Okay, this is kind of a lie because it’s not really “new”.

It’s an old niche site that I set up about a year ago and then didn’t do anything.

It had about ten articles with affiliate links to Amazon, and is currently making around $10/month.

After a few months I figured the site idea was probably a dud and left it.

Last month I saw some guys in my Facebook groups having some success with smaller sites and it made me think back to this little site I had sitting in the shadows.

I thought, maybe I should revisit it and give it a proper shot.

Generally, there are two reasons I stop working on a niche site:

1. 1. I don’t have a lot of time.

1. 1. I get bored.

The first two or three hours of working on a new site is a lot of fun. You get to be creative and work on new designs and it’s just exciting building new stuff.

Then when it actually comes time to research and write the articles … zzzzzz.

This is the problem with building too many sites.

You get burnout from all the writing. It becomes like a job or a school project.

That’s exactly what happened with this particular site. I wrote ten or so articles and then found myself snoozing any time I started working on it again.

However, this month I challenged myself to do some proper work on the site and get it to a proper level.

So, let me give you some info on the site itself.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s never a good idea for niche site owners to share their sites, but what I can tell you is the site is:

• • About a particular food item

• • It can be expensive

• • Something I eat regularly

• • Considered a “superfood”

So the general idea was:

• • Educate people on this particular food

• • Share affiliate links for them to buy it

• • Earn commissions.

First thing I did was go through and clean up all the existing articles.

They still had review posts “Best of 2021” and so on.

A bunch of other stuff was outdated as well. The site overall had just decayed a bit with old WordPress plugins etc.

Then I did some keyword research to try and find some article ideas.

I knew to get any decent traffic to the site, I’d need to beef up the article numbers. At least to thirty or forty.

One thing I did was do some “poor man’s keyword research” which is just using Google’s auto-suggest to see what people are searching for.

For example, if you had a site about Vitamin D, just type in “Is Vitamin D…” and see what comes up:

I did this with a few different phrasing combinations, and I didn’t spend too long looking into volumes (you can do this with Keysearch).

Reason being – I actually don’t mind filling out content with low-volume keywords, because they have no competition, and also the reason for publishing these articles was more about letting Google know the site is being updated rather than to bring in a ton of traffic.

In my opinion, the main success factor of a site (after picking a good niche) is to simply publish and update content. Keyword volumes change, Google algorithms change, but you will never be punished for publishing regular (good) content.

In total, I managed to get a list of 21 article topics to write.

Then comes the hard part – actually writing them!

I gave myself 3 days to write them all, because as I said, I have more interesting projects to work on and this one I’m finding kinda boring. However, the niche has so much potential that I really wanted to see how a decent site might perform.

I failed miserably on the 3-day target – it took more like two weeks, but finally I knocked them all out.

Great feeling to mark that final line clear in my Excel spreadsheet!

Results seemed to be pretty quick to show.

I started publishing around the start of November, and here’s what my Google Search Console looked like:

That’s not conclusively a Google green tick – as you can see the graph is choppy and it might just flatline again next month – Google is unpredictable so it’s never good to assume an uptrend will stick.

However, for now it’s clearly moving in the right direction so that’s a good start.

Even better was the income.

This site has links to two affiliates, over the last year or so it’s dribbled along and made maybe $10/mth from Amazon and has had only one sale from the other private affiliate.

However, once I started publishing and getting clicks, Amazon income stayed the same but the private affiliate started generating regular sales.

It generated about $140 in commissions during November:

That’s way more than I expected. Why is it converting so well?

First, it’s only one month so let’s see if it carries.

However, my guess is because I did spend a good few days designing the site nicely when I first set it up (because that’s the stuff I find the most fun) so objectively the site does look aesthetic and professional.

It’s too early to tell if the income stream will be regular, so let’s see what December looks like.

As for now, I’m not publishing any more articles on the site and am just going to let it sit while I work on other things.

If things continue to look good for the next couple of months, I’ll jump back in and see if we can optimise things even more.

Wait and see!