If you’re new to niche site building, I’d recommend checking out my post on getting started with niche sites.

The last update I gave you on this niche site was back in December (around 5 months ago).

Back then I was just reviving this old site which hadn’t been worked on in years and wasn’t making any money.

I published 21 pieces of content, and finally started to see traffic rise and a few hundred dollars in affiliate commissions come in.

Naturally this would tell us – Google is enjoying this.

Publish more content and make more money, right?

So that’s what I did.

Since then I’ve published another 21 pieces of content, and also gone back and edited and optimised the previous 21 pieces I published.

Here’s what Google has been doing:

I had a big spike in traffic around December, which got me excited and I was just about ready to order my private plane and Rolex watch.

Then it tanked, made a slowwwww climb back to around 50 clicks per day, and then tanked again to almost zero.

Now, it’s just slowly recovering back to around 25 clicks per day.

Why did this happen?

I have no idea.

This is one of the nuisances of being a site owner that relies on search traffic.

You’re at the whim of Google and even if you do exactly what they want (or what they say they want), there’s no guarantee you’ll be rewarded.

They might just tank your site anyway.

But it’s not all bad.

The site is still making a small amount of revenue each month.

I usually make on average one sale per day, and my commission can be anywhere between $5 and $50 USD:

Overall, the site has made approximately $1,500 USD from this particular affiliate:

Also, Google doesn’t hate my site either.

These are my top performing pages in search, according to Google Search Console:

As you can see, almost all of them rank on the first page so Google is showing me a bit of love.

The trick is to get a few pages into the Top 3, as that’s when traffic really starts to boom.

What To Do Now?

Ultimately, I aim to get this site to a respectable income level ($1k/month) and then sell it.

The reason I want to sell it is, I’m not really enjoying working on the site anymore.

The niche is something I have now researched to death, at first it was interesting because I use the product regularly, but now I know more than I need to and have no interest in continuing to dive deeper and deeper.

However, I will still continue working on it since it’s been a good SEO project and I’ve been learning a lot. Ultimately though, I want to get off working on little sites like this so I can spend my time doing cooler stuff, like researching stocks!

So what can I do?

Usually, when Google is not loving your site, there are three things to do:

• Optimise your current articles
• Write more articles
• Get more backlinks

Optimising current articles means including more keywords or better keywords, adding extra content or images, and updating it to ensure its accurate.

I am currently using Keysearch as my keyword research tool, which has been great.

Writing more articles just means adding more content to your site so it looks more authoritative and adds more value to users.

Getting more backlinks means reaching out to more sites to link back to your site (Google rankings are heavily based on the number of other sites that link to you).

Also with Google it helps to remember – their algorithm is very fickle.

One day they hate you, and the next day your traffic can skyrocket without you changing a thing.

Just keep building the best quality website you can, and hopefully Google sees that and pushes you up the rankings in the long run.

Hopefully I have better progress to share with you in a few months!