The Timeline For SEO Niche Sites
I’ve received a few comments over the past year of Niche Site Challenge posts about the various timelines and content guidelines I’ve set out. A couple of these came from Phillip this week.
Basically, I’ve caused some confusion due to my ever-changing schedules and approaches to building niche sites and writing as well as publishing material. Add in the fact that there are waiting periods and success accumulates and you have a messy set of rules to try and follow.
Let’s try and sort that out in today’s edition of Niche Site Saturday.
There Are Two Timelines
Here’s the first point of confusion that people tend to have. I’ve probably caused a lot of confusion here because I mix the two and my schedule is pretty erratic.
Essentially though, there are two timelines when you’re building a project; especially a niche site that works based on SEO.
The first timeline is the timeline for “getting the work done.” Let’s say you plan a website and it’s going to have 50-100 articles on it. Say you take an hour to write each article. That’s 50 hours of work.
Now, you can do what most people do; write two posts a week for the year. That’ll get you there. Or you could write fifty and then launch the site. You also have to design the site, find the products and do the market research and all that stuff. We’ll talk more about this in the next section, but that’s your first timeline.
Your second timeline is the timeline for when it all starts coming to fruition – or not, as the case may be. If you build a website and stick one article on it and hope for the best, chances are that nothing will happen. Your website isn’t big enough and the sea of billions of bigger and older websites drown out your article easily.
Over time though, your website will gain traction, especially if you keep adding content to it, encourage traffic to it and otherwise nurture it. If you have a good combination of the right niche, right products and strong sales skills, then you’ll see traffic and then money.
We’ll talk about this more in a later section, but that’s your second timeline.
These two timelines are different.
The First Timeline: When Are You Going To Do The Work?
Caveat here: this is all my opinion and it’s subject to change as time goes on and I get better.
I don’t really buy into the “write a couple of articles a week and wait” idea.
For one thing, I get bored with projects and sometimes have creative fits on a particular subject that burn bright for a few days and then disappear. That’s just me though.
I also like my websites to look established from the get-go to avoid people coming, reading and leaving.
As such, I prefer to write quite a few articles up front before I launch a site. This also saves on costs because there’s no point in buying a domain name for a year only to have six months wasted.
Now, on the flip side, you don’t necessarily want to sink 100 hours into a project that might be doomed to fail, and no matter how well you do your research, pick the right keywords and do all the background work, some niches and sites just aren’t profitable.
The last thing you want to do is sink hours into a site and then find you’re faced with two choices: scrap the project and write off the time, or sacrifice even more hours to see if the project is profitable.
So, weighing those two possibilities up, let’s move into the second timeline.
The Second Timeline: When Will I See Success?
The second timeline is highly volatile and will depend on millions of factors. However, here are some factors that I’ve found to be true in almost every case.
Firstly, your website won’t start building SEO traffic until it’s reasonably well established. It will need a number of pages and those pages will need some internal linking (so they’ll need to link to each other as well as outward.)
Secondly, there’ll be a period where your site grows in traffic as you put in hours up to a certain point. So, you might have twenty articles when you start getting traffic, and every time you then add another article, you’ll get more visitors up to a certain ceiling.
Thirdly, there’ll be a point where your visitors will remain stable; at this point there’s no need to keep pushing for more and more visitors to come (which is time intensive.) By all means keep writing and trying to cover new ground, but there’s a ceiling to the popularity of a site and niche, and when you hit it you might as well pivot to something else.
Example
It might look like this (assuming you’re working to the 2 articles a week scale):
Weeks 1-12: next to no visitors organically.
Weeks 12-26; you have 24 articles at the end of week 12. This is enough that you’ll see some visitors. Maybe a couple a day, maybe more. By week 26, you’re gaining visitors through long tail, and because you’ve added another 25+ articles, that means considerable visitors. You should be able to tell what’s what with your niche by now.
50 articles and no visitors = something’s wrong.
500+ visitors a month and no sales = something else is wrong.
But assuming you’re getting reasonable traffic and some sales, you’ll know what sells and what doesn’t. You’ll be able to make some decisions.
Week 52 = You’ve got a hundred articles. Your website is getting 1000+ visitors a month. You make sales at a rate of 1%, which isn’t the best conversion rate in the world but at an affiliate fee of $10 an order, you’re making $100 a month.
That’s not bad… it’s $1200 a year and because you’re now working on an established site, every new article you write is worth more than the last. Some of your articles by this point have made you $100+ in affiliate fees. That’s not bad for an hour’s work.
But your website isn’t gaining new visitors at the same rate now, and you’re not buying a yacht on $1200 a year, so you want to start a new project. At this point, follow the advice in this article.
Leave it for a while, write the odd article when a new product comes out (or you have something to say) and pivot into a new site or project.
Final Thoughts
The above is a basic timeline.
The figures aren’t accurate, because I’m a writer and not a mathematics wizard. The idea is solid though.
Stage one = work hard and get enough content to get those initial visitors.
Stage two = get those visitors into regular numbers and build from there until you have enough data to determine whether you’re wasting your time or whether you need to change anything.
Step 3 = you’ve got the site doing well, keep going until your site is stable but not growing anymore.
Stage 4 is the cooling off and transitioning “stage” but you don’t really do anything special here.
The amound of work you’ll have to do, the amount of articles you have to write and the traffic and sales you get are all pretty unique.
Sometimes, you’ll create a niche site and it’ll get a ton of traffic from day one. Sometimes you’ll get a high traffic niche with no sales. Other times you’ll get low traffic but high conversions.
One thing is for sure; you’ll learn a ton more by experimenting than you will by not doing.