Can An Old Micro-Niche Site Be Resurrected? Here’s the Results of My Experiment

Hey guys,

Time for another niche site building experiment.

But it’s time to improve an existing site, rather than try to establish a brand new one.

The Backstory

Around 2011-2012 I started going on a massive website building campaign. I joined The Keyword Academy.  I bought more domains than I knew what to do with.

But I got results.

I got my monthly income from advertising up from $100 to over $1000 a month!

That I achieved all that success was largely down to the work ethic The Keyword Academy taught its members. There was a tool for logging the number of words written each day. I easily achieved 7000+ words a day. In fact I wrote so much I broke my computer’s keyboard.

Then a lot of my efforts crashed and burned as Google made it harder to rank micro-niche sites and get almost instantaneous success with them.

So was that the end of my online money making story?

Most definitely not!

I’ve still got most of the domains I bought all those years ago. Mostly because I registered them for 10 years apiece.

I’ve also bought a few new domains. For example, I established Niche Laboratory in 2014.

I think Niche Laboratory is kind of cool and I hope you do too. But it’s not made nearly as much money as my micro-niche sites in other niches have.

One particular niche site I own is still doing very well. As you can see from the chart below it did very well in 2012 (when I bought the domain), then kind of died off till I did the pruning in mid-2014.

In fact since I redesigned this site in mid-2017 I have:

• Increased page views per session by 28%.
• Decreased bounce rate by 12%.
• Increased page views by 35%.

Here’s an article about how this micro-niche site continues to make me money.

Site Rebuilding Stage 1

So I am currently at stage 1 of this project. Stage 1 has the following aims:

• Make the site more advertiser friendly.
• Remove poor quality and uninteresting content.
• Switch to a mobile friendly WordPress template.

Here is the traffic chart:

So traffic was pretty good in 2011 through to early 2013 but then it kind of levelled off.

The amount of traffic it gets is pretty low. However, this is a decent paying niche.

The encouraging thing is that it does still get traffic from Google. So I don’t think the site has been overly penalised. It just doesn’t have any killer content. Most importantly, it doesn’t have any high ranking pages with good keyword search volume.

The first thing I want to do to my site is make it more family friendly. So I’m ditching any vaguely NSFW content. Actually this content can get good traffic, but I have other sites that can focus on this area. This content will result in around a 10% fall in traffic, but I can hopefully make it up by writing some new content.

When I resurrected another niche site one of the things I did was to ruthlessly prune the site of any poor and low quality content.

Where I went wrong with that other site was adding some pages that I had once had on HubPages, but had to move off of that site due to quality issues. I should have just been more honest with myself and admitted the content was junk!

I have two ideas for some very nice articles that nobody else has really covered. Beyond this though, I’m gonna fire up Keyword Researcher Pro and hunt for some new keywords to write about.

Site Rebuilding Stage 2

Stage 2 of the project will be the following:

• Do keyword research and get some ideas for new articles.
• Add some interactive functionality.

The good news is that this niche is still a good one and if anything there’s even more interest in it now. There’s still not a great deal of competition either. My trump card is that I am now living in the country this site is about. So I can go outside my front door and take photos of what I’m writing about.

I’ve had some great success on my related niche sites that have built in tools and utilities. I just put these together using HTML forms in WordPress templates. These are great in that 80% of my competitors never bother adding this kind of value to their site.

I like interactive toys because they attract natural backlinks AND increase visitor time on the site.

If you want some idea of what I’m talking about then if I had a finance blog I’d add loan repayment calculators to it and that sort of thing. Much like this compound interest calculator I’m forever making use of.

I will report back when I get some news of any success in rebuilding a micro-niche site!

Today is the 4th of February 2018. If I haven’t posted an update here in a while, leave a comment and that will remind me to see if any progress has been made. It can be quite a long process for Google to re-evaluate a site and I’m not anticipating any overnight success here.

If you have any comments or suggestions about how to relaunch a micro-niche site then leave your tips below.