Case Study: Niche Site after 4 months applying only Whitehat technique

[Sebastian Velandia]

Great journey. Good luck buddy.
Few questions, What is your content strategy? Out of The articles you have published, how many of them are info type articles? How many of them are product review type of articles?

How you implemented the clickbank offers in the site? By only using banners? Or using review type posts?

My content strategy is focused in providing deep research on all the topics I talk, with nice media as well. all of the articles have a recommendation to the affiliate product at the end, I try to connect the topics with the affiliate product.

I also have eyecatching banners, that work very well, I have read that the average CTR of a banner is 0.04% and my banners have +2% CTR which is amazing (I think it's good according to the stats I have researched).

 

[destinywakes]

My content strategy is focused in providing deep research on all the topics I talk, with nice media as well. all of the articles have a recommendation to the affiliate product at the end, I try to connect the topics with the affiliate product.

I also have eyecatching banners, that work very well, I have read that the average CTR of a banner is 0.04% and my banners have +2% CTR which is amazing (I think it's good according to the stats I have researched).

Good to go, you are doing very good just don't loose the confidence mate.
Do you recommend affiliate product for each page with CTA even for the how to or informational articles or just for product reviews.
Best of luck.

 

[Sebastian Velandia]

Good to go, you are doing very good just don't loose the confidence mate.
Do you recommend affiliate product for each page with CTA even for the how to or informational articles or just for product reviews.
Best of luck.

Well my topics are very aligned with the affiliate product I'm promoting, so I add a CTA on the last paragraph of the articles, this CTA is not trying to sell them anything, I just offer a freemium to encourage them to subscribe to my newsletter, when they subscribe I redirect to the affiliate offer, then through mailing, I continue the marketing thing.

I actually don't create "review" articles.

 

[kaudo]

In terms of traffic, you're doing great. Work upon monetization a bit, but not too much, it's still very young site.

 

[destinywakes]

Well my topics are very aligned with the affiliate product I'm promoting, so I add a CTA on the last paragraph of the articles, this CTA is not trying to sell them anything, I just offer a freemium to encourage them to subscribe to my newsletter, when they subscribe I redirect to the affiliate offer, then through mailing, I continue the marketing thing.

I actually don't create "review" articles.

As you have mentioned have 17 articles so far so I think you can create few review articles also here n there n link it to already ranking posts for better CTR.
How much did you made with the 5 sales last week n this month so far.
May I know if you don't mind what the plugins you using to collect emails later send newsletters.
All da best.

 

[Sebastian Velandia]

As you have mentioned have 17 articles so far so I think you can create few review articles also here n there n link it to already ranking posts for better CTR.
How much did you made with the 5 sales last week n this month so far.
May I know if you don't mind what the plugins you using to collect emails later send newsletters.
All da best.

I will update at the end of the month, I have made more sales, and made some cash this month, will update soon!

 

[sabhan]

I will update at the end of the month, I have made more sales, and made some cash this month, will update soon!

Since you are doing affiliate marketing. Don't bother with adding ads to your website. Even with $20 ecpm of AdThrive from ads, they won't be able to catch up with coming affiliate sales for you + the user experience and speed goes down as soon as you add ads. Also consider selling the website for 30-32x income multiplier once you feel the website has grown to the maximum.

 

[Sebastian Velandia]

Since you are doing affiliate marketing. Don't bother with adding ads to your website. Even with $20 ecpm of AdThrive from ads, they won't be able to catch up with coming affiliate sales for you + the user experience and speed goes down as soon as you add ads. Also consider selling the website for 30-32x income multiplier once you feel the website has grown to the maximum.

Thanks for the advice, well I considered adding ads, since I have seen my competitors have ads and also affiliate marketing, so I thought if it works for them, then it should work for me, shouldn' it...

Just a question, regarding what you said about selling the website, you mean if Im making $1000 monthly then I should sell it for $30k? is that what you meant? or what did you mean with "30-32x income multiplier"

By the way, where do you recommend me to sell my website? or how that works? Thanks!

 

[destinywakes]

Thanks for the advice, well I considered adding ads, since I have seen my competitors have ads and also affiliate marketing, so I thought if it works for them, then it should work for me, shouldn' it...

Just a question, regarding what you said about selling the website, you mean if Im making $1000 monthly then I should sell it for $30k? is that what you meant? or what did you mean with "30-32x income multiplier"

By the way, where do you recommend me to sell my website? or how that works? Thanks!

My recommendation also to stop ads on your site it effects UX and slow down the site speed, btw have you check the speed of your site?
If you wanna sell your site I suggest you to with Flippa or motioninvest but trust me flippa is better coz they can buy anything literally anything.
for example if site making $100 a month means you can sell it off for 30x means $3000 that's what I do.
Another platform to sell sites is FB groups.

 

[Sebastian Velandia]

JULY UPDATE
Ok, this month I had a peak on traffic, also had the most income so far since I started the journey, although it's still not too much it's a progress.

This site is also collecting new leads every day, although the subscription rates have gone down, now only 0.56% of the visitors subscribe to my email list, which I think it's quite low.

Semrush Keyword ranking:


although Im ranking more keywords in the top 10 the total amount of indexed keywords went down, not sure why. I think I just need to keep adding more content.

Search Traffic stats:


Although the income has been the highest so far, I think it's still low for the amount of traffic.

Search console stats


This is the progress in the last 3 months in my google search console. As you can see, I had a peak this month, but it seems solid, so that's nice.

Goals for next month:
- I will work on my own digital product, I have no experience creating products so I will need to read and research how to implement it.
- I noticed that the landing that's bringing the most organic traffic is not the right audience for the website niche, so I will monetize with ads that landing instead of affiliate marketing. I will try to get approved again on Adsense, once I reach the 25k sessions (Im close this month I had almost 23k) I will apply to Mediavine.
- I will focus on a clear CTA on the site to get emails instead of using banners redirecting right to the affiliate page, I think I need to focus on one thing and optimize it. I think that probably there are too many distractions and that could be causing low conversions.

Well, any advice or point of view about my journey so far would be very appreciated. I honestly feel frustrated with the thing about monetizing the traffic, I have tried many things but it seems to not be working. This is my first niche site so I think this is a learning process.

Thank you.

 

[yasin.wazza10]

Great journey!
I also have a few questions:
1. As in the first picture: 10 Posts in March 2020. Is it total or only in March?
2. There are very few keywords in Page 1, So How did you make affiliate income in these last months? I hope there will be something breaking out in April but before the situation Covid, I fear that it will be more difficult
I'm building a website for around 3 months and still do not have any income.View attachment 130473

You’re doing well mate, focus on publishing quality content (review + info articles with solid inter linking) & make sure your On-Page is top notch before focusing on building backlinks.

 

[oblivion19]

This is a really good journey. Its incredible that you are getting such traffic with such low number of articles on site.Was it a completely new domain.

Whats your keyword strategy like?

 

[Sebastian Velandia]

This is a really good journey. Its incredible that you are getting such traffic with such low number of articles on site.Was it a completely new domain.

Whats your keyword strategy like?

I create high quality content, and I focus on finding low competition keywords with >1000 searches per month, I have also found nice keywords with a lot of searches and and low competition, I have ranked easily for those, I think the key is the tool I use for keyword research

 

[noctropolis]

Great journey! Please tell me: you said that you are using KWfinder for low competition longtail keywords. What number of "keyword difficulty" there you consider as low and worth to try?

 

[SHAYZO]

Brilliant and inspiring! Will keep following

 

[Sebastian Velandia]

Great journey! Please tell me: you said that you are using KWfinder for low competition longtail keywords. What number of "keyword difficulty" there you consider as low and worth to try?

For those who don't know this is the keyword tool I use.

I have a cheat sheet to choose the keywords

1. Keyword score below 25
2. Google results below 10 million proportional to keyword difficulty. For example: the higher the score, the lower the amounts of results in google to consider it.
3. I look to the competitors that are ranking on the first page, I check their social signals, I check content quality, I check backlinks, etc. If I can outperform them I will go for it.
4. Another good sign is when the first page of Google has Pinterest results, or an Instagram page, quora question, Reddit thread... That means there are not strong landings created specifically for that term.

Well, I think that's what I look for.

 

[noctropolis]

Nice, thanks. And how many longtail keywords do you choose for one article? And each article is optimized for different keywords?

 

[dlyhai]

Really nice, I will follow you

 

[Sebastian Velandia]

Today I improved the performance of my blog, I would like to give you some advices guys:

1. Avoid using cache plugins in your wordpress or CMS, avoid php cache plugins at all cost!
2. I recommend you to use this plugin for DB optimization: Serverbolt Optimizer
3. Avoid using page builders like Elementor or WPBackery
4. Use cloudflare CDN and use their cache system! (You need special settings to make cloudflare cache work Let me know if you need help with this)

After setting up Cloudflare cache and all the frontend and backend optimizations my website is now loading within milliseconds!!

Im using Cloudflare workers to use the Cache API so I can cache different versions of my website according to the device and another nice stuff. Well those are the advantages of being a skilled developer

Check this reading so you will understand how to optimize your wordpress like a PRO.

https://servebolt.com/articles/these-plugins-slow-down-your-wordpress/

Page speed and UX seems to be a very important ranking factor for Google so better to be competitive there as well!

 

[Sebastian Velandia]

As many of you already know I started to build my mailing list in June, however, I had too many deliverability issues, my emails were not reaching the inbox of the subscribers, and that caused me a lot of problems. Today my mailing strategy is starting to work very well, most of my current sales right now come from my mailings. And I'm collecting subs every day on auto-pilot without investing any penny on ads, everything I do is organic.

After many failures working with different email marketing providers, I came up with a winner. I needed a solution with good deliverability, marketing automation, easy integration, good support, and affordable with my budget. The winner email marketing solution I'm working with is Mailer Lite. All my deliverability issues have gone, and pricing is very decent. Also, the automation feature is very very nice and you don't have to pay more, it's included in all the plans, even the free plan.

Now, let me talk about how's my mailing strategy. I think the key is not trying to sale from the first email, you first need to provide value.

Automation sequence:
1. Welcome email with free gift
2. Email with Free resource
3. Email with Free eBook
4. Email with link to article talking about a topic related to the product (in the article I include affiliate link at the end).
5. Email selling the product with affiliate link to the product.

This sequence is starting to work, I still have few subscribers (292 at the moment of writing this) and I have been able to get decent sales from my emails. Now imagine when I get 10k emails.

I have read many copywriting and sales persuasion books, I have applied everything to my email subjects and content and it is giving results. all my email marketing stats are above the average. According to Campaign Monitor:

• The total average open-rate is: 15-25%
• The average click-through rate is: 2.5%

Now let me share with you my stats:


As you can see my stats are above the average. So I think the key to success with email marketing is:

1. Get a reliable email marketing provider (I strongly recommend Mailer Lite)
2. Create a marketing automation strategy providing value instead of focusing on just selling a product
3. Learn about sales persuasion and get copywriting skills to write killer emails

Bonus:
- Cloak affiliate links, never add direct affiliate links in your emails.

I think that's all for now, I'll keep you updated. This month started very well, I think I will be able to reach my first milestone of making $500 in a single month.