The 1k Niche Property Project – Month 6 Feb 2022
Welcome BACK to the 1K Niche Property Project!
We are just crossing the 6-month mark with this project and while everything is rolling along smoothly it’s not moving quite as fast as we had hoped.
The Goal:
In case you haven’t been following along with this project, our goal is to make a website from zero articles and zero traffic to $1,000 per month in monthly recurring revenue in less than one year.
While we have built and maintained several different niche properties (Six currently) this project is a little unique and we’ve given ourselves a strict timeline of one year.
To achieve this objective, or testing a variety of different strategies and tactics that we have seen work well across our other niche properties to see if using a combination of the strategies can shorten the timeline to reaching this objective.
The History:
In case you haven’t been following along up until this point, I wanted to give you a quick recap of how we got to where we are today.
In the first month of this project, we approved our partners over at Niche Website Builders
for the niche.
Additionally, we conducted thorough keyword research and came up with 90 article topics that we thought would be a good fit for the site.
Month two saw us conducting a full content Review which narrowed down the original 90 content ideas to 44 written and polished articles.
The initial investment we made into this site included a budget for $110,000 words of written content, and while this would generally result in us being able to accomplish our 90 piece goal, the final content was substantially longer than we had anticipated, resulting in 44 published articles.
The third month of this project was the first time that we had a full month with published content and we began to see a quick increase in the number of organic visits to the website.
In month four, we saw that traffic go from roughly 10 visits per day to over 21 visits per day, exclusively from organic search.
We also decided to start creating a few more articles for the website (beyond the initial 44 published pieces) To help us more quickly reach our goal of having enough traffic to support a $1,000 per month recurring income on the site.
Last month (month 5) we began to publish a few new pieces of content (22 in total). Additionally, we saw our organic traffic increase to over 35 visits per day.
That brings us to the sixth official month of this project and some exciting news.
The Activity This Month:
To say that I’m impressed with the continued growth rate of this site is a little bit of an understatement.
That being said, if we plan to reach our goal of having $1,000 a month in recurring revenue from this site within the first year (8 to 10 months when we first published content) we are going to need to do a few things which we will discuss later on.
Traffic:
Let’s start by taking a look at what happened this month with traffic.
Overall, the sight saw a 32% increase in traffic over the fifth month of this project and brought us in just under 53 visits per day.
As you probably know by now, the biggest thing that we pay attention to when it comes to traffic is the traffic that we’re getting from organic search.
While traffic from any source is more than welcome, organic search traffic tends to be more stable over time than something like traffic from Facebook or Instagram.
This is why our major focus is on creating evergreen content that will rank well and bring in consistent traffic from search engines.
This month, we saw another big jump in the number of visitors with a slightly more than 37% increase in traffic coming from search engines.
This means, our organic search visits jumped from 35 visits per day to 48 visits per day.
Just like with many of the other months in this project, this number doesn’t give us the complete picture as it’s an average over the last 30 days.
While we did average 48 visits per day, many of the lower traffic days were at the beginning of this last 30 day period, With our days averaging between 30 and 45 visits.
Towards the beginning of March, about 2 weeks before writing this article, we started to see those numbers slowly pick up with our average day being somewhere between 55 and 60 users.
More recently, we’re seeing our average day between 60 and 70 users which is an extremely promising sign.
This is one area where I’m slightly torn.
While I’m extremely excited about the growth we have had over the first few months( about 4 months since we published our first piece of content) I’m also slightly disappointed.
While we typically say it takes between six and eight months for a piece of content to reach its final resting place in a Google search results page, we were hoping to speed that up through the use of an expired domain and our content Blitz strategy.
While the content Blitz seems to have done its job and we are successfully seeing consistent growth month over month, well before we would. Otherwise, we were hoping the use of the expired domain would give us the additional push to not only rank for more competitive terms, but also do so faster.
If we’re going to reach our goal of having $1,000 a month in recurring income from this site, we’re going to need to see some of those initial pieces of content massively increase the amount of search traffic they are bringing in.
That being said, there’s still a lot of hope for this, given that these pieces of content are right around 4 months old at this point and still have room to move up in the organic search results.
So we will have to wait and see.
Keyword Rankings:
If you’ve been following along with this project for any length of time, you’ll know by now that Scott and I love to take a look at our keyword rankings to see what’s coming down the road.
We use a tool called Ahrefs To give us a better idea of exactly how many keywords our site is indexed for and where they are in the Google search results, our keywords our showing up.
While this month didn’t see the explosive 200% growth we saw last month, we’re seeing another interesting trend that’s giving us hope for the future.
If you take a look at the chart above, you’ll see that while we only had 21.5% overall growth, we weren’t expecting this month to be massive.
Having just published 22 pieces of content during month five, I would expect to see those two start to get in the text within the next month or two (month 7 or 8 of this project ).
With that being said, the fact that we are continuing to see large growth (over 85%) in the number of keywords that are ranking at the bottom of page 1 (Positions four through 10) continues to give me strong hope that we will see a large increase in the organic traffic within the next month or two.
This boost should be bolstered by an increase in the number of keywords ranked on page 2 or higher from the articles we’ve written in the last few months.
You may also note, that just like last month we did see a small decrease (Three keywords) In the number of few words ranked in the first few slots of the Google search results.
As I explained in the deep dive last month, this is a result of us having an artificially high number of keywords in those positions related to the domain’s previous owner.
Thankfully, none of these lost keywords are relevant to our building of an itch property site and I expect to start to see the number of keywords indexed on the top portion of the first page to begin increasing in month seven.
Content Creation:
This month saw us publish another nine articles which bring the total on the site up to 75 articles in total.
Six of these nine articles were the new style of articles that we discussed last month and the other three were question-based posts.
In month 7, I see us publishing slightly more frequently than 2 a week with an even heavier emphasis on the question-based posts.
The Money:
Just like last month, we are starting to see a little bit of movement on the money front (money leaving our pocket) because we’re investing in more content.
Expenses
Our expenses this month. We’re not terrible given that we only created nine new pieces of content.
As discussed last month, we’re currently paying an average of about $45 per article that is being written.
This includes the cost of writing, editing, optimizing, and publishing the article.
Essentially, all we have to do is give our writers the topic after we have done our keyword research and everything else is done for us.
Month 6 Expenses: $405
Earnings:
Because we haven’t tried to monetize the site, we have zero earnings for this month.
I would expect to see some earnings start to roll in around month eight of this project.
Month 6 Earnings: $0
Net Earnings
Month 0 Expenses: -$9,000
Month 0 Earnings: $0
Month 1 Expenses: $0 (Zero Additional)
Month 1 Earnings: $0
Month 2 Expenses: $0 (Zero Additional)
Month 2 Earnings: $0
Month 3 Expenses: $0 (Zero Additional)
Month 3 Earnings: $0
Month 4 Expenses: $0 (Zero Additional)
Month 4 Earnings: $0
Month 5 Expenses: $945
Month 5 Earnings: $0
Month 6 Expenses: $405
Month 6 Earnings: $0
—————————————Month 6 Net: -$10,350
That’s A Wrap:
Month 6 of the 1k Niche Property Project was a BUSY one.
Wow! We are seeing consistent results and consistent growth, Scott and I are going to be looking for a way to pour a bit of gas on this fire to see just how fast and how far we can grow this site over the next few months of this project.
Make sure to check back next month to get an update and if you’d like to learn how we got to where we are, make sure to check out the full 1k Niche Property Project Archive here.
