I am so fortunate to announce that in the month of September my wife and I welcomed two beautiful and healthy girls to the world. Unfortunately, the daddy tasks to two newborn girls and a 2 year old boy didn’t leave a lot of time to kick but on my niche websites. You’ll notice that this income report is substantially below the norm but i’ll also show the work that’s been put in place recently and the extremely positive results i’m seeing.
First off let’s start with a screen shot of the organic search traffic from the now not amazon website (more on that here) Best Canister Vacuums.net
Yeah. That’s bad. I essentially disappeared from the SERPS around mid September. To make matters worse, my niche website interview with Spencer Haws went live on NichePursuits right before the site dipped. A lot of people questioned how this website made nearly $500 a month when it couldn’t be found anywhere in the SERPS. I explained my rational and what I did to turn the website around here.
In addition to some site performance concerns I was also thrown one more mega twist from SkimLinks. They were going to start enforcing the Amazon ban on affiliates that live in states that require collecting taxes on good sold online. What this meant was that I had to switch the entire website from Amazon affiliate program to other merchants like KMART, WAL-MART and TARGET.
The drop in traffic really killed me but i’m also finding that my conversions are dropping when sending traffic to sites other then Amazon.com. Below you’ll see the income from this website in which 90% was generated BEFORE the traffic dropped and BEFORE i had to switch from amazon.
What’s Happening?
Once the Vacuum site hit its all time low in traffic and income I look a moderate risk and switched almost everything up. I redesigned the website completely, remove the WPZONBUILDER plugin (which created Amazon product pages) and also restructured the affiliate linking. I am now using SkimLinks server side redirects to append my affiliate IDs. This allows me to link out to the product pages without having to include my affiliate ID in the URL which can look spammy to users and maybe bad to the search engines (this is why people cloak their affiliate links). Since I don’t want to send any SEO value to my competition I always no-follow my outbound affiliate links. I thought having 10+ no-follow links per page might look a bit unnatural so I removed 90% of the text affiliate links and added them to images on the website. Finally, I purchased a link building package through THEHOTH.COM to help further diversify my link building portfolio. Definitely worth the $$$ in my book. Look at the turnaround i’m starting to see!
You can also see that i’ve returned to the first page of Google as well. Here is a screen shot from SERPfox the tool I use to track rankings – specifically the keyword “Best Canister Vacuum”.
Tools I Use For Selecting and Building My Niche Sites
Since starting my various niche website projects I have had a few people ask me what I use to determine my niches, keywords, and how I build my sites. Below are a few tools that I rely on to help build sites. These links are affiliate links so if you purchase through one thanks in advance. I would recommend these tools regardless of the affiliate offering so if you want to feel free to Google search the product name and it will avoid giving me a small referral bonus. Don’t worry – it’s all good – It’s completely up to you but still check out these tools and services!
For a keyword research & niche site selection tool I have been utilizing Long Tail Pro which you can get a free 10 day trial here. You can also read my official review on the software too.
THEHOTH.COM is a great link building service for build well rounded link profiles. I use them specifically to diversify my anchor text ratios so that I can send my most valuable links to my money website with the strongest anchor text.
I use HostGator for my web hosting. They also own SEOHosting which will allow you to utilize multiple IP addresses if your interested in scaling your niche website creation or even building links through expired domains. Use promo code “25OFFNICHEHOSTING” to save 25%
Plans For October
I’m a bit late posting this income report as we head into the second half of October. The good news is that with all the work i’ve put into the vacuum site and the results i’ve seen i’m simply going to take it easy and post new content each week. Where I want to focus my time is on the insurance niche website I’ve been struggling with lately. I’ve recently picked up a few expired domains that i’m going to leverage into creating awesome links back to that website. I also went ahead and purchased another THEHOTH.COM package for that website too. My goal is to use TheHOTH as a way to diversify my anchor text so that when I set up the links on the expired domains that I can used extremely optimized anchor text to push quality signals to the website without pushing my anchor text ratios skyhigh. I think i’ll see some great results from this technique. Of course, i’ll keep you all updated in next months income report!!
How did all of your guys’ websites do in September?
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