March 16, 2011

A Site On Diabetic Shoes – Another Niche Site Duel Update (#5)

It’s been some time since I talked about my diabetic shoes website that I started as a part of Pat and Tyrone’s Niche Site Duel. In previous posts (1, 2, 3, 4) I discussed (among other things) my feelings about using spun content or mass auto generated article submissions. I know they work and all but I’ve never felt they were something I would feel comfortable doing… so I haven’t.

Instead I’ve built my site (and backlinks) up slowly with unique content I’ve written myself. I have also focused on building my backlinks by focusing on building up only a few backlinks from the major revenue sharing sites and a few strong article directories and then backlinking those URLs to make them strong pages on their own passing a lot of link juice.

What I’ve Been Publishing Lately
Lately I’ve been adding more content to the main diabetic shoes site and some of it I have been publishing based on long tails of things already drawing trickle traffic as well as on other keywords which will actually help the site be a better resource to real diabetics with real foot problems. Basically I do want this site to have a wealth of information on it that is helpful to anyone needing these products and this kind of information.

Some of the keywords I’ve gone after have also been carefully selected based on their difficulty level as defined by Niche Refinery (see my Niche Refinery Review for more), the proprietary keyword selection tool available to members of The Keyword Academy.

Site Indexing
As a result I have built a site of roughly 16 pages plus tags, categories, and administrative pages. The whole site is basically indexed just fine (107 results for the site found in Google as of today’s writing) and many of the pages are ranking well for many long-tail keywords and moderately well for some shorter keywords. One suggestion I may have in this area for you is to get each of your category feeds setup under Feedage as well as your main blog feed. I wrote this article on submitting your InfoBarrel RSS Feed to Feedage a while back which may not exactly be focused on blogs but should help you understand the process nonetheless.

At this pace it will be a while before I take any 1st place rankings for any major traffic keywords but in my book slow and steady, calculated and intelligent design of content publication and backlink promotion will always win in the long run.

Site Design
http://bestshoesfordiabetics.com
It took me a while but back in January I finally worked on the aesthetics of the site a bit by adding a (bit) more “attractive” header. I also set up an appropriate contact page complete with working email form. I should have done this from the get-go but simply didn’t. I have some trouble with building aesthetics when I know there is no search traffic coming in.

I still plan on working more on site design in the coming month but only a little at a time. As I build more content and work on better monetization the site design and aesthetics should slowly change for the better. In the end I want this to look professional but not flashy at all and I do want the site to remain largely text based. My idea is to make many of the pages on the site feel a bit like a store to stay in line with Dave’s Amazon layout for blogs.

Traffic And Monetization Methods
Today the site is roughly 3 ½ months old. I went live on November 4, 2010 and as of today’s writing is starting to make some decent gains in search traffic. I’m slowly adding backlinks to the site in general from the revenue sharing websites as well as the revenue sharing bookmark sites and will be starting to increase my backlinking effort from PostRunner guest blogging submissions (see my post explaining what PostRunner is). I expect in not too much time I’ll continue to see good improvement in the way the site responds to search traffic.

For months now I’ve had Adsense on the site in addition to Amazon affiliate links but as I get more and more involved with Amazon’s affiliate program every day I am starting to lean in the direction of Amazon.

I have also been reading Dave’s excellent material on Making Money On Amazon which I HIGHLY recommend you read (I’ve linked to it twice now already!) and have been slowly implementing some of his advice into my site in the way of side bar links to Amazon product categories and building some posts up as an Amazon store on top followed by an informational blog post on the bottom.

This is new for the site so I haven’t really been able to measure the results of these changes quite yet but I can see how they will help. On my next report I’ll have to add to this topic with my observations on the monetization layout.

In the future I’d like to build in some integration with some specific medical supply stores (diabetic supply affiliate programs I’m thinking) but as always I like to see some traffic first before trying to satisfy their needs with ads and products.

Results so Far
So how has the site been doing so far? Not bad but there’s a lot of room for improvement. Over the last 30 days the site has seen 489 unique visitors with 76 percent coming from search engines. My main low volume keyword: “best shoes for diabetics” brought 18 unique visitors to the site over that time period and I currently rank #3 for it according to Scroogle. Some other long tail keywords worth mention include “best diabetic shoes” and “shoes for diabetics” ranking 7 & 92 respectively. With my upcoming PostRunner submissions those numbers should improve notably.

Always do your searches in Scroogle as your personalization is stripped out of the search results and you get a more accurate picture of where you rank.

As far as earnings on those visitors goes, over the last 30 days I have made $30.60 in Adsense and $25.63 in Amazon earnings for a total of $56.23. Since inception the site has made $48.51 on Amazon and $53.57 with Adsense totaling $102.08 in its first 3 ½ months. Again, not bad but I really should have spent more time on this project considering my last month saw revenue of over fifty dollars on less than 500 unique visitors. That’s a rate of more than $100 for every 1000 visitors which is pretty darned good.

In the coming weeks and months I expect to do some heavy backlinking to the site from PostRunner submissions. That will start inching my search rankings higher and I’ll start seeing some really good traffic and earnings if this earnings pace continues. Obviously I will continue to edit my pages and tweak the placement of monetization links to maximize my revenue per visitor.

One Side Note
I have been busy publishing my 28 days to start making a living online series and much of what I have done for my Diabetic Shoes site has followed what I’ve been discussing over the last couple weeks. I haven’t followed it to the letter or anything but only because I am slowly building the site and because I have access to PostRunner for my backlinks. For a beginner with no cash flow, many people prefer to stick to the free methods before investing in any programs.

Are you participating in the Niche Site Duel, let me know in the comments because Pat’s list is too long for me to follow along with them all. Good luck and good work guys.

All Other NSD Posts
NSD1 - Niche Site Duel #1 – I’m Jumping Into The Game - November 4, 2010
NSD2 - My Diabetic Shoes Site Is Seeing Results After 4 Days - November 7, 2010
NSD3 - Making Progress On My Diabetic Shoes Niche Site - November 17, 2010
NSD4 - Providing Value With My Diabetic Shoes Site - December 31, 2010
NSD5 - A Site On Diabetic Shoes – Another Niche Site Duel Update - March 16, 2011
NSD6 - Benefits Of Backlinking On Revenue Sharing Sites - March 21, 2011
NSD7 - Diabetic Shoes – How My Niche Site Earns (1st $100+ month) - April 1, 2011

For reference here is the Niche Site Duel hub on Pat's site.

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2 comments:

  1. Hey Brian,

    It looks like your niche site is going well! Keep up the great work (you'll always have my support). :)

    And to make $56.23 already? That's definitely exciting, especially if you can continue to earn money on a residual bases throughout the months (with literally no additional work involved). And I'm sure your niche site will only continue to grow.

    Christina

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  2. Yeah, I'm really excited about this site - I expect it will be a very lucrative site for me this time next year... actually it will probably be pretty lucrative for me by summer seeing as though it's making over $50/month already.

    I'll be sure to keep updating on what I'm doing to the site and how it's doing, and I hope you have similar successes with your fish sites. The best way to make them work is to monitor what is already working on the site and build off of those posts. let your traffic guide the way you develop the site.

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