Wave Issue 44

First...

The first link below is a video by Shaun Marrs on Blogger Mental Health. It's such an important topic, but many people don't talk about it.

Building niche sites is a lonely affair, especially when you're just starting out. As you grow and possibly build up a team around you, you'll have others to talk to. But for the most part, it's all you.

The niche site journey really is like riding waves and why I felt Niche Surfer is a great metaphor.

When you catch and ride a wave, it feels great. It's like getting a bump in traffic or revenues.
When you wipe out on a wave, you're holding your breath and waiting until it's passed and you can come up for air to see where you and your board are. It's like getting a drop in traffic or revenues and seeing where it stops.
Majority of the time, you're paddling out and waiting for the next swell - it's lonely. It's like writing, publishing, and waiting for the traffic and revenue to come - it's lonely.

Surf with others for more fun and support. Find others who are also building niche sites for more fun and support on your journeys.

There are a number of Facebook, Reddit, and Discord groups where you can find others to talk to. If you've taken any courses, there are also private communities that are good because you can talk to each other based off the same foundation of information.

The best group I've been in for more experienced niche site owners is Matt Diggity's Affiliate Lab FB group, but that's only for students. If you want to take the course, here's a $200 Off discount. Everyone in there's taken the course and there are some heavy hitters to learn from.

Matt also has a free FB group, Affiliate SEO Mastermind, and some of the same people are there as well. It's more of an intermediate and up group in terms of SEO knowledge from my experience. He also just put out a video where he answers random FB DMs.

If you like Discord's setup, Chris from Niche Safari has a free group. It's a good group for beginners to intermediate.

Another good place to hang out is in groups for the niche you're in!

Get ideas for blog content in those groups. People there are constantly asking questions. You can answer them in the groups and/or create content to answer them if you see it's a popular question.

And if you happen to live in Taipei, hit me up!

SEO

Google’s Title Rewrite Dropped Our CTR by Up to 37%!

Wordstream put out a case study of what they did when they noticed that the CTR (click-through rate) of one of their top pages suddenly dropped by 37%. They needed to investigate where they grabbed the title from and more.

When going through to see what the SERPs give searchers, be sure to use a VPN if you don't live in the US (assuming that's your target audience). Even if you live in the US, I may still use a VPN because different regions may show different results too. I also use incognito mode to ensure my personal preferences aren't affecting the search results.

For VPNs, I use ProtonVPN now. I used to use ExpressVPN, but they were more expensive and I was having more issues with them. They weren't able to get over China's great firewall when I was there, so I switched over.

An update to how we generate web page titles

Google's come out with a blog post in response to the many complaints they've had over their Title Tags update for the SERPs. They point to 3 main reasons that they've been changing titles since 2012. Titles can be:

Very long.
"Stuffed" with keywords, because creators mistakenly think adding a bunch of words will increase the chances that a page will rank better.
Lack title tags entirely or contain repetitive "boilerplate" language. For instance, home pages might simply be called "Home". In other cases, all pages in a site might be called "Untitled" or simply have the name of the site.

Why does a site:query not show all my pages? #AskGooglebot

In this episode of AskGooglebot, John Mueller explains why a site:query is only showing 28 out of 180 URLs for a site. He basically says to use Google Search Console instead to see if your pages are indexed.

Tools and Resources

Keyword Chef Cooks Up New Updates

Keyword Chef has become even more useful with People Also Ask questions and Related keywords. The SERPs feature is still a big time saver to find low-competition keywords. No more manual SERP searches!

EasyWins.io - 120+ Strategies to 10X Your Website's Growth

Mushfiq's EasyWins.io is a great database of ways to grow traffic and earnings. As I've been going through it, there are a lot that I've already done, but I did catch some tricks that I implemented as well.

He's purchased, optimized, and sold 175+ niche sites, so he knows how to maximize earnings on sites. The database can easily act as a checklist too when auditing your sites to make sure you're doing everything you can to optimize for earnings.

It's a lifetime deal, so one payment. He also offers a custom website teardown video package for an extra $100. If you're newer to building niche sites, I'd say it's definitely worth the money.

Great Tools for Niche Site Owners and Content Creators

Peppertype.ai - Ends in ~2 days. A popular alternative to ConversionAI, because Peppertype is a lifetime deal. There's a limit of 70k words per month if you get Tier 3. That should be enough for single users. ConversionAI's Pro and Boss Modes are unlimited text, so that's better if you have multiple writers using it.

Outranking - A Frase / SurferSEO alternative. There's a quick product demo on the page, so check that out. Based on the tier, it gives you a certain number of characters per month from the GPT-3 AI writer. Frase has their own AI and SurferSEO has no AI writing.

Master - Can host online courses, live classes, one-on-one sessions, posts, and digital or physical products.

Wisecut - Video editing software that uses AI to edit and subtitle your videos. It enhances the audio pretty well from testing.

Content

5 ways to take advantage of trending topics

Good article with 5 tips on how to use Google Trends to find opportunities to drive more visitors and earnings in your niche.

Use trends to create new content
Use trends to revive and republish old content
Boost affiliate marketing revenue with trends
Ignite your email marketing strategy with trends
Turn trends into products and services

Education

We Found a Ridiculously Easy Way to Increase Affiliate Income

They talk about adding ways to try and generate affiliate income in more informational articles. They talk about adding a reusable block of favorite tools at the bottom of posts.Reusable blocks are a great feature in Gutenberg and if you make a change in one post, that same block will change in other posts.

BUT there are times you don't want that same change across all the posts. In that case, click the three dots and select "Convert to Regular Block." Then it becomes a one-time use block only for that post.

Website Merger and Acquisitions with Mushfiq

Great discussion by Mushfiq on Doug Cunnington's YouTube channel about buying sites and merging them into his sites.

Mushfiq gets into the details of different approaches that he takes. All great info if you're looking to grow sites quickly.

The Top Skills to Look for When Hiring Your Next In-House SEO

This article is about hiring an in-house SEO and what to look for. The article is targeted to businesses, but I feel that it's actually relevant for all of us building niche sites and trying to get these sites ranked.

Most of us need to be a jack-of-all-trades or at least need to understand the broad strokes of what is needed to get sites ranked. We focus on our strengths and fill in the weaknesses by outsourcing.

Until you're making $1000s/month, most likely you need to do the On-Page, Off-Page, and Technical SEO yourself. You are the in-house SEO expert.

Go through this article by thinking about the skills that in-house SEOs must have. Then try to objectively think about what you can and can't do.

For those that you can do, continue to improve on those strengths. Crush those areas and that's going to help your site grow. For those weaker areas, I'd say you not look at it now and worry about it later.

Unless you're in a highly competitive niche, you shouldn't need to be tops in all areas. If you're just starting out with niche sites, you shouldn't be in a highly competitive niche anyways.

How to PUNISH & FIGHT BACK Against Copycats

Mark and Gael share tips on how to deal with people that copy your website content.

This a good video with many tips on what you can do. How to fight back and screw copycats with some sneaky tips.

It's a fun discussion and I found myself laughing lots of times.

Case Study

Blogger Mental Health - 7 Full Time Bloggers Experiences!

Shaun Marrs put together a round-up video of bloggers talking about mental health. Besides Shaun himself, the others are:

Carl Broadbent
WP Eagle
Passive Income Geek
Luke Jordan
Hasta La Vista Boss
Emilia Gardner

Sold Website for 6-Figures in 10 months - est. $200k Profit

Great Twitter thread by Ted French on how he bought an expired domain at auction and build that site to sell in 10 months. He's been building sites since 2015/16, so he isn't new to the game. He goes through the steps he took:

Assessing and buying auction domain
Wordpress, plugins, tools
Testing articles and subtopics
Keyword research
Internal linking and anchor text
Pounding out content and optimization
Link Building
Earnings and the sale

Let’s Break Down the Numbers on My Backyard Life

These are the numbers for a 2 yr old site with 550 posts that gets 300k visitors a month. They made over $12k in July from Mediavine ads.

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!