Niche Site #1 - Month 7 Update

Disclaimer

Due to the nature of the business model, I'd rather not reveal the website URL for now, nor too many details on the niche.

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Previous Articles:

Niche Site #1 - Introduction & Month 6 Update

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Activities

Content

This month has been full of activities!

I published around 40 new articles, indexed, and ranked somewhere in the top 60-70.

I'm satisfied with the volume output. Since the beginning of the year, 70 new articles have been published. The original plan was to create 150 articles in 2022, but that milestone will be achieved in the next 3 months.

This pace is possible thanks to WriteSonic, which does a great job with its AI content generator, allowing me to crank a new good article in around 20 minutes.

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Solving the Indexing Problem

In the previous update, I mentioned I was having issues in getting some of my pages indexed.

Thinking it was a problem from the Google side (as confirmed in the various online communities), I just let it be and waited.

All the news articles started to get indexed within 12 hours of publishing, while there seemed to be no way to unstuck those 20 pages from the "crawled but not indexed" status.

Eventually, I changed the URL (slug), set up a 301 redirect, and republished the pages.

Within 24 hours, they all got indexed.

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UX fixes

Google Search Console flagged some poor UX due to excessive CLS (cumulative layout shift) on mobile.

Just ads popping up after the page is loaded already.

Moved position and submitted the correction.

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Monetization

The Amazon Affiliate Experiment seems to work

Last month, I added some related products in the sidebar with an Amazon affiliate link.

"Niche Site #1" is not a product-related website, so it was more of an experiment... and I didn't have much expectation on it.

After a few days, I started to get some clicks and the first order!
Crazy how good it feels to make your first $1 through affiliate links.

I decided to expand this "affiliate product in sidebar" thing to all the articles on the website (the experiment was on a sample of 10 pages only).

It seems to go well, I have received 20 clicks so far and a few orders, for a total of $3.15 earned.

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Google Adsense still sucks

While Amazon affiliate links created a new hope for the success of this site, Google Adsense didn't make any progress.
I only made €3.52 out of 19 clicks coming from 6,394 impressions.

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Traffic Growth

Overall the site is still growing steadily, even though I was expecting much more traffic considering the 70 pieces of content published in a two months span.

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