I will not go back here on the operation of this type of project. For the curious, consider having a look at the previous post on this niche site. In this article, the idea is rather to present the actions implemented to launch this first site , to share with you, in complete transparency, the progress around this new challenge. I hope to propose an article of this type on a regular basis, in order to expose you to the progress, the expenses and the gains generated by this first niche site.
This article covers the period from October 3 to November 5 .
I will try to specify here the various actions implemented over the past period.
For this first month, the main event is obviously the launch of the site in early October 2014 . I won’t talk about the “technical” aspect here (hosting, installing WordPress, plugins used, etc.) but I can come back to it in a future article if you’re interested.
For the month of October, I worked almost exclusively on writing content for the site . I am not specialized in the theme chosen by this niche site, so this step began with a necessary knowledge of the subject. From October 3 to November 5, I wrote and published:
We therefore have a total of 8 articles for approximately 9,000 words for this first month following the opening of the site. The activity is clearly extremely time-consuming, and I have also started to find out a bit about a possible outsourcing of this aspect. I will probably explore this point in the weeks and months to come.
On the pure referencing part, I did nothing or almost nothing in October. The idea was above all to offer content before I could seriously tackle it.
Oh I forgot! I created a Twitter account corresponding to the site, where I haven’t done much since, except for some links to the pages of the site. I don’t know if it is relevant to create a Facebook and/or Google Plus page on the same principle. Any opinions on the question? What benefits can I derive from it?
During the last week of October and the first days of November, I started to take a more serious interest in my positioning in search engines . I started posting a few comments on blogs with similar themes, about ten I think.
I also contacted some sites, but for the moment without return from them. 🙁
Finally, I started submitting the site to a few quality directories , to get some traffic and some inbound links to that first niche site. To be exact, I registered the site with 8 general directories, submissions for the most part awaiting validation.
As you can imagine, the site being young and not having interested me in referencing until a month after it went online, the first figures are far from staggering. I’m not worried about it, because as I said this project is not a sprint. Although logically, I would have been very happy to see better numbers for my debut in the world of niche sites! 🙂
On my main keyword, I oscillate between positions 40 and 50 of Google . Within a month, I managed to gain and then lose places! Indeed, for a few weeks I was positioned around place 35. Strange… Perhaps this is linked to the various adjustments in Google’s algorithms. It is obviously on this keyword that I hope the most progress, because it is not by being on the fifth page of the results that I will take off my number of visits!
On the secondary keywords chosen, the site is positioned in this way at the end of November, the figure in brackets corresponding to the exact search volumes per month on each keyword:
I hope to quickly gain a page on certain keywords, but the target remains the first page of Google. I still have a lot of work to do to achieve this, the most important thing being to achieve this on my main keyword (as a reminder, 14,800 exact searches per month).
But concretely, what does it give in terms of visits? No surprises, everything is calm …
The “peaks” observed at the beginning of October are not associated with visits. I hadn’t yet excluded my IP address from the results, so my own visits were counted. Overall, I have stayed under ten daily visits since the opening. But I already have some visits from Google, which is quite positive .
Overall, the figures are not more flattering but nothing alarming at this stage of the project.
It is from October 15 that the site to begin to appear in the search results. Since then, the site has appeared almost 1,500 times on Google, for just under 60 visits from the search engine. The site appeared on 111 queries, which isn’t too bad after just over a month of existence. Note that I “officially” positioned myself on 1 main keyword and 7 keywords, but that the site therefore appears on more than 100 different requests . This is called the long tail.
As I mentioned, I also launched a Twitter page associated with the site. I got 41 followers in that time frame. A Facebook page will no doubt appear in the coming months. Do you think this is relevant? Should I target other social networks?
On the expense side, the first few months are the most expensive. Two lines of expenditure should be noted for these beginnings:
As for the gains, it’s simple: 0€ went into the cash registers. As I mentioned, my goal is to earn my first euros linked to this niche site within 6 months of its opening. Patience, patience…
We therefore have for this first period a total of €106.49 spent, for €0 earned .
From the next post of this type, I will draw up in addition to the balance sheet of the month a balance sheet since the launching of the site.
For the next steps, I still intend to publish some comments on sites with similar themes . I also aim to pursue registration in a few reference directories , I still have a few in stock. I am obviously open to other ideas to facilitate the referencing of the site, do not hesitate if you have any ideas.
I intend to publish a few more articles on the site, however less frequently than in these first months: 2 to 3 articles per month is the objective I have set myself for the next few months. In order to lengthen the long tail, I’m going to change my tune a bit. If the articles published so far have focused on secondary keywords very close to the targeted niche, I will start publishing a few more related posts . The objective is twofold: to broaden the panel of visitors in the long term by targeting keywords not directly related to the targeted theme, and to indicate to Google that I do not centralize all my content on the same group of keywords, just to avoid in the long term a potential penalization of the latter which could be harmful to the correct referencing of the site.
So much for this first assessment for this first month since the launch of the site! The next posts of this type will undoubtedly be a little less plentiful…
Feel free to comment on this adventure! Advice, criticism (constructive of course 🙂), opinions, questions… That’s what comments are there for! For the more shy, you can go through the Contact form.