August 2023 Niche Site Report
Written by Casey Botticello
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August 2023, was a great month across my portfolio of niche sites. Both of my niche site projects (that I focus on in these reports), experienced a substantial surge in growth. Niche Site 1 is still not monetized with a display ad network, but the traffic is growing. Niche Site 2 had plateaued /slowed down in terms of pageview growth over the past few months. But I aggressively continued adding content and updating posts, and the site saw a decent improvement in traffic during August, especially toward the end of the month!
Progress of Niche Sites
While I am working on a larger portfolio of sites (read my intro post to this series to learn more about each), for the purposes of this niche site report, I’ve decided to focus on two of my sites launched in the last few months.
Why?
To name a few reasons:
Building income producing niche sites is harder than it used to be. While it’s interesting to see earnings figures from well established sites, as many readers have pointed out to me, building a site (on a “fresh” domain) in 2022 or 2023 is much harder than it was even 5 or 6 years ago.
The sandbox period seems to have become longer, and sites with low domain authority (i.e. any site under a year old) is susceptible to Google algorithm updates. So in order to help newer bloggers, it’s vital that I stay up to date on the latest trends in blogging, and one way to ensure I do this is by going through the website building process myself, on a regular basis!
Competition has increased. There has always been some level of competition in most niches, but it used to be possible to identify larger segments of long tail keywords, with obvious indicators of high traffic, yet low quality SERPs.
Finding these easy wins or low hanging fruit is much harder now, and the rise of AI writing tools will only make this more competitive. So, I’m looking for new strategies by going through the process again myself!
The tips and tricks used to start a successful niche site are very different than those used to boost an existing site. The early stages of launching a niche site are all about reaching enough traffic in order to optimize your content to the fullest extent possible. If you are building a site designed to run display ads, you want to get into a premium display ad network (Mediavine or AdThrive, ASAP).
If you want to apply to top tier affiliate programs, hitting certain traffic thresholds is also key. But getting traffic to a new niche site is very hard. So, it’s important that I am able to replicate this process to expand my own portfolio but also so that I can best help my readers!
All of these factors led me to conclude that showing my readers a behind the scenes look at my two newly launched sites will be extremely valuable.
I am still running all my larger sites (as those are funding all these experimental smaller sites) but I will focus these reports on the findings and insights from the newly created sites.
August 2023 Progress
While the first few months of building a new niche site can be very slow, I’ve made a deliberate effort to scale these sites by maintaining a very high content velocity and establishing topical authority much quicker than usual.
Some highlights from August 2023 for two of the niche sites I’m currently focusing on building:
Niche Site 1 (Craft & DIY Niche)
Published 25 new posts to a Craft & DIY niche site (Niche Site 1), built using a new domain. I have now published a total of ~270 posts on this site, since it was created on a fresh domain in November 2022.
Many publishers do not see significant activity until 6 months in, so my expectations have been pretty low for this site. That said, I nearly doubled the amount of content on this site compared to last month, so I was happy to see some growth.
While the first few months had been negligible amounts of traffic, Niche Site 1 received 4,232 sessions in August 2023.
I’d say of the two new niche sites that I’m covering in these reports, this Niche Site 1 is far more typical in terms of site performance and growth.
While it is nowhere near Niche Site 2 in terms of pageviews, Niche Site 1 is showing all the right signs that it could reach the same level of earnings:
New posts and pages are being indexed quickly.
Site is ranking for new organic keywords.
Top performing posts have begun to naturally attract high quality backlinks.
However, as my second niche site is still performing exponentially better and is generating decent monthly cash flow, (and I only have finite time and resources) I plan to primarily focus on Niche Site 2 (covered in next section of article)!
Niche Site 2 (Technology Niche)
Published 47 new posts to a 11 month old technology niche site. I now have ~277 total posts published on this site. I built this site on an aged domain that I had purchased about a year prior to launching the blog in its current form. August is the eighth full month of regular content posting.
This site had a major surge in traffic during August. While the trajectory did become steeper after the August Google Core Algorithm Update, the traffic was already trending up for the first half of the month, so it’s hard to fully attribute this growth to the update.
Either way, the site is doing great in terms of traffic.
In August 2023, month 8 of posting content to this aged site, I received a staggering 113,238 sessions!
Unfortunately, my RPMs for this site have generally been lower than I hoped for, but if the traffic continues to grow at this level, I think it is very likely I will break $3,000 in future months (and possibly have a few $4,000-$6,000 months in Q4 if ad spending increases).
I hope you enjoyed this monthly niche site portfolio update. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions! You can follow the whole series by clicking here. If you want to stay up to date on the latest blogging tips and tricks, be sure to check out my newsletter!
Best of luck on your blogging journey!
Until next time!
-Casey
