the Google, MSN, and Yahoo search engines. Traffic has been trending upward the entire time, so the future looks good for this site.
Income from the neglected niche site has been $0. I just put ads on the SBI site March 10th. The first month’s income there was $16. I don’t have affiliate links on the SBI site yet, but plan to add those soon.
The SBI site hasn’t caught up yet to the first neglected niche site I created, but I have no doubt that it will before long. The traffic on the first neglected site is no longer trending upward, but has plateaued. The SBI site is still stretching its legs, so I’m not sure how high the traffic there will go.
I’ll be back in a few months with an update, but at the moment I’m convinced that writing quality content and using advanced tools (such as the SBI tools) is a far better investment of time than churning out mass quantities of made-for-Adsense sites.
I couldn’t agree more, Jay.
I have dipped my toe in the MFA and neglected niche site pond but they never build up web “capital”. It is difficult to take any really interest in them and Google gets wise and sends measly traffic.
The best neglected niche techinique I do use is a tips website. Each set of tips is researched and aimed at a neglected niche and ranks well for specific search terms. The bounce rate is high and CTR not great ( I am using the Blue Sense theme for AS) but I don’t do much work on it and the domain gets aged. It generates a bit of income.
If every website, or even page, is your product then building something people actually want is key. We don’t have a physical product and what is have is mostly given away for free.
Every bit of time I spend not producing good content is like a business overhead. Site setup, coding and design is all necessary, but it isn’t the product. I know creating lots of sites can work for some people but it’s not for me.
Aaron Wall over at SEObook.com has some interesting thoughts on modern internet business models and how they stack up.
Best wishes
Rob
[quote post=”530″]Every bit of time I spend not producing good content is like a business overhead. Site setup, coding and design is all necessary, but it isn’t the product. I know creating lots of sites can work for some people but it’s not for me.[/quote]
Not for me, either. I’ve seen comments on the DP forums from people who work site creation as a mass production business, but I get a lot of satisfaction out of producing content that’s truly useful to people, rather than just search engine bait (ideally, the content will be both, but it has to be useful most of all).
Thanks for the interesting thoughts. I have several SBI sites and I know that everything is handled for me. The time that we are ‘forced’ to wait until we advertise means that the site is maturing naturally.
Also we can’t get away with keyword stuffing because the analyser doesn’t like it!
So all in all it is necessary to follow the guidelines set by SBI and this is what leads to success.
Thanks again