Monthly Report for May 2016: Niche Site Project 3

The time has come for an update on Niche Site Project 3!

Over the past few months, Samara, Ryan, and Colleen have been busy building out their niche sites, and as you will see below, things are definitely moving in the right direction.

For the most part, the regular coaching calls are over.  We’ve covered tons of material and honestly all of the basics (and much of the advanced) that anyone would need to build a niche site from scratch right here.

Now, we are going to try and provide monthly updates for the next several months for how their niche sites are doing; including, traffic, earnings, and other lessons learned.  Today is the first of the official monthly reports.

So, as you can see below all 3 students have provided an update for May on how their niche sites are coming along.  Enjoy!

Samara’s Update for TinyFry.com

Hey everybody!

Well, it’s been about a month since we revealed my site, Tiny Fry, so we thought we’d give you a little update on what I’ve been up to in May.

As you’ll recall, the strategy going forward is to write content, do outreach, work on social media and try to get some backlinks. Lather, rinse, repeat. So that’s essentially what I’ve been working on.

I published seven articles in May, which I think is okay, but to be perfectly honest, it’s about half the number of articles I would have liked to publish. I am hoping to beat that number in June. I wrote a mix of affiliate and non-affiliate content, and for some reason the former just takes me a long time to complete. I have 36 posts at the moment.

I have been doing outreach, and a few bloggers have offered to share my article with their followers on social media, although the majority generally respond to say “thanks”. I have started a few conversations with some people in the space, and it feels nice to connect with others and start building those relationships.

I have been a total failure on social media. I wanted to publish something every day and, sadly, that hasn’t gone as planned. It turns out that managing several social media accounts is actually more time consuming than I thought! That being said, I really do want to get active as I think there are lots of opportunities there.

As for backlinks, I snagged a few this past month. I did a guest post on a friend’s blog, which has absolutely nothing to do with kids and babies, but I was able to find an angle that made my article relevant to both my friend’s site and my own. I was interviewed for participating in Niche Site Project 3 on a great site on entrepreneurship, so I nabbed a link there.

I had an idea for a new section for my website, which I’m pretty excited about. I’ll be publishing interviews, which I think will really provide some great value for readers, and as an added bonus I may be able to get a few backlinks in the process. I’ve reached out to 15 people so far and already have 5 articles lined up, so I’m very pleased with how that’s going. I hope to launch the new section this month.

I got a handful of subscribers through the opt-in on my homepage, and I sent out my first newsletter, which will be monthly for the moment. It was my first time putting together a newsletter, so that took a bit of time and planning.

Traffic to the website peaked, unsurprisingly, when we revealed the site, and since then it’s been on a steady decline, although at the moment I’m still getting half as many visitors as I did following the big unveiling.

Traffic in May

Earnings for May

My earnings in May from Amazon amounted to $21.51. It’s still a long way from $500, and it’s certainly not enough to pay off my mortgage, but it’s a start! I can see people have bought all kinds of things through my links, including many products that I have recommended, which is pretty cool to see.

So that’s where I am, in a nutshell. I feel that I’m off to a decent start. There are so many things I want to do with the site, but there are only so many hours in the day, and I never seem to make it through my entire to-do list. Like, ever. But this isn’t a race, and I’m confident that working consistently on Tiny Fry and growing it gradually will yield great results over time.

Ryan Update for May

Well folks, this is what failure looks like. I wish I had better stats to offer up, better insights gleaned, better news to report. But I don’t. This is what failure looks like.

Or more accurately, this is what failure on a personal level looks like, because it’s not the failure of the tactics and strategies that Jake has taught me along the way. No, this is about me not getting my work done.

Sometime around Mid-April I just hit a wall on the website and I allowed things to stand in my way. Life things. Confidence things. Depressing things.

Sure, some of these events and circumstances were out of my control, and May has been a very trying month for reasons that I won’t get into because I don’t want to seem like I’m making excuses. We’ve all got stuff in our lives that stand in the way of us achieving our goals/dreams/happiness. The successful among us power through them, learn from them, and grow stronger.

That’s all I can do at this point.

I’m not sure where the other students are at, but I’m going to assume leaps and bounds ahead of me. It’s hard not to beat myself up when thinking about it. I feel like I’m wasting a great opportunity.

STOP IT, YOU’RE DEPRESSING US!

Okay, the positives:

1. Your crazy if you think I’m giving up. I’m only going to get stronger from this point forward.

2. I think from the standpoint of the Niche Pursuits community, maybe some of you can relate to this. I think it’s good to see one of the students struggling to succeed. The idea that I could fail at this is very real. And if you don’t put the work in, you’ll fail to. I just need to refocus. Maybe some of you out there do too.

3. The content that I do have on my site is ranking, so something I’m doing is working. Right now most of it is on the third page of Google, which I can only assume is just because of good SEO. I just have to scale up my output and outreach. This is very doable.

4. Some of the big life events and circumstances that were standing in my way have been solved. These were taking up way too much mental space in my brain (and hours of my day) and I’m finally ready to move through them.

So there you go. I apologize if this wasn’t a helpful write up for you guys in terms of strategies that are working vs. not working etc, but I felt like I just needed to be real here and let you know where I’m at.

I promise you that the next time I do a write up, there will be plenty of positive things to talk about. I can still do this, and you can too.

Colleen’s May Update for Coustii.com

The month of May has been completely focused on lots and lots of link building! Fortunately, I’ve really enjoyed getting to know other artists and webmasters in the music industry. It’s crazy the connections you can make all over the world.

I’ve been doing a combination of guest post writing and targeting link and resource pages. My goal is to get to 100 links to Coustii, before switching my strategy back to building more content. Right now, I’ve got 70 live links and still growing!

In the screenshots, you can see the spike in traffic at the beginning of May. We got a little extra boost from the NSP site reveal. My organic traffic is still small (about 900 in May), but we’re still climbing and all of my keywords are now ranking. I’ve even got a few hitting the first page of Google.

Traffic for May

The past month has forced me to be a bit more creative with my link building tactics. I’ve already knocked out my “easy” targets, such as sites accepted guest posts for guitars or ukuleles. I’ve started reaching out to markets that have a small tie to my particular niche. Then creating content geared towards both of our audiences.

I’ve learned that it never hurts to ask! Maybe a topic or article pitch is really a long shot, but it doesn’t hurt to try. Even if someone says no, you can try another idea. Don’t take no for an answer!

Quick Summary from Spencer

Overall, I’m really happy with the way that Niche Site Project 3 has turned out so far!  The coaches have done some great coaching, and the Samara, Ryan, and Colleen have put in a ton of effort and are starting to see some nice results.

As Samara continues to “lather, rinse, and repeat” with content, links, and monetization I’m quite confident that her rankings and earnings will continue to improve.

Colleen has put out a ton of great content on her site, and looks like she starting to get some nice links with her outreach and other link building efforts.  Even though the site hasn’t been monetized yet, I’m sure in the long run the money it makes will be well worth the effort.

Even though Ryan has had some hurdles that have kept him from working on his site as much as Samara and Colleen, I’m still happy with the progress I’ve seen.  Ryan is an extremely busy guy with a family, full-time job, and more, but has still managed to lay an awesome foundation for a great online business in the past few months.  We are all rooting for you, Ryan!

Hopefully, this quick report for the month of May on all the niche sites is helpful as you work on and build your very own niche sites.  All of these sites are really young and so perhaps the stats and earnings don’t look that impressive yet; however, this is too be expected with new sites.  In just a few short months, I’m quite confident that these sites will have grown to a point that is much more significant in terms of traffic and earnings.

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