Growing a Niche Site to $50k Series: Nina’s Build in Public Project

(00:00) hey everybody and welcome back to my building and public Series where I am building a niche website to sell for $50,000 in 2024 now if you were here in episode one things will look a little bit different and hopefully a lot better I changed the theme but that’s not all I changed this month now January I had lofty
(00:17) expectations of myself and I will fully admit I did not do all the things I wanted to do but I did a fair amount so number one I changed the theme number two I did a Content audit in which I updated basically every post on the site including rewriting a bunch of them I also wrote a couple new posts um and I
(00:36) started the process which is quite an arduous process of converting all of my affiliate links over into their own affiliate account I figured if I was going to sell it it really should have its own dedicated account and travel payouts has made that pretty easy for the majority of the links however I
(00:52) still have to go through and change them and I have not done that yet I’ve just started at the very beginning so some things have changed some some things are kind of stagnant for the moment now I want to take you through what I did um and we can go through it a bit together and then I’ll show you the
(01:07) traffic as it stands right now so we have a brand new homepage this is courtesy of my editor Sarah Sarah is such a good graphic designer and she recently launched two um child themes for Cadence so these are themes that work with cadence but just format it for you so that you don’t have to worry about trying to create this yourself now
(01:27) now I will say not sponsored I just genuinely believe in them and honestly I bullied her into making them a little bit cuz she is such a pretty site herself um she does have two available if you guys would like to purchase them for yourself I’m going to link both in the description but until March 1st they
(01:43) are on sale for $49 a piece but you can use them on unlimited sites so like $49 across as many of your sites as you want it also comes with like a detailed setup guide an installation guide um but yeah this is the first one this is postcard I think it’s so pretty I’m working on putting it on another site at the moment
(02:00) uh and then we have polaroid which is the one I went with for this site so both are available there is a demo site that you can see on the sales page where you can scroll through and click around a bit more or if you want to see Polaroid in action you can click around on Ottawa things to do and you’ll find
(02:14) it there as well so that meant that I also had to change some things about the site itself because it just didn’t fit things weren’t there so I finally finally finally updated the section on the homepage about me and why this blog exists and giving a lot of information about experience and expertise um I went through and we’ve
(02:34) kind of adjusted the silos a little bit except not really food is technically in the activity section of my actual silos but I needed a fifth here so we pulled it out because I think food is yummy so I want to put it there then of course we’ve got um my where was it you’ve got my latest posts here um then when you scroll down
(02:54) past them we have like a little like intro to Ottawa section where I highlight a couple of like great experiences that I really love um and then this is new and I think it’s going to be kind of interesting to see how this goes is we’re going to highlight every season so like the next season so spring and Ottawa once we hit I don’t
(03:10) know probably April I’ll change it to Summer um maybe even may it just depends a little bit uh then I’ll kind of keep changing it maybe a month before the next season actually happens and this is going to let us kind of like get some juice to these pages from the homepage but it’s also going to let people like
(03:28) start planning ahead so I think that that could be good uh and then we have socials I have a Facebook page I set up I think last month maybe before it has no likes or followers I’m not using like the Facebook page method that’s going like viral on Twitter right now um I just wanted to have something that’s tied to
(03:46) this account uh it also has a Pinterest and I’m just realizing I forgot to connect that so I need to connect that but I’m also not actively using it then I just did my own Instagram and Twitter just that way they’re linked we have the work with me which just takes you to the contact page but I did put some
(04:00) information there cuz this site gets constant requests to work with Brands and things locally and like for free and paid experiences um so it does seem like a good opportunity to monetize it then we have like our little search bar um I did set up in the most basic sense just like the Pinterest and Facebook page uh
(04:18) newsletter um where basically your email gets collected at this point one of the things I’d like to do next month is set up a welcome sequence I’m going to use Liz Wilcox email marketing template welcome sequence she does have it offered as a freebie as well um but in the membership you get a bunch of other
(04:34) stuff too so I’m going to kind of integrate some extra ones in there as a like automated welcome sequence um and yeah one day I would like to send newsletters like weekly but that’s not going to happen right now then I had to update our uh Silo pages so I’m not going to take you through all of them you guys click
(04:52) through them if you want to but what we have here basically is going to be like a new little kind of blurb about it and then only for this one so far none of the rest have enough stuff I’ve started breaking it down into topic clusters so we have like our yearr round activities winter activities spring activities
(05:06) summer activities fall activities and then food and then like history is kind of what I’m calling like the general stuff cuz I felt like calling it General wasn’t really good if you guys have suggestions for things I should call it instead put them in the comments please cuz I could use some help I’m really bad
(05:20) at naming things if you have not figured that out by now so this is just where people can access all the posts and the good thing as well is but by me looking at it this way and as part of my content audit um oh I think I forgot to mention too I also found um a Year’s worth of keywords I’m going to work with um well
(05:36) it’s like almost 100 keywords I might do more than that I don’t know um but in that um I was also working on the the topic clusters and silos so here I can see the ones that are lacking like if we went to Spring you can see that there’s three things here that is not enough things for a topic cluster yes it’s all
(05:54) kind of within the overarching silo but if someone’s coming in Spring specifically there’s definitely more individual things I could talk about there that would help them so I do recommend doing categor stuff this way um that just that way you’re like you really get to see everything in action now we also have a
(06:12) new about page where I was also um really focused on giving more experience and expertise here I really wanted to focus on like okay I know my stuff I’ve done the stuff here’s all this information um popped in some internal links we’ve got some more experience of like other travel as well um and then we
(06:29) link out to these specific silos I also like I’m trying out a resources page it’s one of the templates that I think is really pretty that Sarah has um and I want to see how it goes I will admit I’ve put it up with this being broken right now which is not great um but I don’t have any yet and I wanted it to go live and I knew that if
(06:50) I deleted it for now I’d forget to ever put it back in I also know that the formatting there is weird because I made them too long I’m going to work on this later I don’t expect it to be a big thing so we’re going to leave it for now uh then we also have the contact page where I finally added like a form I’m
(07:05) going to try it I don’t like forms but I want to try it it’s okay we’ll see what happens um we have information people to get in touch but I also immediately say we don’t accept these things if people send them to me I put them in spam immediately um and so for any of y’all if you try to spam me with this you will
(07:22) get put into spam and then blocked from all of my emails that’s how I do it if someone does it to one email I block them across everything um okay then we have the information about the audience and everything um and some offers there I will fully admit I don’t have a rate like package in mind yet for this um I’m
(07:39) just going to see how it goes so yeah this is up now and available and I do think that this makes it look much more like a solid brand versus kind of the nonsense I had before where half the things were broken so this is the new site setup but before we even get into um the specifics of the audit that I did
(07:57) I do want to show yall what the traffic is like now I updated basically every post on this site I think there were like four that I didn’t press update on during this um and so you can immediately see what’s happened whenever you do an update rankings and traffic will slip that is totally normal so you
(08:15) can see that My Views are down um unfortunately when I was like kind of getting excited to share this like a little bit ago I was like ooh it’s like 14,000 it’s like getting back into kind of its better Zone usually it hovers like 15 to um to 25,000 kind of around there but then I updated everything so
(08:33) it’s dropped but to be completely transparent I’m not going to hide that here you can see it um and hopefully the updates will kick in quickly and not take too long and then um that’ll bounce back faster now if you’re wondering what we’re looking at this is um my data Studio I have a master data Studio
(08:50) that’s available only to my SEO Road mappers where basically if I move this you can see we do like all your total G4 like added a glance then you can analyze it per post then you can get all your demographics then you can go into your Google search console you can see your positions um and the Google search
(09:05) console one is actually one that I want to show y’all it’s going to give you um kind of your landing page clicks and Impressions and also the queries that are happening um so we can see here that our impressions are o are we on the right one yes oh those are higher than I thought that’s I was confused um
(09:23) impressions are also down because again rankings are shifting clicks are down rings are shifting um but Ur LCT is up so the ones that I’ve updated that stayed pretty well the good thing is that people do seem to be attending those pages a bit more now this is my favorite page of the whole thing I just
(09:39) think it’s really fun a lot of people like pay for rank trackers I’ve tried a few if you like and like if you really want one Peak Ser is probably the best one I’ve tried um but I don’t track my rankings really except here where I can get an idea at a glance from my Google search console for free well for you
(09:55) guys it’s not free CU you to be a road mapper and then you get it but um spent a long time creating this so here you see you can get all your position ones at a glance you get all your position 2 to 5 position 6 to 7 and then all the keywords on the second page of Google in particular so here I can see okay I have
(10:12) 283 number one rankings but not all of those are going to be like um thousands of page views or anything 100% not saying that it just means that these are my number one rankings um I know a lot of people will be like oh I have like a million first page rankings like do remember that people rank for a lot of
(10:31) weird like very obscure things so I want to be completely transparent on that but it does show you that like it’s doing pretty well which is really exciting um and we’re getting a fair amount of traction on keywords here then um I did an audit so this is the what my audit spreadsheet looks like I’ve collapsed some stuff just because
(10:50) some of it’s private and only roaders rappers uh only Road mappers get to see all of it um but here you guys can get an idea of like kind kind of my system so essentially I went through and I exported all of the um posts on my site with the URL then I checked for every single one that was under 100 page views
(11:07) but I don’t just care about that I also want to know if they’re in the top 10 and only two posts were like really really far off now even as I did this rankings were shifting even before I touched anything the serps are really volatile right now um so things are moving around a lot that means I did my
(11:24) best to figure out like where are they and where have they been decently stationary and I did have to look I looked at like the last month and the last 3 months and unfortunately both are incredibly volatile times so I’ve done my best to approximate it but based on what I was looking at um it looked like
(11:41) only 15 out of the 61 posts were not ranking in the top 10 for their primary keyword and that was for the designated primary keyword not for like a weird secondary keyword then um based on that I went through and updated stuff but I updated almost everything so anything that got like if I updated it as more than just
(12:02) like changing a link I noted it here I didn’t really want to keep track of everything where I was just like changing a link or changing the color of something or whatever so these are all the instances where more things happened now eight posts I completely rewrote I still have two more to do you can see I
(12:19) have a needs update here and a needs update here and I just ran out of time but there also like one is on winter which is happening right now so I don’t think it’s the right time to update it the other one is on Christmas lights which just passed and I have many months until that actually like kicks off again
(12:34) so I’m going to leave it for a minute and then come back to it later you can also see if you’re looking at the date that I changed things the last updated date there two things will become apparent number one I don’t know what year it is cuz I put 2023 for all of the January ones which I did not realize
(12:49) until like now and I’m going to keep it I’m not going to change it for the recording I make mistakes but I also did most of these in the same day so the way that I set up the system is I batch work basically I start with one thing so the very first thing I did was put them all in this spreadsheet the
(13:09) second thing I do is I figure out what their page views and rankings are then I determine what I’m going to do with it I was pretty fortunate this time I knew that I didn’t plan to delete or no index anything cuz I was like 99% sure that everything was salvageable even though I thought a lot of it had dipped way
(13:26) further than it had um most things hadn’t even really dipped and I’m going to talk about where I think traffic losses came in then um and a lot of its affiliate posts ranking really really well which is really great cuz to be honest I think I wrote two of them on this site and I had beginner writers
(13:41) write the rest and I was pretty concerned but topical Authority does wonders for you um and that’s not to say it’s the writer’s fault it’s entirely my fault because if you watched my other video about like the biggest mistake I made part of that big mistake was just abandoning my writers and not finishing
(13:56) things so that’s that but um in the end I updated uh yeah so it was eight posts that I rewrote uh 30 oh god I’ve forgotten all the math now I did like I put it down to the bottom but I updated 36 post total for sure um some the majority of them needed just like kind of minor shifts where it was like okay we’re going to rewrite
(14:17) maybe two header sections we’re going to reorder things and then a couple only needed something really quick like okay I was testing something with um Bolding something here and then here I I don’t know didn’t have images or I need a new video like little things like that those are some of the things in the collapse
(14:33) window was like me tracking everything um y’all don’t need to know absolutely everything I did my road mappers got that my road mappers got to see a preview of this ahead of time and all in more depth and they also know all the strategies of how to do this but I did this really efficiently and that’s
(14:47) partially from the batching it’s also because like I know my subject I am pretty quick at this it took me about three evenings to do everything um to get through it all and yeah that was pretty simple so then the next thing I did was I started making um I started trying to like fill in the blanks I guess of like what is missing here so
(15:05) I’ve collapsed most of these keywords because they are my keywords you will see them eventually when they are published on the site but I wanted to show you all an example of like what I’m doing essentially is I grab the keywords find the volume I use key search for this I have a tutorial on my channel
(15:19) where you can see how I like use key search then I set my own difficulty level this is not based on them this is based on my evaluation of my site and everything and then I add it to a cluster so I’m planning by clusters right now and I’m working on finishing and like filling out all the Clusters I also wrote a couple new posts
(15:35) uh oh yeah here so I wrote uh the places to visit post uh and then there was another one but then I’ve updated everything since so I don’t remember it’s just so bad oh it was a spring in from a local um best things stent Ottawa and spring from a local because it was the only one of my like four seasons
(15:51) missing so I went through and added those they’re two new posts they are not ranking yet but working on getting them up there um I will also admit that I did not track things super well typically um if you were here you saw I have like link swaps and collabs I’ve done um number one I don’t do link swaps anymore
(16:09) really I don’t find them worth it um but I did do a collab post and then a guest post that I did for another site I threw a link to this in as one of like the links I was given and I forgot to keep track of that so I have to go find them um so there were kind of one and a half links sort of buil to it um but I do
(16:27) need to figure out where I did that so those are all the changes I’ve made um as you can tell overall traffic is down though and that’s totally expected for me that’s why I wanted to start by like I say like spring clean the house before you invite people over so I wanted to go through and really clean things up I
(16:44) definitely adjusted a lot I definitely like messed with things a ton um and I was not afraid to adjust things as you could have seen that were in the top 10 I even updated stuff that was ranking number one um there was like two that have Snippets I did didn’t really want to touch but also like they were fine um
(16:58) typically I will update things even then so this is really what I did last month um I know that you might be like Bina you said you didn’t do a lot no I didn’t honestly like I crammed it all together and unfortunately procrastination and being sick meant that I didn’t really do it until like the last week and even
(17:16) then it was kind of a couple evenings that I was able to get it in um so I do think I did a good job of what I did but I’m sure I could have found even more opportunities I could have written more um I have two posts that are like half written that I’m working on for it uh so those will be coming soon but yeah I did
(17:31) not do nearly as much as I wanted before we go though I do just want to say one interesting thing happened as well um or sorry before I talk about like next week um yeah one of the posts the new post best places to visit got a bit of disco discover traffic for no real reason like that is not something I wrote for discover I do
(17:52) not write for discover especially for this site I’ve never written anything with the intention of discover um this is a Canadian site we barely have discover in Canada so I always assumed it wouldn’t really work but it did very well with me following no discover rules I know a lot of people are trying to
(18:08) like figure out discover so if looking at these posts helps you in any way go for it um the best one that ever happened was in December kind of around mid December I had this post about Ottawa in January that took off um completely unexpected but maybe if you like look if you look at that or if you can look at this data and it matters to
(18:25) you go for it and I hope that that helps you in some way um to figure out yeah what could benefit you so having looked at every post on this site I tried to like I did a deep dive into it like post hcu but like I was doing a lot of sites at the same time to be honest because I was trying to like do 500 I ended up with 200 still
(18:44) mad at myself I didn’t hit 500 for that audit but you do what you got to do um I was like finally looking at every single search result for this and every single primary keyword and I noticed a lot of things so even though a lot of stuff is ranking really well like this site has 61 posts on it now um admittedly two are brand
(19:03) new but still it’s got a fair number of posts it’s not getting that much traffic and that is for a couple reasons so a lot of those things in the top 10 are not ranking number one they need backlinks um they needed those updates so I do hope that those will move them up a bit more and I definitely think
(19:18) that they need some more topical Authority in their cluster because even though I have Ottawa Authority I don’t necessarily have authority within the little things some of my updates as well were because those writers wrote them I wanted to go in and put more of my personal experience so I also hope that
(19:32) will help them but I noticed so many times that there were weird new widgets at the top of the screen and this is something that’s happened in travel um fairly significantly I haven’t seen it as much in nearly any other Niche um food is having something weird happen right now but a little bit different um
(19:49) for us in travel we are getting a lot of widgets targeted at our keywords so essentially Google has put a bunch of stuff at the top before our posts even show up that are not featured Snippets um this was something that happened uh that there was some drama about with travel leming on Twitter um but it’s
(20:05) happening to everybody in a lot of different ways and I’ve noticed this on my main site as well so with this I did find that for some of my keywords yeah things were getting siphoned elsewhere which is not super helpful I’m also noticing that where it used to just be one sponsored post there are three
(20:22) sponsored spaces above even the first result um which is Super Fresh frustrating because it means it’s harder for people to find our content and I know that the point of advertisements on Google is for people to click them so I appreciate why that’s happening but I definitely think that that’s contributing to click-through rate a
(20:37) little bit um another thing some of these are just very low volume keywords and that was definitely an intention I did a lot of zero volume keywords here um but I and I did different formats so I did like the Forum keywords and I did GSC keywords mostly and those are both things I teach in the SEO road map
(20:54) Google search console keywords are my favorite keywords by far um they’re like a they’re they’re a type of zero volume keyword and I’ve just classified them for my students but um yeah so I I wrote a lot knowing that it wasn’t going to get me a ton of traffic like I have stuff ranking number one that are
(21:10) bringing in under 100 page views a month and that’s totally okay to me because um like the point was topical Authority that was the point there so it’s not necessarily that every single post is going to bring you a ton of traffic I’m writing about a pretty like I don’t know not that it’s a small City but it’s not
(21:27) the most popular city in the world doesn’t tend to go viral or anything so I totally expected this is going to take more post to really get it to where I want it I also have not done backlink work significantly for this so that’s going to impact my ability to get out of like the seventh position on the top 10
(21:43) um and these are all things to consider when setting up your own site um but yeah I just want to say that like I fully understand and people are going to be like she has so many posts and not that much traffic no I don’t and that’s okay and and that’s what I’m trying to fix so definitely targeting the right
(21:59) keywords does a lot for this but I also really really believe in targeting keywords that help your user so I did go with like some pretty General starter keywords to try and like just start teaching people about Ottawa a bit more um there are some things on here that are just like probably unranked to be
(22:16) honest um but I just did the thing and it was fun so I wanted to write about it and I do think that that’s good if it helps your user so yeah the plan going forward for next month especially um I have a lot of things I want to do so it is hard to like pick exactly what to do next month I have a pretty busy February
(22:34) with other things and I was supposed to audit all of my courses this month because I was sick I only finished one um so I do think February is going to be slow again so basically I’m going to try and just focus on writing more content that’s really strong for the site um internal linking all the content and
(22:50) really filling up those clusters I think that’s going to be the biggest thing for me is right now some of the posts as well that are kind of stuck on like the bottom of page one have like three internal links because I just have nothing on them because I didn’t work properly through a cluster so I think
(23:05) that’s going to benefit me where I find like link opportunities I’ll go for it but pretty passively I don’t want to push myself too much to do too much um definitely like I’m still I’d still like to create an ebook and then a freebie for this as well and I’d like to start sending emails but I do not see that
(23:21) happening in the next month um so yeah I think my goal will probably be something like minim um 10 new posts but my brain immediately said 20 so let’s say 20 is the goal and we’ll see what happens there um and then largely the main thing I need to do honestly is just finish finding all of the links and changing
(23:39) them over to uh the new affiliate so I’m basically creating like I want this to have to be a seamless transfer for the new buyer so I’m taking um all the I used to use travel payouts for this one as well like under this as a site but then you can’t just like give someone else the login for that it would still
(23:57) be in my account so I decided I would just make a new account anyway um and put it all that way so doing that now um and yeah and actually that reminds me I should update y’all on how much it made last month now I will fully admit because I haven’t finished bringing things over I don’t have the exact
(24:14) numbers um but I do have I know a stay22 it did over $57 like $57 and some cents um and I know that with uh Vier alone I haven’t checked gety your guide yet it did about 100 bucks so I do need to like filter that a bit more and next month that once I have like everything sorted better I should be able to start doing
(24:32) like better updates about how much it’s earning but considering it doesn’t have that much traffic that’s pretty decent for me um and also considering I didn’t know it was ranking for stuff I’ve been so negligent with this site it’s really embarrassing but I’m working on it and we’ll fix it so um yeah that’s kind of
(24:49) the goal now and we’ll see how it goes so I think it’s going to be prioritizing that um and yeah I’m going to Prior prioritize traffic with the post next month and then I’ll probably switch over to Affiliates after that but I do really like again my batch workor system doing one thing at a time so I hope this has
(25:05) been informative and helpful and you guys had some fun um getting to learn about this site with me uh if you guys have questions let me know if you find anything that’s like a glaring error let me know cuz I feel like I’ve gone like blind to it with this site now um and yeah good luck with your sites as well
(25:20) and I will see you in a month uh where hopefully I will have written 20 posts and finished moving all my links over to um travel payouts for where I can I definitely have some where I’m still going to have to like combine them with my other site just because I’m not going to set up whole new accounts with
(25:36) everything and with Amazon you can’t which to be fair barely use them but don’t want to do too much there so this has been a building in public episode two we are about $150 towards the goal of $2,000 a month income for this site um which honestly like I it surprised me and it also shows that you need to track
(25:57) things per site which I think is the most important um and I definitely want to try and like long-term figure out the profit and loss for this with the writers and stuff as well um and one day I’ll get there so hopefully I will have better reporting on that for yeah for you all soon um and I will see you next
(26:14) month and if you want to like work alongside me then yeah set yourself the goal of writing 20 posts as well um or if you haven’t done it yet do a Content audit first and then next month do 20 new posts okay see y all soon and if you guys want to learn more about SEO or AI or whatever of all the things I like I’m
(26:32) going to add two videos to the screen right now that I’ve hand selected for you um so if you would like to check those out and keep watching and keep learning you can do so there or if you would like to get an all access pass to both this um like build-in public and learn all of my exact methods this was a
(26:47) really really really cursory overview and I fully admit that um you can join the SEO road map where they’re getting a deep dive into this site into others we’re doing lots of fun things um like February we have a writing challenge which has actual cash prizes um we also have done a travel bundle to grow their
(27:04) email list we’ve done a lot of cool stuff Beyond even just learning how to set up a site that is profitable and ranks really well with Google so you can join us over there and yeah hope to see you soon bye