The Niche Site Challenge Week 38
It’s week thirty-eight of the Niche Site Challenge.
For those of you who are coming into this challenge late and wondering what the hell I’m talking about, let me recap.
In May 2016, inspired by some tweets, I decided to create 28 new niche sites within one year. Those sites – which I’d only spend a maximum of two hours a day on – were designed to make passive income, build my skills with writing product reviews/sales letters, and also work as internet properties in and of themselves.
Since then, I’ve created around fourteen sites. Now, a few of those are pretty great, and get traffic and sales on a regular basis. Others have a couple of articles on them and get next to no traffic.
The way I see it – I still have fourteen weeks left.
Other people occasionally chime in on the comment section. Every week, I write an update with random thoughts included.
What I’ve Done In The Niche Site Challenge This Week
I spent loads of money. So much money I want to cry. But that’s the cost of doing business (and I’m exaggerating a little.)
I bought ten new domain names, and also paid for one of the last pieces of the puzzle for my software business challenge. That’s relevant because it’s something I’ll be using for all of my websites – both niche and otherwise – from now on.
Also, I’m switching all of my sites to SSL or https:// from now on.
Other than that – I haven’t actually launched any of the new domains because I’m having trouble setting up the domain name servers. Today has been a rather unsuccessful tech-support kind of day, which hasn’t been entirely interesting.
Still, we march on.
Other Things
Here are some random thoughts that I’ve found during the week.
It’s Best To Have Related Niches
I wrote ages ago that you’re better served by picking similar niches for multiple sites.
After all, the knowledge and subject transfer then helps you out – and you can even cross-link between your sites.
The annoying thing is that for the Niche Site Challenge, I haven’t followed my own advice. Every little hobby I have or interest I’ve shown has become its own little devil, and they’re all unrelated.
This is a pain and you should all avoid it where you can.
Every Site Will Be SSL From Now On
Apparently, SSL certificates are becoming a bigger factor in online stuff. They improve search performance and stop people’s data from leaking.
Now, with a niche site you’re not really collecting data, but if SSL becomes standard, your sites will end up penalised for it.
Regardless, I’m switching to using SSL for all sites because it provides a better experience.
The niche sites are going first because they’re easy, traffic is low enough that I can have downtime if needs be and they work as a litmus test – which is another benefit of building them.
I’m dreading switching my bigger sites over to https. Apparently all sorts of little errors can happen. We’ll see though.
Time On Site Affects Search Engine Performance
Here’s a little thing I found that’s probably obvious to everyone except me: time-on-site is a definite ranking factor when it comes to SEO.
I’ve got a few sites where I ran a little test and found this to be the case – notably, I haven’t changed anything else in the past two weeks apart from that factor.
The result is that more people are visiting the site via search engines. Whether that’s due to single page rank increases, increased impressions or a higher click-through rate, I’m not sure.
Still, all you need to know is that this is a factor based on my data. It’s just a little and irrefutable discovery I’ve made.
(Side note: Again… this sort of thing is what niche sites are good for. Big sites have so many confounding factors it’s pretty much impossible to isolate any one thing for effectiveness.)
Final Thoughts
Another week in the Niche Site Challenge done, and hopefully this new batch of sites will be up and ready by the end of next week.
Who knows?
We’ll see – tune in next week to find out.