This video is about a niche site that I sold
for $235,000 in 2017. It was a 10 month project…but it’s more
complicated than that… I’m Doug Cunnington, from Niche Site Project,
I talk about Amazon niche sites, productivity, and project mgmt I’m going to be talking you through this
crazy roller coaster of a journey. We built up, adapted, and improved a niche
site that we wanted to sell for $500,000 (text appears). Which sounds crazy to say outloud! Now, some of you may be wondering, “what
the heck is a niche site (question mark appears), and how can it be worth $500,000? ($500,000
appears in front of question mark, perhaps add a second question mark like “$500,000??”) so here’s some basics to get us into this
story: An Amazon Niche Site (text on screen) is a
website that makes profit by linking readers and consumers to buying amazon products.
Essentially, if you lead someone directly
to an Amazon page for pruning shears (image appears) linked through an article called
“10 Best Ways to Care for Your Rose Garden” (text appears) and that person buys those
pruning shears, Amazon will give you a small cut of the profit. When you multiply that by hundreds or thousands
or even hundreds of thousands of people doing that overtime, you can end up with a nice
chunk of change. (money cha-ching sound?) So how do they work? Amazon niche sites use buyer keywords (text
appears) to get people to click on their sites– for example if you search “best pruning
shears” (text appears) you will likely get linked to sites with gardening stuff & information
(maybe pop up images of gardening supplies, etc). A lot of these sites will be amazon niche
sites, and when you click on a link inside that leads you to a tool on amazon (image
of a tool on screen), you know that niche website will be getting a small portion of
the money you spend.
So, the buyer keywords need to be words that
consumers are going to be using regularly, that the average person will put into their
google search. There is a whole art and science to choosing
and optimizing keywords, and you can learn more about that over at my website (link text
on screen), or checking out the Keyword Golden Ratio but for now, back to our story about
this specific niche website. So, niche websites are designed to make a
profit off of people using them to buy amazon products. However, not all (and honestly not most) of
the Amazon niche websites out there actually make decent money, and even the ones that
do are always looking to improve their profits. That’s where someone like me comes in. I’m an experienced internet marketer, with
expertise on increasing traffic and profits for niche websites. Traffic (text appears) is just how many people
are clicking on and reading through a website each day. The more people who click in, the more likely
they are to end up buying a product and giving us a profit. So, this niche site that we’re talking about
was started by a friend of mine, Rob.
He wanted some help to increase the revenue
& profit. Little did we all know that we were in for
a bumpy ride. So let me give you some background on this
niche website: (Some version of the bold words should appear
on screen) This website was making around $10,000 a month,
so already making a nice profit It was already ranking well in google’s
buyer keywords (some sort of text/image perhaps “Google’s Buyer Keywords: A+”) ranking;
meaning the site was already using effective keywords, and getting good traffic
It only had around 45 pages of content, so it wasn’t an enormous site, and
The majority of the traffic was really only clicking on a few of the pages– in fact,
80% of the traffic was only hitting 7 of the pages out of those 45 So, obviously we had some good things going
for us. However, there were still some hurdles to
jump over before we could consider selling this site, especially before we could consider
trying to sell it for $500,000. Spoiler alert – we failed as you can gather
from the title of this video.
Here are some of the things we had to consider: There were tons of Private Blog Network (text
on screen) links on the site. A Private Blog Network is essentially (text
of definition on screen) a series of websites that someone owns. This can be tricky on a website you’re trying
to sell, because this is against the Google Webmaster guidelines. It’s Gray hat as they say in the SEO World. Some of the links we had on the site were
actually on a paid network, (text appears) which meant we were paying monthly fees on
them (which is a hard selling point for most buyers) So, knowing all of this, Rob was looking to
improve the site’s traffic and profit to the point where they could reasonably sell
it for $500,000, So Rob asked me if I wanted to partner up. SO! What do we do with all of this information? Well, based on my background in project management,
I made a game plan. And I called that game plan, Project Go White Hat. (cool graphic) Essentially, our site was filled with “Gray
Hats” links (text: “gray hats” appears; buzzer) — backlinks that violate the Google
Webmaster Terms of Service and made it hard to sell our amazon niche site.
Our basic goal was to eliminate the links
(in ideal world, we put big X over words gray hats), and instead add backlinks with guest
posting. Google is fine with guest posting and doesn’t
violate the Google Webmaster Guidelines. It’s “White Hat” as they say (text “white
hats” appears; ding). So we came up with 3 goals to make that possible:
(Use words “Number One” etc.) (“1. Guest Writers” appears; ding) Replace all
of the Personal Blog Network links with “guest post” links that are white hat.
(“2. Improve content” appears; ding) Improve
the existing content– we wanted to make sure that every part of this website was the best
it could be before trying to sell it for a profit, and
(“3. Keyword Golden Ratio” appears; ding) Add
more content that is Keyword Golden Ratio Compliant. The ratio is this…The number of Google results
that have the keyword phrase in the title divided by the local monthly search volume,
where the LMS is less than 250. If the KGR is less than 0.25, then you should
rank in the top 100 when your page is indexed. You should still rank in the top 250 when
the KGR is between 0.25 and 1. And it should be pretty fast. (Ideally we’d have some sort of visual to
help us with this– step by step the words should appear as the equation, and then….) (Scribble or “X” appears over whole formula)
But don’t worry too much about the details of what the Keyword Golden Ratio is right
now, just know that we were working to improve the site across the board, including in our
use of keywords.
So, now we had a plan! We were ready to start working to make this
site even more profitable and ready to sell for 6 figures. Check out my next episode to see what kind
of challenges we were facing, and what we decided to do about them. You’ll hear about how we were struggling
with competitors’ Negative SEO (Text appears), a problem for Amazon niche sites, and how
we accidentally almost gave ourselves big problems with Exact Match Anchor Text, another
potentially problematic piece of a niche website that many website owners, especially new owners,
fall into. I can’t wait to tell you guys more about
this website. Though I can’t share the site since we sold
it and that’d be totally unprofessional and not cool to the new owners. Please feel free to leave questions and comments
below. Like this video if you found it helpful and
SUBSCRIBE for more. And check out my website, nichesiteproject.com
for more details on a lot of this information, plus the sign up for the email list! I have tons of useful articles and videos
for you to help you make your amazon niche site the best it can be.
