[CASE STUDY 2] Rising To #1, A Niche Stealing Diary

Welcome. Some of you may remember me from my other Journey thread on here: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/my-journey-discussions/809191-case-study-building-authority-website-using-100-bhw-services.html. Time for something similar in nature, but a little different in execution.

I'm going to commit a hostile niche takeover with a one-page website.

Is the niche profitable? No, not really. There are no real products to sell, no physical anything, and no services that really are worth anything. How will I make money? General ad revenue, Amazon links, and building an email list.

All in a one page, text-dense website. Watch me.

Here are some details about this niche:

STATISTICS

~800 exact searches per month average over the past 12 months. The niche came to fruition about 18 months ago.
A general search brings up around 60,000 results. Exact search (quotes) brings up 21,500

Here is the first page of results:

• One shittily built niche-based Wordpress site that is image-based and has not been updated in over a year.
• Seven Buzzfeed-esque lists
• An Imgur gallery
• A subreddit with under 400 subscribers (the mod is active, so I can't http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/social-networking-sites/801219-niche-goldmines-stealing-subreddits-making-your-own.html sadly)

Pathetic. Here is how I am going to take this niche over:

PLAN

The number one result is the niche-based site. Instead of posts, they post images with words on them. Let's call these things Flugels so I'm not outing immediately. Nothing that can be considered quality content, either. There are about 150 of these Flugels, and I scraped them all. I am confident I can come up with another 50-100 Flugels as well. I am going to take each Flugel and hand-write an expanded, original version. Trying for 100 words or more a Flugel.

Then I will post up 50 Flugels to a simple one page white Wordpress website. Maybe 100 if I'm feeling frisky. The remaining Flugels will be saved. Where Amazon links can be placed, I will do so. The top of the site will be a fancy-ass logo. A minimalist sidebar will have an email form, and links to a Facebook and a Twitter. Maybe an ad section for text ads or if anyone wants to buy a link in a shitty blogroll. Relevant small, compressed images beside each Flugel. A disclosure and privacy policy in very small text in the copyrighted footer (I don't consider these to be real pages). And that's it.

At this point I will manually promote the site and/or individual Flugels where applicable, via hand-written blog comments, guest posts, social media commentary in various groups, whatever works. Once I have a few email subscribers, once weekly I will email blast out another Flugel (with Amazon links where applicable). Two weeks later, the Flugel will appear on the social media sites. Two weeks after that, the Flugel will go on the site. This will be a weekly thing. Email, then social media two weeks later, then the site two weeks after that. Rinse and repeat.

The site will be fast. The site will be simple. The site won't be spammy. The site won't have pop-ups or pop-unders or irrelevant advertising. It won't have any additional pages. I will take my time, a la my other Journey. I'm $400 in the hole on that one and haven't made a cent after a month. I don't care. For this, I'm going for consistent visitors. And position one by the end of 2016.

GOALS

Spot 1 in Google by the end of 2016
$20 per day minimum in revenues by the end of 2016
A revolution

Just watch and see. I will update this weekly, as it's like spot 12 in my life project priority list. But it will still get regular attention, because I'm smart with my time when I'm not posting on here. Here we go.

-SH

EDIT: I will be putting this log in its entirety up on my catch-all site http://www.thismaywork.com as updated occur as well, just like the other Journey.

Looking forward to following your progress. Good luck!

Sounds interesting, following along !

Nice, this should be good.

Best of luck on flugels!

Good luck with your journey. will be keeping an eye on it.

I love that you contribute a lot to BHW. Really nice of you!

Loving these Case Studies ! Good luck Mr Sherbert.

An update one week in.

I've written three Flugels. Each one is around 75 words. I've got another 20+ in the pipeline over this next week (it was a busy weekend, and this isn't my number one priority). I've been researching domain names and other metrics.

This "niche" has exploded in the past week thanks to a popular thread on Reddit about the topic. I've got all the images scraped now, and am going to do the following this week:

Buy a domain
Set up Wordpress
Set up a theme
Put up the Flugels I have written
Add images where applicable
SEO the crap out of the site
Work on pagespeed

Expect a big update this time next week.

Good luck with that one, mate! All your journeys are awesome ^_^

For someone thinking of similarly "stealing" a niche, how would you recommend they go about finding one?

Definitely following this one; sounds like a cool study.

Closing this case study for now. My sincerest apologies. I've just got too many eggs in too many baskets and need to trim the fat some before I have an anxiety attack.

As a gesture of goodwill, whoever PM's me first I will give you the sub-niche. No questions asked. Thanks for everything, those who replied.