Week In Review – September 28 – October 4

So last week was probably the single most unproductive week that I have had since starting my blog and doing anything else. For some reason I was really unmotivated to do much of anything and slacked off the entire week. Which means that this week I have to bust my ass to catch up and get back on track. I wasted a lot of time and I could have gotten a lot done as there is always something that needs to be worked on or there is always a site of mine that could use a new post. Anyways, on to more specific details….

Niche Sites

Depending upon how often you read my blog you may or may not know that I have developed a few niche sites over the past few weeks. The first that I developed I thought would do well in the search engines but unfortunately it hasn’t even though I have it sitting on the first page in Google for it’s main keyword. I wrote a few articles so maybe those will get published and get me a few backlinks to bump me up a few positions and I could see more traffic.

On the other hand I have some very good news! When I wrote my mini series on finding a profitable niche I mentioned 2 keyword research tools that I used. One of them is Micro Niche Finder and I believe it is a must have tool if you are wanting to get into building niche sites. Using Micro Niche Finder I was able to find a term that had a good amount of searches with very low competition. So I whipped up a mini WP blog for it and set it live. It took about a week for it to get indexed which is a little bit longer than I would have liked but it was worth it. It turns out that when it did get indexed Google thought it was important enough to place it in 3rd position! The site was indexed on the 2nd as I saw 59 visitors from Google hit the site, Friday saw 83 visitors from Google and yesterday saw 42 visits from Google. So quite a drop in people over the weekend however I am not sure if this will continue to be a trend or if it was just a freak day. The site was bumped up to position 2 so I know it wasn’t because I lost a few ranks. There are some niches which may do well on the weekends and some may do well during the week.

This niche is also related to Halloween so it is why I have seen such a surge in traffic. Which I looked into before actually going ahead with the niche by checking out Google Trends. From 2004 to 2006 the keyword would see huge spikes in traffic right around Halloween. But in 2007 it actually saw quite a steady stream of searches with a surge again in October. 2008 saw a minor decline in searches with a huge drop in June-August from what I can see. Not sure why there was such a huge dip but searches have obviously accelerated back up as Halloween quickly approaches. While I am not expecting the same level of traffic after Halloween I hope that the remaining months of 2008 and into 2009 remain steady like 2007 shows. I have made about $3.25 from AdSense from the site since it was listed which isn’t a whole lot but even if I can make $30 from AdSense this month I will have done better than most who have tried AdSense.

So that is the good news in terms of my niche sites. I have a few smaller blogs that I have been ignoring that I am going to start working on this week. This week is going to be a niche site week as I want to get at least one other niche up and running. It may not necessarily be a mini site, I was thinking more along the lines of a Squidoo page to test it out and then I may turn it into a site.

Ebook Updates

I know that I have talked a bit about 2 ebooks that I would be working on but with last week being so unproductive nothing got done with those. I still want to write an ebook about creating a niche site though as I know that it would help a lot of people. I have contemplated about either writing it in an ebook or just a series on my blog. By using a ebook I could have people sign up to a mailing list and collect emails or as a post series password protect it and still make them sign up to a mailing list to give them a unique password. I think that an ebook would do a little bit better in terms of getting people to sign up but I may try out both approaches just to see which works out best.

I also want to do another ebook or 2 in the future but I am not sure on exactly what just yet. It depends upon how much I enjoy doing the niche site book and if it is worth the effort.

Posts Worth Mentioning

Never Pay For StumbleUpon Traffic – I forget exactly how I found Chris’ blog last week. I know it was through a comment but I forget which site I saw him on. Anyways, I checked out StumbleUpon advertising awhile ago and saw that you could pay for traffic. It didn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me as you can just discover your site yourself or have a friend submit it and receive a good amount of traffic. I am not sure exactly the benefits to paying for it from StumbleUpon other than the fact that people may thumbs up it more? Chris found out that it isn’t worth paying for it which he explains why in his post.

Are You Ready For Christmas Traffic? – Elijah talks a little bit about getting ready and being prepared to make some money during the busiest time of the year in terms of people spending money. You can be sure that I will definitely be whipping up a few sites to capitalize on the massive traffic that the holidays can bring!