I have been looking at doing another niche site in the diet realm since my first one just totally tanked as I had no clue what I was doing. I have been noodling over this concept for probably 6 months where I was trying to pull the trigger and get started.
I was invited to a competition to start on January first with a new website and domain starting on the first. I had my eye set on this diet niche and thought it would be a fun way to get myself started and to help put me up against some good hard competitors and figured a diet niche case study could be created at the same time.
My only self imposed rules were to write all the material myself at least until the first 30 posts were complete. Then my goal is to carry forward with writers and to find good solid cracks that could be written about by outsourced writers while I moved onto the next site.
I bought the domain online on NameCheap at the end of December, set up new hosting on Closte and started assembling the website with Oxygen Builder. Unlike traditional page builders, Oxygen is a site builder and disables the installed themes.
Since I wanted to focus on content I put up a fast website that consisted of a main header and footer, then a homepage, and a template for single posts to display well. After that, I added a related posts area to the bottom of the post to help guide readers to additional posts that may fit their interests.
The reason I provide these additional options when I used Closte is they are a no-frills host, they have support but they aren’t the super kind and helpful version you get on SiteGround or the others. The trade-off is they have excellent speeds and built on the Google Cloud Server infrastructure and global CDN.
When approaching any challenge with a short duration, especially where website views and income will be the deciding factor you want to find the best low hanging fruit possible. Preferably at least one with buyer intent would be outstanding as you will only get a small amount of users during the first 3 months.
If you get search analysis and keyword targeting incorrect it can set you back far enough to lose the challenge after month one. You need your first posts to rank and rank quick, preferably with some sort of internal linking between them to help move them all up the ranks.
Month one was busy with the website build for most of week one and this was with posting the first three posts. I set a goal for myself to complete 12 posts each month to finish the overall challenge at 30+ posts.
This also ensures I have a solid understanding of the information within the niche by reading and learning while diving in headlong into the topic. This will give you a tremendous leg up on your competition as many marketers will just regurgitate existing information.
Unlike a great many people online when they look at statistics they look at all users who visit the website. I prefer to instead focus on just organic traffic as that will be what gives your website legs to run for a long time, all users includes all kinds of random traffic that won’t hold up over time.
Month two, the month where people start to see that they are making progress and can start to use that success to find additional cracks and opportunities. This month I could focus better on posts around some more difficult keywords and give them some better power through links from the initial 12 posts.
Additionally, this month is when I set up a recommended products page in the menu to route visitors to my choice selection of products to make their lives, and the diet, simpler.
The start of this month looked very promising, I had managed to make $6 on Amazon and it was based on ONLY 54 clicks, a near 7-8% conversion rate is nothing but amazing this early as it means the links I put were in a perfect context to readers to click and look into more.
Unfortunately, this is the month that was looking up and then mid-month the Covid-19 issues started to really grow in America and the sales and, really visits overall, tanked and the slowdown hit me hard.
I took it in stride and did what all niche site owners should be doing right now, I continued to crank out content and to fill my site with all the information I could to be more helpful to any visitors, I finished very strong in the third month as I got fewer clicks to Amazon but sold better products!
I was lucky enough to win this inaugural challenge and am currently looking to join in the new Quarter Three challenge which is upcoming. I am searching for a niche that will be good for a three-month challenge along with giving me another high-quality site to use to build passive income!
Out of everything I achieved in this short and intense 3 months that was my favorite was to get the CTR at 5+% for the entire competition, this CTR is what gave me the edge up in visitors, honestly getting that click out of the SERP and into your site is one of the hardest things to consistently achieve!
I actually loved this competition and the results speak for themselves, as a diet niche and maybe on the YMYL structure I have learned a decent chunk so far on what I think helped me get moving very fast compared to many niche sites.
The topic was exploding when the competition started, thanks to exploding topics, I was able to find this and a good domain to bring the force into the competition. While this is awesome it isn’t typical and will not be how all websites start, my first site was a rock and sunk to the bottom of the ocean.
I am going to continue making this case study updated each quarter as to progress and hope that it will help others start to build out their sites and get results that will help them start on the path to self employment and freedom.
