2 month niche site update — an expensive start

Things have been going pretty well, and I’m starting to figure out which writers I want to stick with, and which ones I’m going to stop using.

I ended up finding 2 experts in the subject, and they’ve been a great help in putting together insights that I haven’t been able to find otherwise.

I tried experimenting with an agency that writes content, and the results have been surprisingly great. It’s a little more expensive than my other writers, but they tend to be much more in-depth.

Key Metrics

We’re roughly keeping up the same pace as last month, and hiring the agency helped with a few extra articles.

Total Posts published73
Posts published in Month 123
Posts published in Month 250

Rankings

Google is starting to pick up a lot of the content, but I noticed there were some pages that still weren’t being indexed.

At this point, I’m going into Google Search console after after post is published, and submitting it manually to help try to speed up the process.

Date CheckedDecember 1 2022
Avg. Position21.7
Position in Top 3 on SERPS0
Position in Top 10 on SERPS2
Position in Top 50 on SERPS168

Traffic

We got a little bit of extra traffic this month due to some links on social.

One of my writers ended up linking to one of her articles, and some traffic some Pinterest is making up for almost 50% of total traffic (more on this later).

Time PeriodNov1-Nov 30
Monthly Pageviews518
Engagement time:53
Pages/Session1.56

Expenses

I knew this month was going to be expensive because all of my writers are going at the same time, and I’m paying more for trying out a few agencies.

I expect it to drop down a bit next month (hopefully).

Time PeriodOctober 8-Nov 1
Writers$2366

What I’ve learned this month

Upwork charges a 20% fee to my writers, which is borderline ridiculous.

While it’s been pretty handy to find people, it doesn’t make any sense to stay on that platform once I’ve made the connections with people I’ll be continuing to work with.

I also have some slight hesitations on if I’ve picked the right niche. It’s not a very transactional niche (the content is primarily to generate ideas for the end user), so any ad revenue will be significantly lower than what I’m used to.

Or maybe I’m wrong, we’ll see!

Plans for next month

Now that we’ve covered a bunch of competitive keywords, I’m going to start targeting search terms that have no competition at all.

I’m finding these search terms by looking for long tail keywords in my genre, with a minimum of 4 words.

An example would be something like: “best knife for cutting steak” or “watercolor paint for skin tones.”

This should hopefully get us ranking faster than everything else, even though it won’t be driving too much traffic.

Related

Starting a niche site from scratch

1 month update

2 month update

3 month update

4 month update

5 month update

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