A month or two ago, I started my health niche website in a sub-niche that had very little competition with the opportunity make some good money. You can read the first installment here.
Let’s have a look at the good news first and then the bad news and break it down.
The Good News
The good news is that I was able to put up a small affiliate site in less than a day with about 6k words of original unique content. The content on this site was not ground breaking nor did I focus much on each individual page.
My only concern was to optimize the front page of this niche site for sales. I knew that not much traffic would be landing on individual pages and that most traffic would hit my front page and be gone within a few minutes.
I put up a nice testimonial and then a large call to action at the very top of the page. This was converting well but not as much as I expected. To further increase my click through rate, I added a video and some large cheesy red text for my call to action. I did not know how well this would work, but my click through rate skyrocketed to around 10% which I was more than happy with.
Within 1 month I was able to rank this site to number 1 for the biggest keywords I was targeting. As you can see from the first post, these keywords had some decent search traffic and I was soon getting around 700-800 unique visitors a day.
Since I was getting around a 10% click through rate, I was able to push about 70-80 visitors to the sales page each and every day. From the sales page, which was laid out very well, those visitors converted at around 10% as well.
So if we do some quick math, you can see that within a month, I was able to bring a site from nothing to around $200-$300 a day in profit! It even held up under the Google Hummingbird update that was rolled out without anyone knowing about it until it was later announced.
This passive income lasted for about a month total and then crashed. So what happened?
The Bad News
Well, shortly after the Google Hummingbird update rolled out, Google decided to strike fear into the hearts of SEOs with another update. This time, they rolled out penguin 2.1. Virtually overnight, the rankings of the health niche site plummeted into the hundreds, not to be seen again.
Penguin 2.1 seems to be a bit more smart than Penguin 2.0. Some findings show that links created after the Penguin 2.0 roll out were looked at and subject to a penalty from the new penguin. Forum spam, forum bio spam, do follow blogs, blogroll spam, spammy directories, and blog comment signature spam were all targeted.
Of these types of links, I made heavy use of blog networks to rank this health niche site with a typical rank and bank type attitude. I knew that the earnings would not last forever, but it is a very quick way to rank a website and it looks like I just got unlucky with the timing of this update.
What To Do?
I have taken some time to look into the link profile of this site, and currently I do not have the time nor motivation to clean it up and keep going. In fact, it might be a better idea to just start over with a fresh domain. I have been very busy the last few weeks but I also may try doing a 301 to a fresh domain and seeing if I can squeeze some more money out of this site.
Instead of going full steam ahead trying to fix this site, make sure you stay watch for a new guide I be releasing to make $100 a day through Adsense. After I release that guide, I will be starting a new case study where I follow my exact tutorial and show you all how anyone can make $100 a day with Adsense with a little hard work.
Summary
Overall, I was able to make a good $3,000 within 1 month from a simple affiliate site and with very little money invested. Yes, it got hit by an update, but such things will happen when you decide to go blackhat. The key is to keep your head up and keep moving forward!
Hi neil, I have been struggling online making money with blogging. I want to make a health niche site . But I do not know what niche would work . I have done some searches but I m not sure if this really work . I want to put adsense..So it would be my income source. Can you please tell me some of the niche or micro niche for my site.. I am following your blogs for that $100 a day.
Its really useful and I felt great after getting useful info.
You gave me confidence and always motivate me to work more. I need this help from you. Please tell me some ideas about the health niches .
Thanks..
John
Hi John,
First spend some time doing some research on “low hanging fruit” or keywords around a topic that you know or could write a lot about that have a few hundred searches a month and do not have much competition in google. Get a bunch of these keywords together and just start writing articles about it.
I do not really have any health niches that I can give you but a good place to start is Flippa or any other marketplace to see what is being sold/making money right now.
Curious, other than google analytics, what keyword tracking do you attach to your website please. On my website 80% of the results are hidden with google analytics so I can’t get an accurate understanding of the search terms people are using.
Any tracker that you use is not going to show the majority of keywords since the way it was changed by Google. I use GA but I also use statcounter. Give it a try and let me know how it works for you.