Wave Issue 78

First...

Last week I gave a What Would You Do? and said that I'd tell you what I'd do.

Here's a recap of the situation:

Here are the key background items to know:

Large authority site

Generates 5-figure monthly income from affiliate sales, courses, and ebooks

100K+ visitors per month

What would you do? Would you:

Add display ads to ALL the pages?

Add display ads to informational pages only?

Skip display ads and focus on sales conversions?

Other...

What I would do is #3 and focus on converting sales because the margins on products are high and revenues will grow faster.

In SEO, there's always the "it depends" answer and that's true. There are many variables that you can add to the equation that could change my answer. But I wanted to keep it broad for this and see what the responses would be like.

For me, here are my thoughts about the 3 background items. I did some quick math:

Assuming base numbers of $10k monthly income and 100K visitors, the site's Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) is $0.10. In Revenue Per Mille (RPM) terms, that's $100.

With that amount of traffic, the site would go with Mediavine or AdThrive usually. Either way, obtaining a $100 RPM through display ads would be very difficult.

Now, the site is already doing well with ARPU, so I would focus more energy on looking to optimize current revenue streams.

Are there ways to optimize conversions on landing pages?
Are there ways to optimize the current blog content?
Are the email campaigns optimized? Abandonment cart emails?
Is there new content that you can create to drive more traffic? For every 1,000 visitors the site is able to bring in, that's another $100.

Now, if the site owner wanted something more passive, they could add display ads to a few non-sales/money pages to test. If everything looks good with visitors not being bothered by the ads and the site is still working well, then they could expand to all the non-sales/money pages.

My assumption is it's a large authority site and the site owner is probably working on this 100% of the time or at least a majority of the time. So, I would focus on optimizing what's already working with this site.

Niche Creators

Niche Creator Q&A Interviews

This week's two Niche Creators are very active in sharing their knowledge. One shares on Twitter mainly and the other on YouTube, as well as both of their blogs.

Check out their interviews:

Paul is big on Twitter and is in the middle of starting a new 50-site portfolio(!) - because his current 18 isn't enough for him. Great insights from him

Ben is the partner of one of last week's Creators - Jeff Bridenstine at Passive Income Unlocked. They've been sharing great tips and info with their YouTube channel and blog. They recently shared an update to their "No Stone Unturned" Case Study.

Ted French Made $200,000 in 1 Year Using This Aged Domain Strategy

Ted French shares a ton of awesome tips on the Niche Pursuits podcast. Including how he sold a site built on an aged domain for $200,000.

Ted also did a Niche Creator Q&A a couple of weeks ago, so be sure to read that if you haven't already!

Income Reports

Q4 2021 Report: October, November, December

Empire Flippers takes a look back on what they did in Q4 2021 and the year, with the numbers to tell the story of what was accomplished. It's rare to get an inside look like this!

They share all sorts of business and company numbers. Very cool that they share the financial data with everyone. They had $38,676,249.95 in brokered site sales with 2 big FBA sales of $12M and $11.8M.

SEO

Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid — Whiteboard Friday

Google recently made updates to the way they rewrite title tags, so Dr. Pete takes you through some of the new data they've collected. In addition, he shares three titling patterns to avoid if you don’t want them rewritten:

Keyword Stuffing Light
Superlatives
Site Architecture

These 3 patterns are about taking more control over the title, so that Google has less reason to rewrite them.

Measure Health of a Niche Site: 3 Basic and 4 Out-Of-Box Ways

It's important to continously measure how well your niche sites are doing. Revenue increase is one metric. Mushfiq shares 7 ways to ensure your site has longevity.

He shares the 3 Common Ways to Gauge Health with traffic, revenue, and domain rating. But he also shares his 4 Out-of-Box Ways that are great tips.

Keyword Positions #11 to #100 Stable or Growing
Diversified Traffic To Top Pages (<15%)
Diversified Anchor Text Profile
Diversified Backlinks With Varying Domain Rating

There's a lot of great info in here to consider for your affiliate sites. How healthy is your site?

Tools and Resources

Great Deals Out There for Niche Site and Content Creators

Niche Website Builders - Easter 2022 Sale

20% More Content with Aged Domains and Content Packs
10% Off Guest Posts, Niche Edits, Shotgun Skyscraper and HARO*
10% Off Link Packs and Combo Packs*
Discounts on Subscription Services will be applied to the first 2 monthly payments.

Optinly - Customize eye-catching pop-ups from templates based on your marketing goals on WP. Create unlimited pop-up campaigns with triggers for device, exit intent, time-delays, and more.

Acumbamail - Build email marketing campaigns, automated digital workflows, and responsive landing pages within a single platform.

SMS-iT Decentralized - Get unlimited two-way omnichannel messaging with over 51 features including SMS, MMS, email, voice, and more. Alternative to Twilio.

Bit Integrations - It's a simple integration plugin for WordPress that can send data from WP to another program. For example, after a user submits a contact form, data can be sent to a Google Sheet, CRM, and email campaign software.

Content

FAQ Blog Post: Easy Copywriting Technique to Get Fast SEO Results

Samuel Schmitt discusses FAQ Blog Posts as an easy SEO copywriting technique. He defines it as:

A FAQ Blog post is a content format built around questions and answers and located within your blog section.

It's different from a FAQ page that generally covers questions about your products or services. It's also different from the FAQs section that you add onto the end of blog posts. The FAQ Blog Post could even become your content hub's pillar page that redirects to subpages of your topic cluster. In this article, he covers:

How to gather content ideas
How to organize your copy
How to keep your content always up-to-date

The Evergreen Method for Growing (and Maintaining) an Email List

Good tips on growing email lists and making money online with blogging from Chris at Niche Safari. He's made courses and email campaigns for his niche sites.

Love the tip of creating 52 emails at one time!

He also gives a shout-out to Niche Surfer!

All Affiliate Websites NEED to Do This...

Do you want to know how to avoid penalties and instead get tons of traffic to your site? In this video, Matt Diggity shares what he and his team learned is the best ratio of informational and commercial content for websites in various niches.

Analyzing 1517 sites, the average ratio of sites that survived the Google Product Review Updates is 67% informational, 29% commercial, and 4% other pages.

You can also check out the article if you prefer reading.

Link Building

Internal Linking: The SEO Superpower

Why are internal links to topic hubs such a powerful SEO tactic for publishers? Barry Adams explains the details and provides some best practices in this article.

It's a good article covering news publishers leverage the value of internal links - specifically links inside articles to other pages on the same site - to power their SEO strategy and enable rankings. He answers many popular questions:

Do I have to link every mention in an article to a topic page?
How many links should I include?
Do links to related articles count?
Can I use abbreviated phrasings of an entity name as a link?
Can I still use tags underneath an article?
Are section pages also topic hubs?
Should we automate internal linking?

Education

BrightonSEO Slides April 2022 - SiteVisibility

The BrightonSEO Conference was on April 7th and 8th. These are a collection of the speaker's slides from the conference!

It doesn't seem like all the talks have slides uploaded yet, but there are many up there already.

Case Study

Ranking in 24 Hours in the Competitive SEO Niche

Stephen Hockman from SEO Chatter shares his case study of using Keyword Chef to find keywords for 45 articles. Those articles brought in from 3 to 1,507 visits per URL between January to March 2022. Here are the highlights:

Published 45 articles all between 1,000 – 1,500 words each
Nearly all articles ranked in 24 hours on the front page
Focused on topical authority and understood search intent
Used on-page optimization tactics
The total revenue earned was $377.39 from display ads in 3 months

Keyword Chef is a favorite keyword research tool of mine. LowFruits is very similar and has been adding extra metrics and features to it. Lately I've been preferring LowFruits because I'm able to see things like DA, and have a bit more flexibility in filtering and sorting.

They're both great though, so check them both out if you haven't yet.

Stephen was also one of the first Niche Creators interviewed - Check it out here.

LowFruits Case Study Site, Month 6: Niche Reveal!

Dim continues his case study that's now in Month 6, also the time for the big niche reveal - Barbecue!

He gets into the reasons why he chose that niche and the other niches he considered.

The case study uses keywords found on LowFruits with a minimum of 6 pieces of content each month. He's gotten consistent growth since he started the site in October 2021.

There are now 63 posts on what was a brand new domain and had 1300 pageviews in March.

Motion Invest: 6-Month Review Of 49 Website Listings (Data with Insights Revealed)

Mushfiq at The Website Flip analyzed the AHREFs traffic data for 49 websites that were listed on the Motion Invest marketplace. It contains a lot of great insight and shows that even though a site is listed on a marketplace that has some vetting in place, you still need to do your own due diligence.

He looks at organic traffic changes and 1st page keyword changes. There were an equal number of sites that increased, as well as decreased in traffic. More websites experienced 1st page keyword declines than increases though.

He also gets into Motion Invest's "Quality Control" with 3 insights:

Some Listings Have Poorly Written Content
Unrelated Niche on an Aged/Expired Domain
Watch Out for AI-Generated Content

I like that he digs into Motion Invest's vetting process and potential risks buying sites from there. The quality of sites now is all over the place, so I definitely recommend that you do your due diligence.

I purchased a site from Motion Invest in 2020, but it wasn't in the marketplace like it is now. Back then, all the sites were sold by Motion Invest directly. They were ones they purchased, fixed up and resold. The sites they had back then seemed to have better foundations than they do now.

There are still good opportunities on Motion Invest as the data shows, so just be sure to do your research.

Doubling Organic Traffic (YMYL SEO Case Study)

A good case study of what Matt Diggity's team at The Search Initiative did to more than double their client's organic traffic in the YMYL niche.

The 3 main things they did were to:

Optimize your website to build E-A-T
Add valuable informational content to rank for FAQ-related keywords
Leverage your competitor’s link profiles to boost your own rankability

Business Ideas

15 Passive Income Online Businesses That Give You Total Freedom

Empire Flippers shares their top passive income online businesses. There are obviously lots of these types of lists out there, but this one offers great insights because they have the data points to be able to share numbers and not theoreticals.

They're able to provide sale multiples and team makeups to go along with the business models. They also have a "This Business Model is Suited to:" section for each online business. For Affiliate Sites, they say:

Someone with an interest in content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO)
Someone who is a creative marketer
Someone who enjoys following and reading blogs
Someone who has worked in journalism or a writing profession

Is that you?

News

Mediavine University Opens

Mediavine opened their University platform giving members:

"Access to paid courses on growing traffic, raising your RPM and more, taught by Mediavine team members & other experts."

Mediavine also offers many YouTube videos and blog articles. Not sure how their first course for $85 is different from those resources. If anyone has purchased the course, I'd be interested to know!

Personally, I don't believe in a company/platform selling courses on how to generate more income on their own platform. That should be part of their marketing/educational budgets already. The more their Publishers make, the more the company makes. They already take a cut of ad revenues that the Publisher makes.

As for what Ezoic provides, here's an Ezoic blog article on the key resources they provide Publishers with links to their trainings and YouTube videos.

AdThrive has a Resource Center themselves that's free for their Publishers.

Like Niche Surfer?

Join the Niche Surfer Community

Be sure to also join others riding the passive income wave in the Niche Surfer Discord group.

Have questions? 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 taking your niche sites to another level!