I thought I’d do a quick roundup update for the last couple of weeks.
It’s not been my most productive month since after a week’s holiday in Spain I decided I’d had enough of the Scottish winter and I’m moving back for a while. Going to spend at least a month in Las Palmas so if anyone is in one of Europe’s nomad hotspots drop me a message.
Between the holiday and packing up my pandemic hideout, I’ve not been at the desk as much as I’d like.
I also snapped my laptop while traveling and swapped it over to a Macbook. I’ve been on Windows since I was a kid so there’s been some adapting to do there.
But let’s get to the updates.
New Site
The other day I realized that my active website portfolio had swollen into the double digits I knew I had too much on my plate and I had to cut some of them down.
A few hours later I impulse bought another site.
I know this sounds like I have no impulse control and I make bad decisions. Both of these are certainly true but I had a couple of reasons for picking up the new site.
• I have an existing KDP asset on Amazon. Being able to push some traffic to it will help pick up some organic sales there too.
• My mum took a personal interest in the niche. I don’t have many projects like this and while I have no real interest in it, she can produce a lot of content that she actually enjoys. Plus she’s well connected to very experienced people in the niche. Had a brief meeting with them and we’ve already started putting together some unique content for it.
• I wanted another case study on KGR keywords and a low-competition Amazon project.
This won’t be a project I’ll be doing too much with. I’ll probably do a few dozen of the Amazon pages for it but I’ve info content for the niche handled by an agency and my mum will be handling a lot of the info content.
The site and initial content cost about $7,000. I’m earmarking another $3,000 for the content and that’ll be a passive project I’ll probably be left alone for a long time.
Micro-Niche Website
This was a project I started the week before I left for Spain.
I wanted to see if building a small micro-niche site could still work in 2022. I actually really enjoyed this project because I knew I was just spending a few days working on it and wouldn’t get burned out with another long-haul project.
I had good fun producing the content and the results have been… somewhat interesting so far.
The Good
• Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo all ranked the site on the first page quickly including some of the biggest keywords.
• The onsite metrics are fantastic. The majority of users are clicking through multiple pages and we’ve got a 30% opt-in rate from cold traffic. The traffic sample is small but consistent and the content is definitely serving the niche.
The Bad
• Google is slow to index this one. It’s getting there and it’s no surprise that Google takes longer than the smaller search engines but it’s certainly not an overnight result. It’ll be a while before we get the results on that one.
• I’m slow too. The VO artist turned in their work pretty quickly but I wanted to do a decent job of the video production and I’ve been focused on some other projects lately I haven’t put the channel together yet. Aiming to get that done soon.
Overall: I like the project and I think if we get even some mid-range traction on Google it’ll generate some cash flow. I’d be pretty keen to see it work well in Google since it was fun to build such a focused project.
Aged Domain
I’ll keep the update brief for this one.
The site is doing well – but I need to focus on it more. The new content format is exactly what Google seems to want and the onsite metrics are doing well which is good news for the EPMV for display ads will do well and the traffic is steadily rising.
Posts are indexing within hours and ranking page 1 within days. On top of that, I think I’ve found some real underserved affiliate opportunities that would let me scale this site to quite a large project.
Generally? This is where I would be dropping my other projects and really putting my foot down. I think I could find a hobbyist for this niche to produce some good content at a decent price but something has been holding me back.
I think it’s because this site has been exposed to a couple of people which isn’t normally how I work. I’m pretty sure at this rate I’m just going to reveal the domain but at the rate, it’s growing I could probably actually focus on it and make it a profitable project before I give people a chance to screw with it.
I’ve got some decisions to make but I do need to start taking that site more seriously.
AI Content Case Study
This has been the main one I’m focused on.
Again (I feel like I’m constantly reminding people of this one) I’m not just letting the AI run away and do whatever it wants. I’ve seen it threaten readers and give some… questionable financial advice. I’m using AI as a tool to help speed up manual content creation.
I also want to be clear that word count is not a KPI. You can put out 100,000 words a day and never make a cent from your site. The only result I’m going for is the traffic which eventually means revenue. Word count is mostly just a vanity metric but a useful one in this case as it’s somewhat a measure of productivity.
The focus for the last couple of weeks has been on a site that takes more editing time than most other niches and we’re producing longer-form articles in a bunch of different structures. It’s slower but it’s also on an existing site.
Site 1 is still growing well. We’ve slowed down on the content production on this one now but the onsite metrics are looking good so now we’re just leaving it to sit and publishing a few articles here and there. For a new domain, I’m super happy with it.
Sites 3 and 4 have been the focus. Established domains are usually a quicker return and we’ve published roughly 100,000 words over the last couple of weeks. One of these sites takes a lot more editing time but it’s still turning out to be a real content push.
It’ll be a while down the line we have a real update for these sites as the content has time to sit in the SERPs for a while. Once I’ve finished this content push there’s site 2 and another new site (I know, I know) which will be site 5. These are easier niches than sites 3 and 4 so it should be a better example of scaled content production.
Faceless YouTube Channel
This project has been the flop of the month. I got a little sidetracked working on two other channels that actually produce revenue and I let this one die off a little more than I had planned.
I actually did have a number of videos ready before I went to Spain but just plain forgot to publish them and that let the channel flatline a bit.
Now, this is the tricky bit. The move to Spain is actually going to severely screw with this channel. Since it’s not one I just outsource and can run from anywhere in the world as easily.
Without getting too into it, my girlfriend has one of these ‘career’ things I keep hearing about. It doesn’t seem to be contagious but it does mean she’ll need to be back in the UK. I’m kind of planning to dip in and out so I’m going to try and front load some content again and keep it dripping out while I’m on the move and record more when I’m back.
This might just be more effort than it’s worth. I have older channels that are doing well I could put more time into or other niches I could outsource a lot easier. I’ll publish for a while longer and see how it goes.