Wave Issue 38

First...

I watched Black Widow this week and really enjoyed how fun it was. There were a lot of family dynamics and relationships in it that made me think about this journey of building niche sites.

This journey can be lonely as we design our websites and write content for different sites. There's a lot that we do in front of a computer day in, day out.

Okay...everything I do is in front of a computer. Just me and the computer.

My family is home with me too, so I'm never alone, but when it comes to the niche websites, it is just me. Depending on the site, I do have writers and a team I work with, but I also don't have a big team.

I rely on the people I'm surrounded by to help and support me with different things. And I support them with things they need as well. It's a support system, a family, whether by blood or not.

As the sites and earnings grow, you can grow the family with writers, editors, virtual assistants, project managers, and more.

I would also add to that a support system of those who are also on the same journey as you with niche sites. Learn from and share with each other.

Even if you're just starting out and don't know anyone personally, there are Facebook and Discord groups. Some YouTubers have their own groups that you can join to talk to others.

Course creators also have their own community groups like Matt Diggity's Affiliate Lab. I've taken his course and am in the private FB group for those in the course.

There are many experienced affiliate site owners in the group who have been doing this for many years and regularly make 5-6 figures. They offer invaluable advice from their experience and since they also took the same course, everyone there has the same foundational information.

Once you reach certain levels of knowledge and earnings, you're going to want to take the next step. It's important to have those at the next level you're trying to get to, so you can learn how they got there.

Never stop learning. That's one of the biggest reasons that I started the Niche Surfer Newsletter.

SEO

Google's July 2021 Core Update: Winners, Losers & Analysis

Lily Ray discusses her July Core Update insights and shows top winners and losers from the update. She covers domains and categories.

She always writes great, in-depth analysis posts after updates, so do check this out.

Google's June and July 2021 Broad Core Update Insights

Glenn Gabe of GSQi provides rapid-fire insights from the June and July 2021 core updates, as well as his "Kitchen Sink" remediation approach.

He always provides great insights into algorithm updates from what he sees on his client sites, so do check out his article. Here are a few things that he discusses:

June update reversals that happened with the July update
Health and medical sites
Finance sites
Sites with the same, or near-duplicate, content
Category adjustment based on Project Reviews Update flaw

Should I hide affiliate links? #AskGooglebot

John Mueller says that it's okay to use affiliate links on websites, but there are two things to keep in mind with affiliate links:

Website should provide unique content and value. Don't regurgitate product information from other sites.
Declare affiliate links for users and search engines. For Google, qualify your affiliate links using rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attributes. No need to cloak or use Javascript, the attributes are all that's needed.

The Ultimate On-Page SEO Checklist For 2021 (+ Cheat Sheet)

Your complete on-page SEO checklist. Find out exactly how to optimize your titles, descriptions and content to boost your rankings in 2021. Each simple step ...

Google's Inverted Index of the Web - SEO by the Sea

Bill Slawski gets into Google's Inverted Index that discusses how Google indexed query terms. It was first shared in a Newsletter for Librarians (really) by then-Googler Matt Cutts.

It's a good look at how Google's indexing works and how they rank pages according to the search query.

Be sure to read the linked web archive of the Google Librarian Newsletter as it's an easy explanation of how Google collects and ranks results.

Tools and Resources

Expired Domain Sale at Niche Website Builders

Expired domains are a great way to get a head start on new niche sites by shortening the Sandbox period.

Niche Website Builders is having a $1000 Off Sale on some of their expired domains. The ones in bold are $1000 Off:

Sigfrieds Call - Musical Instruments
Posh Girl Vintage - Fashion / Clothing
PCR Timing - Track and Field
My Boxing Gym - Boxing / Martial Arts
Ever Maya - Fashion & Lifestyle
Spinbad - DJ
Horses Arizona - Horses
Taste Ohio Wines - Wine

See all their available expired domains and packages.

Great Deals Out There for Niche Site and Content Creators

SerpWatch - Rank Tracker. I have this myself and it's a handy tool. I also get daily email reports of ranking changes, so I don't need to log onto the site if I don't want to. Their plans are separated by Keyword Checks, so be sure you account for that when thinking about the plan. For 1 keyword for a month that's checked daily, that's 30 keyword checks. Their lowest plan of 4500 keyword checks per month would be for 150 keywords.

WP Rocket - 25% Off all licenses until July 21st. Caching plugin to optimize the speed performance of your WordPress site.

Crello - Canva alternative for $49 lifetime. Great deal for access to 140 million stock images and a graphic design editor. Create studio-level visual content with an all-in-one design editor and thousands of ready-made templates.

Qwary - Typeform alternative to create forms, surveys, and collect feedback from visitors. Great tool to have in case you ever want to create forms. The value is definitely there when you compare the prices of Typeform and Survey Monkey.

123RF Stock - Stock images, illustrations, and vectors. If you missed out on the Deposit Photos deal, this one is great too at $39 for 100 downloads with no expiration date. I do see photos from smaller niches too. That's something that not all stock photo sites have.

Plutio - Very popular project management platform that also gives you the ability to create client proposals, send invoices, and get paid. If you want an all-in-one solution for clients with invoices, this could be for you.

Nifty - Another popular project management platform that's more full-featured for managing projects, collaborating on documents, and communicating with the team. But it doesn't have the proposals, invoices, and payments that Plutio has (it's in Nifty's roadmap). This is the one that I use myself to manage my sites. This deal ends in 2 days.

DealFeed.io - Discover Content Sites For Sale

Looking to buy a niche site and tired of going to multiple marketplaces?

Mushfiq at The Website Flip just released DealFeed.io, an aggregator of content sites currently on sale at major website brokers like Empire Flippers, Motion Invest, and Flippa.

They've only released this, but it looks very handy. They also offer due diligence services, so they'll do all the research on the sites for you to tell you what they think of the available sites.

Mushfiq is really priming his The Website Flip to be the go-to place if you're looking to buy and sell your websites. He already offers a lot of great educational resources on his site when buying and selling sites. Now he's added a source for deal flow and services to help you analyze available deals.

Content

How to Create a Winning Content Strategy

Ahrefs covers how to create a content strategy for your business and brand across different channels like your blog and social media.

They cover what a content strategy canvas is and how it helps a basic content strategy with five simple questions:

Who are you creating content for?
Why are you creating content?
What type of content will you create?
Where will you publish the content?
How will you create the content?

How to Optimize for Google Featured Snippets: A 12-Step Guide

Featured snippets can help boost brand reputation and drive organic traffic. Learn how to optimize for them in this 12-step guide.

They cover:

What are featured snippets?
4 types of featured snippets you can target.
A 12-step process for optimizing for featured snippets.
What’s new in featured snippets?
FAQs for featured snippets.

How to Revive Old Content and Get New ROI

Bruce Clay gets into breathing life back into old dead content on your website.

Optimize It
Promote It
Repurpose It

Link Building

Google Affirms the Value of Outreach Link Building

Google's John Mueller expressed approval of asking for links as a link building and promotional strategy... within limits

Boiled down - no money and no link exchange.

There's also another post that discusses link exchanges and some ways that people will try to trick Google's algorithm and quality team.

Education

SEO Machine Learning algorithms in Surfer

Michal Suski discusses Machine Learning (ML) for SEO strategy and content optimization.

Michal covers how SurferSEO can help with their NLP engine helps to optimize the content with Deep Learning by giving you the words and phrases to help generate full content.

They also have the Content Planner that gives you clusters based off a root keyword to help you cover a topic fully across multiple articles on your site. The clusters are useful and I do use the Content Planner as a great starting point when I'm looking to start new a new topic on sites.

Their Content Editor uses AI to create content outlines and draft paragraphs to help you and your writers plan out the content.

Like Niche Surfer?

Let me know! Reply or email me at [email protected] I’d love to know what you think and if you have any ideas.

I’d also appreciate it if you shared it with fellow niche surfers.

Have a great week with taking your niche sites to another level!