Niche Website Project – Month 4 Report

Back in November last year, I started a niche website project, using both typical manual post writing, as well as programmatic SEO techniques.

If you haven’t, you can read the month one report, the month two report, and month three reports.

Now that it’s early March, it’s time to report on the results of my fourth month of this experiment; February.

Contents

In each of these monthly niche website reports, I cover the tasks I have set myself, the content I have created, and the results for the month, broken down by three areas, being SEO, traffic and revenue.

By writing these reports, I hope they help educate others in niche website building, and possibly provide some inspiration for you to have a go at building your own niche website as well.

• Tasks and progress
• Website content
• Month results
  • SEO
  • Website traffic
  • Revenue
• Summary

Tasks and progress

I have had many things going on in my life outside of this site, so unfortunately this project had to take a back step for most of February.

The great learning here though is having a lot of programmatic content posts already scheduled in advance means that the site didn’t stop publishing every day.

I always try to have a number of posts scheduled in advance on any blogs I manage. This way, if I do end up unwell, or away, or for other reasons too busy, then at least the site doesn’t go dormant. I always suggest to others to have at least a months worth of posts ready to go, or scheduled in advance.

If you are posting two posts a week, that means having eight articles up your sleeve for when things get hectic. You can either schedule these posts, or have them ready to publish and leave them as drafts, assuming they are evergreen topics, and will not expire in time.

Content goals

As mentioned above, I sadly had hardly any time for this experiment during February, however I already had over 150 posts scheduled to publish. This means that I can have that break and not affect too many things.

I obviously have catch up work this month, in writing more non programmatic posts, and getting them scheduled.

In any case, the site had 87 new posts go live during February. Out of those posts, there were 12 manually written and created articles, and the other 75 were programmatic SEO posts.

There are now 593 posts in total on the website, which count for 868,597 words. Not bad for a four month old website, indeed!

Here’s the monthly breakdown.

Month 4 results

Ok, now onto the actual niche website project results for the month of February 2023. In each of these niche website reports, I break the results down by three areas; SEO, website traffic and revenue.

SEO

I started this month with 40 unique domains pointing to my niche site, and ended it with 51 unique domains. They consist of 220 backlinks.

The domain rating only just moved from 16 at the start of February, to 17 at the end. The site now ranks for 374 keywords.

SEO metrics for month four

Website traffic

Next up is the Google Analytics stats. Last month I was so excited to report 578 unique users.

This month I am very pleased to report that the traffic has had another big jump, with 1,700 unique visitors to my niche website.

Website traffic for month four

Reaching this volume of unique users has made me think that the publishing velocity is helping me get reasonable rankings quickly. It’s obviously hard to know of course, but this month has been quiet on all other fronts besides the scheduled posts I already had ready.

There are two quite distinct peaks during the month. One if related to an event which the niche website ranks for, and the other I haven’t been able to determine why; Google Analytics shows nothing out of the ordinary in traffic or user acquisition.

Here’s a table showing a breakdown per month showing both total users as well as page views for this niche website project.

It’s an interesting curve upwards, and it will be interesting if the traffic trend continues (fingers crossed!). That will take me closer to adding display ads as a first step towards monetising the website.

Revenue

None, zip, nada.

As I have mentioned previously, I would rather wait until I have a good amount of monthly traffic before I start worrying about monetisation. Sure, the site costs me a small amount in hosting and my time, however it’s not like a typical business where I have any big outlays at the start.

In Conclusion

The big learning for this month on the niche website project, is always have content scheduled in advance. I was super busy on other projects, and couldn’t afford to spend much time at all on this experiment. If I didn’t have content ready to go, this report would have looked a lot less positive I’m sure.

Is there anything in this project that you would like to know more about? Let me know in the comments, or via the usual socials.

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