Stand Out Blogger -

It has been two weeks since I announced that I had set myself a brand new niche site challenge of starting 4 new websites and create at least a $500/month income purely from search engine traffic (By March 2012) – so I thought it was time for an update!

We aside from heading away to Rainbow Beach for 5 days with my little family, I have been getting started on my first new niche site and I can reveal a little information about the niche I am targeting as well as the work I have done and the results I have achieved so far.

So Whats The Niche?

Now I’m not giving away the keywords I am targeting or even the exact niche I am targeting, but I can tell you three things that will give you a bit of an idea:

• I Will Be Targeting Australian Search Traffic (so .com.au or .net.au domains)
• All 4 Niche Sites Are In The Same Broad Niche (to allow networking)
• The Broad Niche Is Something To Do With ‘Health & Well Being’

Definitely a niche that I have never been in before but I am excited to see how these sites grow because it is definitely a ‘buyer’s niche‘.

How Has The Site Progressed?

Well the first site is definitely taking shape. After installing WordPress and my selection of current favourite plugins, I added my heavily customised versions of the fThemes Incorporate theme.

The next thing I did was do some more in depth keyword research using Market Samurai, and picked out about 10 extra keywords related to my niche topic and then hit up my article writer (read: How To Hire An Article Writer).

She is a fantastic writer and well priced, but as expected it takes her about 4 days to get my 10 articles back to me, so I decided to write a couple up myself.

Now, I knew nothing about the niche, so I spent a couple of hours researching what it was all about, to get a good understanding and wrote the content for the homepage, an extra page and a blog post (3 pages in total). And after that I wrote and submitted an article to an article directory just to get the indexing process start.

This is time when I went away for 5 days with no internet access, so I had no idea what to expect when I came home – but I was pleasantly surprised!

Not only had a couple of my pages been indexed, but my main keyword was ranking 16 in Google.com.au already!

How I Use My Outsourced Articles

When I got home, I was happy to receive the articles that I had got my writer to create for me and I wanted to share how I personally use them.

1. As Pages/Posts For My Niche Site
   I can’t write all the content myself so I always outsource the topics that I really don’t have an interest in or understanding of. I will probably use about 3-4 of the 10 articles on my site.
2. As Guest Posts On Other Blogs
   I definitely focus on quality over content for my backlinks. I’d rather have 5-10 backlinks on quality websites than 500 spammy, weak backlinks. Guest posting seems to provide very solid backlinks for me, so I have already had two accepted and will probably submit one more from this list of articles.
3. Submit Them To Article Directories
   Your link building strategy definitely needs to have diversity, and this is why I still submit to article directories and Web 2.0 websites (such as HubPages and Squidoo). I don’t worry about do-follow and no-follow, instead I try to create a natural spread of backlinks.

 What About The Results?

Google Rankings

No I already told you that I have a couple of pages index and the main keyword ranking quite well, but let’s look at some screenshots (with keywords blanked) to show you exactly how I am doing.

I still got a couple of posts that haven’t got indexed, but so far so good. Oh, and the orange ‘D:’ for those of you who don’t use Market Samurai, means that the keyword is in the domain – which just means the right pages are ranking for each keyword (not just tags etc).

Search Engine Traffic

Now while I cannot boast a flood of search engine traffic, I can happily announce that the trickle has started.

2 are for keywords I wasn’t actually targeting, but one was for keyword 4 above.

What About Monetisation?

Now I know Adsense has played a huge part in most of my niche sites so far, but for this site I don’t think I will use it. There are plenty of great products to promote and I really want to make my Clickbank checks a little more consistent.

I’ve added a Clickbank text adblock (that looks like an Adsense text ad), as well as a couple of image ads promoting Clickbank products and also testing a product on MarketHealth to see if it actually converts.

What Do I Think?

Definitely a promising start, and hopefully when the guest post links kick in I will see the rest of my pages indexed and some improved rankings. My goal at the moment is to add 2-3 new articles a week for the next couple of weeks as well as a couple more guest posts and articles. I’d like to see it hit 100 search visitors in September, which is button for my to start working on my second niche site of this challenge. Oh, and one commission would be a good start :)

Any thoughts? Comment below!