This is a guest post by Mike and is an update on his area of the war for Niche Travel Site Battle. I usually just add these updates to the Niche Travel Site Battle War Room but as always Mike has produced a very nice post and I wanted to get it in front of as many people as possible.
Building niche sites is not new to me, but I saw this challenge as a great opportunity to get out of my comfort zone and try out a completely different business model. With the changes going on in Google there were several strategies I wanted to test. Before I even thought of a niche I put together a business model.
Niche Site Structure
- Low maintenance
- Low setup cost
- Google Adsense revenue stream
- Information resource site
- One day setup
- Forced funneled income (will explain below)
Once I knew what type of site I wanted to create I decided on a style.
Niche Site Design
- Clean and stylish
- No ads other than Google Adsense
- Structured navigation
- Short and descriptive posts/pages
- Visually appealing
Each of the design features and site structures were decided upon solely for the purpose of the business strategy.
Business Model Strategy
I wanted 100% organic search traffic so that each visitor was looking for specific information. The site would provide a general overview of information that would entice the visitor to continue their search. The only way to continue with their search on the site would be through a profitable link. No outgoing links for more information, free resources or external navigation in any form. This would create a forced funnel, whereby the visitor would be inclined to click on a Google Ad to move on, thus resulting in a high click through rate and ultimately revenue.
Choosing the Niche
The easiest information niche for the travel industry is a “Destination” niche. I needed a mildly popular destination that did not have too much competition. After some keyword research I chose a few spots and did a domain name keyword match to narrow it down. I chose http://cheapmalta.net
I purchased the domain at 9 AM on February 28th and by noon I was finished with the site minus the content. (due to time constraints on other projects the content was outsourced for $75) I had planned to write all of the content myself but I was needed on another project.
I used Market Samurai for my keyword research and settled on 15 keywords I felt I could rank number one in Google for. This would bring an average of 1800 visitors per day (in a perfect world) exceeding my goal of 50k visitors per month with an average click through rate of 28% and an average click rate of $0.63. This left me with a maximum potential income of $10,280 per month. Realistically it would reach 50% of that within six months to a year.
I made one modification to the Google Adsense revenue by adding an affiliate page for Expedia http://cheapmalta.net/check-malta-hotels/ This page was designed with no navigation so the visitor could do one of three things; book a hotel, click the back button or click a Google Ad. I did not want this page to be an exit from the site.
Getting Traffic
The only thing left to do was get traffic. I built, and still are building, link wheels to each of the pages for the various keywords. I use SENuke (Todd here: I’m not a user of SENuke, and am just investigating it now with the free trial, but it seems expensive) for building linkwheels. In addition to that I create various Squidoo lenses, post comments on blogs, educational sites, government sites and other high page rank blogs. The main techniques I use for link building are:
- Linkwheels
- Web 2.0 individual posts
- Article marketing
- RSS Aggregators
- Video marketing
- Blog Comments
I cannot use link exchange or blog rolls because I do not want any external links. This part is tricky because external links are important for SERP’s. To fix this problem I am making a list of information sites that rank high such as Wikipedia, Malta government sites etc…. No sites that have any sort of monetization. I also will be putting these links set to open in a new window so that the visitor does not leave the site when clicking.
This is a new strategy so I have no idea how it will play out. I guess we will see.
You can get all updates on each of the Niche Site Battlers over at the Niche Site Battle War Room.
About Guest Blogger
No serious research, didn’t even write the content.
Come on travel bloggers, I know you are all jumping on the same bandwagon desperate to make your money and travel the world but filling the web with poor travel websites is spoiling it for the rest of us.
Just more and more clutter!
Why not create something which will really benefit people, something to be proud of?
Just my opinion, I hope you don’t mind.
Hi Ross, just to give you a bit of background on my side of things. My approach is in building my site is that is SHOULD be valuable to my target audience (those searching for information on Tokyo). I think with Google’s ever evolving changes the best practice is to always put up sites and information that others find useful. I have had a look at mikes site and I don’t think it is clutter. This is of course my personal opinion, and in the Niche Battle we all have slightly different strategies and are putting them out there for the world to see.
I don’t see any problem with paying someone to produce content. Most large websites do this (Matador, BootsN’all etc). But there also has to be a monetization and business strategy to a destination site. This is usually through advertising.
And, I love all opinions here. Both those that agree and those that don’t. I believe vigorous debate around subject are what make us really decide what we believe in and why are doing things.
hey mike – thanks for the candid explanation, so how old is the site now and how much money is it making?
johnny recently posted..Are You Successful Is it me or do we have it all wrong!
A click through rate of 28% sounds insanely high to me. Or is there some trick to this, that I am missing?
Robin recently posted..10 Photos from Above- The Philippines
Mike, your site has a lot of quality content which shows that you can offer quality content while monetizing at the same time. I saw the link for the hotels, but I didn’t see any links for Google ads. Am I missing something?
Laurel recently posted..First Impressions of Manchester
@Ross I agree with what you are saying to a point. I would not start an information site about topic I was unfamiliar with. (there is too much fluff on the internet and it does not rank well anyway) I lived in Malta for several years. Please keep in mind that it is not a travel blog. It is a niche site in the travel industry.
@Todd SeNuke is pricey. They are about to launch SeNuke X which is even better. In order to maintain the number of sites I have I could not accomplish 1/10 of what I do with it. So for me it is just a business expense that pays for itself many times over every month.
@Johnny The site is a month old today. It already ranks for several of my keywords on the first page of Google. Some are in the first position. I do not have any ads active yet as a I am waiting until I reach position one for all of my keywords. This will give me a better base to judge profitability for this particular strategy.
@Robin 28% is insanely high. I agree. And since I admittedly stated that I am using new strategies it would appear that I am pulling numbers out of thin air. On the contrary, I have doing SEM for many years and have discovered many tricks and techniques to increase the CTR. The theme and navigation combined with content word count and subtracting certain topical information is key. The numbers I quoted are based on several years of backtesting and more than 500 websites.
@Robin The hotel page might make me a grand total of about $10 per year if I am lucky. It is actually another technique for Google ads. People tend to go forward in search not back. Since there is no external navigation they are limited to either a hotel or a Google Ad. The ads are there on the site but they are invisible at this point. Which makes the text on several areas of the site look out of alignment. I am not activating the ads until I reach my keyword goal.
Google does not like site that are created for Google Ads. They do not rank well at all. However, that is based on what people have done over the years to “play” the system. My goal is to provide a useful site with unique quality content that has been monetized to it’s maximum without taking advantage of the system.
Oops. Sorry Laurel the last one was for you not Robin
Mike Collins recently posted..Marsaxlokk- A Beautiful Fishing Village in Malta
It looks like a really neat site!! I can’t believe you were able to do that in a day. Did you get all that content for $75? Or did you add some of your own? How did you outsource the writing? Many questions, I know
Sabrina recently posted..Only in Texas – Religious Billboards
Thanks Sabrina,
At the time of my writing this post I did not have as much content on the site. I added a lot more myself after. I have a writer that charges $5 for 500 words. I provide the topics and any specific information I want included.
Once I get the content back I do the fact checking to make sure it is accurate. If you need a writer for content just contact me and I will put you in touch with him.
Mike Collins recently posted..Mdina Malta- Timeless Beauty
Thanks! I might get back to you on that. $5 for 500 words does not seem bad at all… I’m still in the super earrly stages of a little website I am planning (my first apart from my blog), so I am following the niche travel site battle religiously. So much to learn here!
Sabrina recently posted..Only in Texas – Religious Billboards
Mike & Todd — I checked out SENuke, though I haven’t downloaded it yet. It kind of smacks of ‘black hat’ techniques. Any feedback on that? Are people getting blacklisted using this software?
Hi Randy, I know that Mike has success with it. And some of the tactics are not really back hat but used in article submissions etc which is a very common practice. For me I have not tried this as at the moment the investment does not make sense for the number of sites I have. But this might change in the future. I will be trying out some other tools and will blog about them soon.
I can see how you would get the impression that SeNuke is kinda Black Hat SEO. It appears that way because in truth you ARE playing the system. It boils down to two options. For example I need to rank for a keyword which I will need to have at least 5000 backlinks in order to compete.
1.)I can try and convince 5000 of my closest blogging friends to put a link to my post on their page.
2.) Use strategies that my competition uses in order to compete.
People don’t like me enough for option one so I have to go with option two. As long as you stick to the rules then you are staying in the realm of White Hat SEO. Spinning content is perfectly fine because the content is not duplicate. There are no rules set anywhere that says your writing has to be “print worthy”. So for article marketing less than perfect writing is acceptable.
SeNuke does not do anything that would get you penalized with Google. Programs like XRumer is Black Hat. That uses spam tactics to get links. Stay away from those types of things.
Mike Collins recently posted..Bugibba Malta