Overview
My first journey was a flop, but I learned a great deal from that:
My second journey has been a success for a nice side income:
My 3rd journey is slowly picking up, but I'm not sure what will become of it.
My 4th journey was a flop, I got too full of myself and got carried away.
And now I'm starting this 5th journey thread. This is very likely going to be a success story.
What's interesting to me about this is that the niche is pretty new. That means no long-standing competitors. It (the niche) is something I'm fairly motivated to write content for. It's not a weird niche, fairly simple one, actually useful to learn about as I research and write.
This too is a summer niche site btw.
Content Strategy
It's the usual: I'll start off writing informational content first as I learn about the niche myself, from there I'll start to analyze the products themselves and write reviews, and then, with all that figured out, I'll make the money posts.
Competition
Since it's a fairly new-ish* niche, too strong of a competition hasn't yet set foot in this niche. So you can imagine my surprise when I found it.
The "Best Cheap Niche Product" keyword for example has only 1 super sketchy All-In-Title article on the first page, the rest are related topics from random sites like quora, reddit, Amazon, etc - ALL these sites are insanely easy to outrank without backlinks. In fact, if I started off by making the pillar post as the very first article on my site, I'd probably win the 1st spot and even get the snippet. However, I can't start with that because my knowledge of the products or the niche itself isn't quite where I want it to be. I don't want my content to look like a high-school student's attempt of describing a product by its picture only. That's completely rubbish. I need facts, I need actually researched useful and interesting nuggets of facts and statistics to off of.
Lucky for me my main competitor right now looks to be an Income School student! https://www.beermoneyforum.com/ yes. They've got fabulous content (they seem like an actual expert in the field) from which I'm able to learn so much. Their on-page SEO is kind of meh, off-page SEO probably non-existent, but the content in itself is almost superb. That means competition is fair game because I don't ever build backlinks either. I try not to "steal" his content though. Instead I try to pinpoint what the readers are looking for more precisely, along with interlinks and references to "studies" and whatnot. I'm not an expert myself, so I have to dig real deep into research papers to get a full understanding of things. It's like learning about some things about physics from scratch from those papers at times...
The SEO side of things is exciting for once. Instead of a site with absurd amount of sketchy backlinks and smelly content making me puke, I now compete with an actual whitehat passionate site. It's refreshing, really. They're really focusing on being useful, just as Income School would have it, but they aren't really targeting any of the money keywords directly, they've taken the "come at it at an angle" quite literally when it comes to money posts... ^^ On informational content, they target search queries directly and it's working wonders for their site. Almost every topic I tried to search for in my own limited research had their site sitting in a snippet position.
Keyword Research
I've tried out a handful of keyword sellers by now. This time I figured I'll pay a little more than I'm used to in order to get an actual decent niche I'd be comfortable writing about, not some uber random freaking cringe set of trash keywords I've been getting lately...
Here's an example of a good, but bad keyword (in my opinion): "Harmonicas". I don't know about you, but to me harmonicas are cringe-worthy. They don't really sound nice. They don't look good either. But that's just me...
I paid $63 for a keyword package that lead me to an Amazon niche I didn't quite see the potential in. The products were comparable to a classic piano - expensive, huge, heavy and sensitive. How did the seller imagine people buying something like that from Amazon, how would that be transported, etc. People don't buy such a product online, I don't think. But then I looked around within the category, because I didn't want my money ($63) go to waste again, and then I found it!
It's almost 100% guaranteed that this site is going to make me a decent amount of money once I'm done with it.
TECHNICAL
The domain is bought via Namecheap for 2 years ($22.12). It's hosted by HostKoala using the now closed 4th journey's premium shared hosting plan for 2 years ($50). I've implemented https for this site and it's using a relatively optimized simple free theme (Roseta).
I figured I had set the site up fully, having checked everything in the checklist. But only today I found out that I had forgotten to create a Robot.txt file for the site. Google Search Console was giving an "oopsie" error when I tried to index one of the posts, and that lead me to the root of the problem eventually (had no robot.txt file and google had a hard time understanding the site because of that - kind of tells me that the free theme probably isn't SEO optimized well enough).
I've also created the logo, favicon, all these neat design elements as well by now and can focus on bumping out content.
EXTRA
This time I don't have this doubt in the back of my head that it might not work and that I'm wasting my time. This time I'm almost 100% certain I will get money out of my efforts. Perhaps even more than my 1st affiliate site which is made almost $2000 in one month in summer.
I've already published 2 pages (About and Privacy Policy) and 2 posts (informational content).
Snail pace.
The only and only problem I have is the lack of pictures available on the internet (because the niche is fairly new, but it's rising in popularity fast). So what I was thinking was actually buying 2 of the products to make the pictures myself... But there are a few complications with that (bad timing).
Expenses:
My first journey was a flop, but I learned a great deal from that:
- Sauna porn tube site (August, 2017 - 2018).
My second journey has been a success for a nice side income:
- Hobby site (3rd of March, 2018 - 2020+),
- 1st Affiliate site (5th of April, 2018 - 2020+).
My 3rd journey is slowly picking up, but I'm not sure what will become of it.
- 2nd Affiliate Site (7th of June, 2019 - 2020+).
My 4th journey was a flop, I got too full of myself and got carried away.
- 3rd Affiliate Site (October, 2019 - 2019)
And now I'm starting this 5th journey thread. This is very likely going to be a success story.
- 4th Affiliate Site (09.12.2019 - 2020+)
What's interesting to me about this is that the niche is pretty new. That means no long-standing competitors. It (the niche) is something I'm fairly motivated to write content for. It's not a weird niche, fairly simple one, actually useful to learn about as I research and write.
This too is a summer niche site btw.
Content Strategy
It's the usual: I'll start off writing informational content first as I learn about the niche myself, from there I'll start to analyze the products themselves and write reviews, and then, with all that figured out, I'll make the money posts.
- informational (5 to 10),
- review (around 10),
- and pillar type posts (around 3).
Competition
Since it's a fairly new-ish* niche, too strong of a competition hasn't yet set foot in this niche. So you can imagine my surprise when I found it.
The "Best Cheap Niche Product" keyword for example has only 1 super sketchy All-In-Title article on the first page, the rest are related topics from random sites like quora, reddit, Amazon, etc - ALL these sites are insanely easy to outrank without backlinks. In fact, if I started off by making the pillar post as the very first article on my site, I'd probably win the 1st spot and even get the snippet. However, I can't start with that because my knowledge of the products or the niche itself isn't quite where I want it to be. I don't want my content to look like a high-school student's attempt of describing a product by its picture only. That's completely rubbish. I need facts, I need actually researched useful and interesting nuggets of facts and statistics to off of.
Lucky for me my main competitor right now looks to be an Income School student! https://www.beermoneyforum.com/ yes. They've got fabulous content (they seem like an actual expert in the field) from which I'm able to learn so much. Their on-page SEO is kind of meh, off-page SEO probably non-existent, but the content in itself is almost superb. That means competition is fair game because I don't ever build backlinks either. I try not to "steal" his content though. Instead I try to pinpoint what the readers are looking for more precisely, along with interlinks and references to "studies" and whatnot. I'm not an expert myself, so I have to dig real deep into research papers to get a full understanding of things. It's like learning about some things about physics from scratch from those papers at times...
The SEO side of things is exciting for once. Instead of a site with absurd amount of sketchy backlinks and smelly content making me puke, I now compete with an actual whitehat passionate site. It's refreshing, really. They're really focusing on being useful, just as Income School would have it, but they aren't really targeting any of the money keywords directly, they've taken the "come at it at an angle" quite literally when it comes to money posts... ^^ On informational content, they target search queries directly and it's working wonders for their site. Almost every topic I tried to search for in my own limited research had their site sitting in a snippet position.
Keyword Research
I've tried out a handful of keyword sellers by now. This time I figured I'll pay a little more than I'm used to in order to get an actual decent niche I'd be comfortable writing about, not some uber random freaking cringe set of trash keywords I've been getting lately...
Here's an example of a good, but bad keyword (in my opinion): "Harmonicas". I don't know about you, but to me harmonicas are cringe-worthy. They don't really sound nice. They don't look good either. But that's just me...
I paid $63 for a keyword package that lead me to an Amazon niche I didn't quite see the potential in. The products were comparable to a classic piano - expensive, huge, heavy and sensitive. How did the seller imagine people buying something like that from Amazon, how would that be transported, etc. People don't buy such a product online, I don't think. But then I looked around within the category, because I didn't want my money ($63) go to waste again, and then I found it!
It's almost 100% guaranteed that this site is going to make me a decent amount of money once I'm done with it.
TECHNICAL
The domain is bought via Namecheap for 2 years ($22.12). It's hosted by HostKoala using the now closed 4th journey's premium shared hosting plan for 2 years ($50). I've implemented https for this site and it's using a relatively optimized simple free theme (Roseta).
I figured I had set the site up fully, having checked everything in the checklist. But only today I found out that I had forgotten to create a Robot.txt file for the site. Google Search Console was giving an "oopsie" error when I tried to index one of the posts, and that lead me to the root of the problem eventually (had no robot.txt file and google had a hard time understanding the site because of that - kind of tells me that the free theme probably isn't SEO optimized well enough).
I've also created the logo, favicon, all these neat design elements as well by now and can focus on bumping out content.
EXTRA
This time I don't have this doubt in the back of my head that it might not work and that I'm wasting my time. This time I'm almost 100% certain I will get money out of my efforts. Perhaps even more than my 1st affiliate site which is made almost $2000 in one month in summer.
I've already published 2 pages (About and Privacy Policy) and 2 posts (informational content).
Snail pace.
The only and only problem I have is the lack of pictures available on the internet (because the niche is fairly new, but it's rising in popularity fast). So what I was thinking was actually buying 2 of the products to make the pictures myself... But there are a few complications with that (bad timing).
Expenses:
- domain: $22.12 (December, 2019 - 2021)
- hosting: $50 (October, 2019 - 2021)
- keyword package: $63
- total: $135.12
- not monetized yet