The First Months Of A Neglected Niche Site

Back in July, I created a niche site based on an offhand comment made in another blog about interesting keywords used to find them.

There’d been one keyword in particular that sent a lot of traffic their way, for which they had no useful pages. So I created a niche site that linked out to some ClickBank products via reviews, put some Adsense ads on it, and registered a keyword based domain name. I submitted it to a few directories, and then promptly forgot about it.

Google is very good these days at distinguishing between legitimate sites and sites that exist solely to generate revenue with as little content as possible. So the site languished in search engine limbo.

Sure, I could have promoted the site better and kept at it, adding content and making it a site search engines would love to send traffic to, but the point was to create a site with minimal effort to see what sort of return on investment I could get.

In September, traffic started to arrive in dribs and drabs. Total Adsense earnings for the month was $0.12.

In October traffic continued to grow, and earnings were $1.63.

Thus far, in the first week of November, traffic is still growing, and earnings are $2.16.

While the amounts are small, the percentage increase each month is quite promising. As yet I’ve had no ClickBank sales from the site, so the content is doing better at being Adsense bait than at selling the products.

Now that results have started to come in for the site, I may very well revisit the site to update the content, and add in a bit more value for visitors.

Overall, I’d say the experiment was a mild success. I haven’t made back enough to compensate yet for the time I spent putting the site together (probably a few hours), but that may happen yet in November.

So the next time you have an idea for a niche site, but just don’t have time to do it justice, do it anyway. Slap something together and see if it looks like you’ll attract enough traffic to make it worth investing more time into the site.

Just be sure to give it plenty of time to mature before deciding that it isn’t working.

8 Replies to “The First Months Of A Neglected Niche Site”

  1. Jay,

    I have a niche site is growing the way like yours and it make me thought the same as what you said. I’ve started to add more content regularly like 4 post a month to see how far it can go but i use organic traffic only. Your blog is great, i’ve stumble this post, you just got a new subscriber, me 🙂

    Eric

  2. Hi Eric, that’s great to hear about your niche site! For these sorts of sites, I think organic traffic only is the way to go. It’s a slow start, but over time traffic grows, and it’s all targeted.

    Plus, since it only take a few hours to create a site once you’ve gone through it once or twice, you can create them when you run across suitable keyword ideas and have a stable of sites working for you.

  3. Awesome. Life is about percentages at that rate… With maybe alittle more content WHO KNOWS. On the forum if you could let me know the site I’d love to check it out and no i won’t make one 🙂

  4. [quote comment=”9571″]Hi Rob! I’ll send you a PM on the forum with the URL so you can take a look.[/quote]

    can you pm me as well? which forum is that? i used to hang around in a few forum like dp, sitepoint, etc.

  5. [quote post=”409″]which forum is that? i used to hang around in a few forum like dp, sitepoint, etc.[/quote]

    The forum is the Bloggeries blog forum, which Rob runs. It’s a great place…if you get over there, send me a PM so I know it’s you, and I’ll send you the URL for the site.

  6. Niche blogging can be hard work but the potential rewards in terms of high traffic volumes and subsequently revenues make it all worth the effort!

    Most people get frustrated when they don’t see the results they anticipated. These people end up giving up after only a few months!

    Stick with it and blog frequently, learn, tweak, submit, comment…it will all be worth it in the end!

    cyberst0rm’s tech blog
    http://cyberst0rm.blogspot.com

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