My 4 Hour Workweek

Given all the changes with Google’s algorithm (Panda and Penguin, the animals we love so affectionately) and the seemingly common AdSense account bannings, it appears the future value of niche sites has never been more questionable.

As I’ve said multiple times (more recently here), I don’t think mini niche sites are dead, but we can’t ignore the fact that it has become more difficult to succeed with them for most people.

And let’s face it – they’re not for everyone.  With my renewed focus on authority sites, I’ve decided to give up on my mini niche sites aside from a small handful that still earn some money.

In other words, I’m not planning on renewing the domains – the sites will eventually die off within the next 6 months.  I feel bad letting all of that work go to waste (especially the content).  After all, maybe the site itself has no value, but the content should still be usable somewhere, right?

That’s what I want to address today – what to do with your niche site’s content after you’ve given up on the site.

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Don’t worry, I didn’t get banned from Amazon! That would’ve been pretty terrible, and I don’t want to have to write another post like this.

From what I’ve been reading lately, Amazon has also been doing a fair amount of banning, so I wanted to be a little bit proactive and make sure that I’m not in a position to have my account banned.  Also, I wanted share with you a fairly quick and easy way to keep your account from getting banned.

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I received a few requests after my last income report to go into some more detail about my top earning niche sites.  Essentially, people want to know why these sites earn more than my others (and believe me – this is something I want to learn too).

Sometimes success is random and can’t be pinpointed on any one factor, but if you can figure out a few reasons why a site is earning well, you’re in a better position to replicate that success.

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I realize the title of this post sounds like I’m about to try and sell you a product…the good news is, I’m not! I actually just wanted to share with you a quick story about how one of my niche sites landed on the first page of Google and received an ad click without me doing much of anything.

Although I uploaded a WordPress theme and added my usual plugins, this site was ranking on page 1 before I even added the content.

While you can’t plan for this in any way, I thought it might be interesting to take a deeper look at this site and the keyword that it targets to see if we can learn anything…

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Although this case study seems complete (the site is currently on page 2 for its targeted keyword, but on page 1 for secondary keywords), it’s actually just the beginning.  The purpose of this case study was not just to create one stand alone project.  After all, what good is one micro-niche AdSense site that will probably never earn more than $50 in a given month?

The exciting part of this case study was not the case study itself – I know it was helpful to a lot of people out there, based on feedback I received, but the excitement is yet to come.  This case study was merely a springboard to much greater things and hopefully positive learning experiences.

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As I’ve mentioned in the past, I think this is the most important step of the process. Despite all other efforts, if people can’t find you on Google, your micro-niche site is destined to be a failure.  Search engine optimization (SEO) is merely the process of tweaking a few things on and off your site so that Google views your site as more relevant for a particular keyword or keywords.

On-site optimization, although important, is easy (especially with various WordPress plugins out there).  Off-site optimization (primarily building backlinks) is more time consuming, and probably what will make or break your site’s rankings on Google.  In this section of the case study, I will show you what I’ve done with my site’s SEO.

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