Wave Issue 59

First...

How was your Black Friday season with visitors and affiliate sales? Hope your sites all saw upticks and continue to see higher levels of both this holiday season!

One thing I've fallen into recently is researching and buying aged/expiring domains on auction from GoDaddy.

I never spent much time on GoDaddy auctions before until the past couple of weeks when I saw an expiring domain that was up for sale. The plan is to 301 it into a site I'm building with a couple partners.

With Black Friday sales, I saw a good aged domain that was available on one of the aged domain marketplaces. It was a perfect sub-niche for our site. It was a DR10 with about 7-10 good backlinks from sites in the DR50-90 range. With the BF sale, it would've cost ~$450.

I then thought, why not take a look at GoDaddy to see what's up there. It wasn't long before I found a DR28 domain on auction that was ending before the BF sale would've. The GoDaddy domain was an even better fit as it covered multiple sub-niches for our site and had 20+ domains in the DR50-90 range.

Since it was an auction, we didn't know what the price would be, but the auction would've ended before the BF deal was over. If we didn't win the auction, we would go with Plan B of buying the BF-deal domain.

In the end, we won the GoDaddy domain for $676, plus the $5 GoDaddy Auction membership fee to be able to bid on domains.

We're happy about acquiring that domain and hopeful for the boost it'll give the site we're building.

But now that's led me into buying more aged domains. I've purchased 7 other domains in the last couple of weeks on GoDaddy!

I definitely got them at much lower prices than if I would've gotten them from an aged domain marketplace. BUT I also spent a bunch of time researching the domains.

What do I plan on doing with all the domains? Depending on the domains and how they connect to my current sites, I have a few different options:

301 to Current Sites - I'll 301 relevant content to pages on my current site. The non-relevant content, I'll 301 to an Acquisition Announcement page on my site and internally link from there to important pages.
Build New Sites - I won't build any sites right away. My current plan is to recover old content fom Wayback Machine and let that sit to see how Google picks up the domains. Depending on what Google picks up, I'll add similar content to replace the recovered content to create a new site in the topics that Google likes.
Sell Domains - I bought a bunch and I probably won't get to all of them. My eyes got too big as I was thinking about all the potential with the domains out there! I might look to sell some of these.

Hopefully that will help give you some insights into aged domains and answer some questions for people who are interested.

SEO

Google December 2021 Product Reviews Update

The November Broad Core Update finished Dec. 1st. Think you were safe for a while before the next update?

Nope!

Google announces their December 2021 Product Reviews Update right after! It's supposed to take about 3 weeks to complete.

The timing of the Nov. 17th to Dec. 1st update now makes more sense, because they wanted to get this Dec. update rolled out before Christmas. Why ruin the holidays, right?

This Google Blog post gives more info about product reviews and a couple more things they're looking for with these reviews:

Provide evidence such as visuals, audio, or other links of your own experience with the product, to support your expertise and reinforce the authenticity of your review.
Include links to multiple sellers to give the reader the option to purchase from their merchant of choice.

Google November 2021 Core Update: Winners, Losers & Analysis

Lily Ray and Amsive Digital share their analysis of 1,408 domains within the U.S. index between the dates of November 16, 2021 (the day before Google announced the November Core Update) compared to November 23, 2021.

They share the domain and industry Winners and Losers during the week. For example, Pinterest was quite a big loser in this latest update.

Semrush Analysis of the Google November 2021 Core Update

Interesting insights by Semrush on the November Update. They covered industry volatility, position gains and losses, and more. Here're 5 industries that showed a 30% or greater increase in volatility relative to July:

Pets & Animals
Health
Real Estate
Autos & Vehicles
Travel

If you're in those industries, did you see much change?

How long to keep 301 redirects? #AskGooglebot

In this episode of AskGooglebot, John Mueller covers what type of redirect to use and how long a site should keep a redirect after a site move.

John says they recommend keeping the 301 redirect in place for at least 1 year. Google needs to see the redirect at least a few times to record the redirect. Be sure that all the links, external and internal are also pointing to the new site.

9 SEO Predictions for 2022 (and How to Prepare for Them)

Wondering what's in store for SEO in 2022? Matt Diggity shares the latest SEO trends and how to prepare for them in this video. Here are his 9 predictions for the coming year and what you need to do to stay ahead of the game:

AI content will continue to rise
Backlinks will continue to reign
Google won't solve the problem of parasite SEO
We’ll see more mixed SERPs and experimenting
Personalized content will increase
Engagement will become more of a factor
Topical Authority will become common SEO practice
We’ll see more core algorithm updates
SEO will be dead

SEO Office Hours, November 26th, 2021 - Onely Blog

This is Onely's summary of the most interesting questions and answers from the Google SEO Office Hours with John Mueller on November 26th, 2021.

JPEG and WebP formats vs. ranking
Deleting JavaScript vs. crawling issues
Featured snippets for different countries with the same language
Reassessing a website
Regular updates during core updates
Non-indexed content
Out-of-stock pages vs. ranking

Tools and Resources

2nd Phone Number For All Those Accounts You Need To Set Up

2ndNumber - Get a 2nd phone number, similar to Google Voice and Skype, using VOIP. This deal ends in less than 2 weeks on Dec. 17th.

The advantage with this service over others is you're able to get verification texts with Gmail, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media sites. The only one that I couldn't get working is LinkedIn, but all the others were working for me.

The FCC has clamped down on VOIP numbers because of spamming SMS messages. If that's what you're planning to do, 2ndNumber will disable your account as it ruins their reputation too. Many email hosting providers do this as well to protect their IP addresses.

This is an early startup though, so it's pretty basic and only usable through the web now. This is a great deal though. I bought 3 numbers myself for future accounts I'll eventually create. My testing was for a couple 650 area code (Silicon Valley) phone numbers, so results may vary. If you do have issues, you can contact support and they can give you different phone numbers too.

Get a US, UK or a Canadian phone number on two lifetime deals. $25 for 1250 credits and $50 for 2500 credits. Free to receive calls and SMS. They have different credit rates depending on where you're sending a SMS to or where you're calling. If all in the US, that's 1250 minutes or 1250 SMS per month.

Content

5 Niche Ideas That Will Get You LOADED In 2022

Authority Hackers Mark and Gael discuss the best niches to get you high profits in 2022. They give good insights in each niche and examples of sites in those niches.

Pet Products
Small Business / Remote Work Lifestyle
Health & Fitness
Personal Finance
Smart Home

Topical Authority Research - A Semantic SEO Strategy

Semantic search has changed SEO as we know it. As a result, topical authority is one of the most powerful semantic SEO strategies today. Discover some effective topical SEO research strategies to help boost your authority and gain more traffic.

How to Scale Content Creation

In this video, you’ll learn how to scale content creation without sacrificing the quality of your content. This is a good video from Ahrefs because it's also one of the toughest things to do when you're trying to grow your niche sites quickly.

Set up your system for project management - I use Nifty
Create SOPs - I use Frase for content briefs and outlines
Hire your team
Hiring freelance writers
Optimize your processes

The 9 Most Competitive Niches in Blogging for 2022! (And How We'd Break In)

Income School discusses the 9 most competitive niches and their tips on how to get into those niches if you want to get in. Find an angle and a subset of the niche to go after. Approach the niche differently. Here are the niches they cover:

The Cooking and Recipes Niche
The Fitness Niche
The Travel Niche
The Fashion Niche
The Medical or Health Niche
The Finance Niche
The Internet Marketing Niche
The Lifestyle or Influencer Niche
The Tech Reviews Niche

Best Blog Writing Services To Scale Your Business in 2021

Devin Hargrove lists out 31 content writing services and 6 different platforms to find freelancers yourself. It's not clear if he's used them all, but it's still a good list, rather than creating your own lists.

Education

Buying vs. Building an Online Business: Which Is Safer?

Good article from Empire Flippers comparing the risks and opportunities with buying or building online businesses. They cover startups and small businesses in general, but it's also relevant to niche sites. Each niche site is an online business after all.

Mushfiq at The Website Flip has a great Course on Website Flipping if you plan on getting into an online business. Whether you want to build or buy a site before selling it, the course materials are all relevant. It's all about optimizing your sites for maximum profit.

Keyword Search Volume: 5 Things You Need to Know to Avoid SEO Mistakes

Ahrefs blog post on Keyword Search Volume and not always taking the numbers at face value. I've been seeing more and more YouTubers talk about zero search volume keywords getting traffic, so this helps to reinforce that idea.

Search volume numbers are annual averages
Not all searches result in clicks
Advertisers may steal your clicks
Search volumes aren’t very accurate
Higher keyword search volume ≠ more traffic

The ones about clicks are very important because people need to click through to your site for you to potentially generate any earnings. As a final step before deciding to write on a keyword, it's important to actually perform the search yourself and see what the SERPs give you.

Ask yourself, is it a search that will generate a click or not?

8 Ways Affiliate Site Owners Can Boost Profits & Traffic Flipping Websites

Making money online flipping and selling websites can be challenging, but with a bit of elbow grease, you can boost your site’s revenue and sell it for a profit. This post walks you step by step through eight actions you can take right now to make your website more profitable, whether you’re a beginner or an experienced blogger.

Write Product-Focused Content to Attract Readers in “Buying” Mode
Use Structured Data to Increase Your Chances of Appearing In SERPs
Use Google Analytics to Optimize Existing Content
Set Up Site Search Tracking to Learn What Visitors Want
Consolidate or Delete Content to Improve Search Traffic
Create a Resources Page to Accelerate Income
Link to High-Quality Affiliate Landing Pages
Optimize Your Content with More Keywords to Improve Rankings

9 Things that DIDN'T work on my websites in 2021 ( Plus 5 Tips that did)

Cark Broadbent shares 9 things that he did during the year, but didn't help his sites for the money and time spent.

Even though these things didn't work for his sites, it doesn't mean they won't work for you. Niche and execution are two things that would have a big effect on success.

Here are some of the things Carl used, but didn't work out for him:

Google Web Stories
Pinterest
2nd YouTube Channel
Social Media for Websites

Carl also gives some things that did work well for him, they include:

Secondary Snippets
Shorter Content
Built a Strong Team

BOOST Your Blog Earnings 125% (3 Simple Hacks!) - YouTube

Morten Storgaard shares 3 tips on how to increase earnings on your site.

Enable video ads and upload your own videos
Negotiate better affiliate commissions
Remove sidebar widgets and only have ads in the sidebar

He recommends Lumen5, AI video creator, which I've been sharing in past issues because it's currently FREE for 1 year on AppSumo. But he says not to upload to YouTube, because Google's AI can detect AI-created videos and disable your accounts.

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.

Also, be sure to Whitelist [email protected] and/or drag the email to the Primary Inbox to make sure you don't miss the emails!

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