Update: Niche Marketing Website Experiment

May 25, 2006 Andrew Seltz

It has been several months now since www.ColossalTV.com went online and it’s time to look back on where I am with this little project. So, where am I?

I Haven’t Retired a Millionaire Just Yet!

I had 3 unique visits in my first month in January. Depressing, but that jumped to 569 unique visits in February, 732 in March, 825 in April, and has drooped back to 400 unique visits this month (there are still a few days to go).

So far I’ve managed to get:

Natural search engine hits
Hits from links in free articles I’ve posted on article services
Traffic to the site from a couple of small Adwords campaigns
The whole site spidered by the major search engines
All of the ColossalTV.com pages show up in the Google index

The financial results have been less than impressive. There was a brief spurt of initial Adsense activity, but so far my earnings are about $22. Not enough to cover my hosting fees for the site and a loss when you deduct the cost of my modest Adwords campaign. I haven’t made a single sale from any of the affiliate links on the site either. But it’s not a total loss – I’ve learned a lot of new things along the way and the price of the lesson is a lot less than college.

So, What Have I Learned About Niche Websites?

Here are some of my biggest insites:

Effortless Adsense Riches are a Sales Pitch and little more
Original Content is King
Be Prepared to Work For Traffic
Building Traffic Takes Time

Effortless Adsense Riches

There are hundreds of websites and e-books floating around the web that promise thousands of dollars flooding in overnight using Google Adsense and niche websites. Scratch the surface and you’ll find that many advocate that you scrape and regurgitate content that is already online and make sites that are basically spam. Not all of the advice is like this, but little of it seems to lead to effortless riches (if you know some secret, please share!)

Maybe I’m at a disadvantage because my niche site is not focussed on web marketing – more than a few programs involve making money selling people information about how they can make money selling people information about how they can make money selling people… you get the idea!

Content is King

I haven’t put much in the way of new content on the site in about a month and the traffic numbers are slipping.

In the first few months I was regularily writing articles to post and also submitting them to article services for others to pick-up and publish. The numbers were growing then. Now that I’m not writing, the numbers are dropping. By contrast, this blog has 5 times the traffic and I write here almost every week. (Although I’m still not making any money here either.)

I was reading an article recently about creating a successful site in 12 months and one of the most important items discussed was writing fresh articles every day. The author, Brett Tabke, says that before you even decide on a domain name you should have a plan for writing at least 100 pages of relevant content (‘about us’ pages and privacy policies don’t count.) This leads to the next point.

Be Prepared to Work For Traffic

If hundreds of pages of valuable, keyword targeted, and original content are the keys to successful websites, then be prepared to work. There are no shortcut programs that will scrape an original article off the web and drop it into your site. You either have to roll up your sleeves and write, or open up your wallet and pay a writer.

I get one or two hits a week from the articles I’ve written and syndicated. They also draw a few search engine hits too. Imagine if there were 200 or more pages out there. I’d be getting hundreds of hits. But, writing a good article that makes people want to visit your site takes more than 5 minutes. Which means…

Building Traffic Takes Time

The only way to build that pile of content that will attract people to my site is by writing articles one at a time. This won’t happen overnight and I am learning that you have to be patient and persistent.

What’s Next for the Niche Marketing Website Experiment?

I’m going to keep experimenting with this site. I’ve got a few ideas I’d like to try out and it’s a good place to experiment. I’d like to build some Amazon Web Services based features into the site to add a little dynamic content and also present opportunities to get more relevant affiliate sales sales links on the site.

Another approach that looks promising is to create online tools that people will come to the site over and over again to use. I have a couple ideas developing for this.

I will continue to refine and optimize the site for better search engine performance. I just found a new e-book on Search Engine Optimization today and will see if there’s any new things to think about.

Finally, I’ll be writing – for all of my sites. Content is king!

I’ll keep you posted as I learn new things,

The Go-To Guy

Andrew Seltz: The Go-To Guy!