Wave Issue 63

First...

Happy New Year!

I want to thank all of you for subscribing to my newsletter in 2021! I hope that you were able to find information that helped you with your niche sites and passive income journey.

Now that the calendar has flipped, it's time to get back to work on building those passive income sources.

I have a few plans in 2022 to help me with my niche sites, but also help you with building profitable niche sites. Some things I'm planning on this year:

Sell 1-2 sites this year - 1 will be very soon and I'm deciding on how to sell it now
Build 2-3 sites - 1 authority site and others are micro-niche sites that I want to test things with
Interviews with other niche site builders
Hire 1-2 VA's to help me with my work on sites
More case studies and guides - getting VA help will free up time for me to do these

How about you? What do you have planned for 2022?

I hope you have an amazing 2022 with lots of success!

SEO

SEO Office Hours - December 24th, 2021

Onely does their weekly recap of Google's SEO Office Hours with John Mueller. The topics covered in this one include:

Paywalled content and cloaking
Potential indexing issues
Product reviews update – affected languages and countries
Localizing pages for English-speaking countries
Adding dynamic content to pages
Rendering and indexing JavaScript files
Indexing URLs generated through search within a website
SEO sites as YMYL
Implementing breadcrumb structured data
Translating only some pages on a website
Crawl budget and automatically generated URLs
Crawling URLs with parameters

8 Ways to Use Google Trends for Better SEO

Google Trends is a great, Free resource to research keywords and topics. Oncrawl gives 8 different ways to use Google Trends for your content and site planning.

Find your niche
Identify relevant keywords
Get ideas for product categories
Avoid fading keywords
Find topics for blog and video content
Understand local trends
Watch what competitors are doing
Enhance your SEO strategy by analyzing Youtube search queries

Google Says There Is No Difference In SEO Value Between Nofollow, UGC Or Sponsored Link Attributes

Google's John Mueller re-confirmed that there is not difference in terms of SEO value between the three link attributes: nofollow, UGC and sponsored links.

Tools and Resources

The Redirectinator: SEO Redirect Mapping & Monitoring Spreadsheet

A very handy and free Google Sheet tool to help keep track of legacy and current redirect mappings and monitor whether a development team has pushed 301 redirects live to productions. Created by Jeff Louella and he has a couple other tools that are useful too.

Essential SEO Toolkit - It's a very simple, but super handy Chrome extension with links to various tools like BuiltWith, GT Metrix, Ahrefs, SimilarWeb, Copyscape and other site audit tools. While on a page you want to audit, click the extension and select an audit tool. It will take you to that tool's page and pre-fill the URL.

Discover Lost URLs - It's handy if you're on Wayback Machine regularly. It uses Wayback's API to pull all the URLs of a certain time period you set and pulls the Mime Type, URL status code, and Final URL if they were redirected.

Content

Recipe Blog SEO: Differences and Best Practices

Recipe blogs present an interesting case study when it comes to SEO. The way that they’re evaluated by the Google algorithm differs from other types of content, presenting new challenges for ranking well.

Interesting look at why recipe blogs have those long intros and other ways to monetize besides digital ads including digital and print cookbooks, meal plans, sponsored posts, and paid apps.

Link Building

Want to build better links in 2022?

A good collection of link building content from 2021 shared by Debbie Chew on Twitter. Links to different techniques like the "Teammate Technique" and "Triangle Backlink Strategy."

Education

The Ultimate Guide to Redirects in Technical SEO

An in-depth look at Redirects and how to implement them. Lots of common use cases, including:

Merging websites
Changing, updating, or removing content
Fixing pages returning 404 status codes
Changing site’s information architecture
Conducting a site migration

Authority Niche Site Teardown - Own The Yard - Amazon Affiliate + Display Ads

Doug Cunnington does few teardowns on affiliate sites that are/were public case studies for other YouTubers.

What I like to do with these types of videos is to look at the sites myself first, make some notes on my thoughts about the site. Then watch the video and see what I might've missed. It could help me find my blind spots when I'm reviewing my own sites on where I can make improvements.

Interview with an Affiliate Manager - 21 Insider Secrets - YouTube

Matt Diggity has a good chat with Daniel Lawman, affiliate manager for Fanfuel. It's good to see the other side of the table and how they look at affiliate marketers and what they expect from us affiliate marketers. They cover some good topics that we should all know, including:

What are common mistakes affiliates make?
What do the best converting sites have in common?
How should affiliates use an affiliate manager?
First touch vs Last touch
What's the best way to get a commission increase?
What kind of products bring in the most sales and revenue?
Which demographics spend the most?
What affiliates don't know about affiliate marketing

66 Content Marketing Statistics for 2022

Lots of interesting content marketing statistics here collected by Ahrefs. They can help you with adjusting your niche sites and content. There are content marketing statistics in these areas:

Content marketing strategy statistics
B2B content marketing statistics
B2C content marketing statistics
Organic search statistics
Blogging statistics
Video statistics
Podcast statistics

Here's an example of a statistic that can become actionable - 73% of people admit to skimming blog posts, while 27% consume them thoroughly.

Knowing that your visitors are skimming, look for ways to create scroll stoppers. Images, breaking up text, and bolding important copy are a good start to get them to stop scrolling and stay on the page longer.

Another interesting stat - There’s no correlation between Flesch Reading Ease scores and ranking positions.

So that means you don't need to write for certain grade levels or Flesch scores. Just write for your readers in a way that they will understand 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.

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!