🍩 A donut site with 1.1 Million visits/month

Welcome to Niche Site Digest!

Here’s what happened last week:

• 🍩 A donut site getting over 1 MILLION pageviews per month

• 🌐 How to choose a perfect domain name for your site

• 🔗 Top 5 link building technique niche site pros use

Let’s dive in!

🌐 Choosing a perfect domain name for your site

The first thing you need to do after you choose your niche is decide on your domain name.

A good name can make or break your site, so avoiding common naming mistakes is crucial.

In this video, Shawna Newman goes through the entire process of picking a great domain name.

From common mistakes to avoid to where to register your domain, she covers it all.

🔗 Top 5 link building techniques

Matt Diggity polled 186 niche site builders and asked them about their favorite link building techniques.

Here are the top 5:

• Guest posts

• Link insertions

• Digital PR

• HARO

• Link exchanges

These 5 were favored by 82% of all link builders. So basically, you can stick to these 5 and ignore all others and get the most bang for your buck. It really is the 80/20 rule in action.

🤖 SGE now summarizing articles

It seems like web publishers can’t catch a break with SGE (Google’s Search Generative Experience).

What this experimental feature does is basically summarize an article you’re browsing, giving you key points in a bullet list. It’s currently only available on Google’s app on Android and iOS but is coming to Chrome soon.

It’s still not clear how this will affect niche sites (especially the ones that use display ads as a business model), but it’s hardly going to be a positive change.

🔍 Site Spotlight

There weren’t any interesting sites being sold on Flippa this week, so I thought I’d instead share an interesting site I found.

I already shared a bit on Twitter (featured above), but I wanted to go more in-depth here.

Website stats:

• Niche: Donuts (with a twist)

• DR: 39

• Traffic: 1.1 MILLION page views per month 🤯

• Monetization: Ezoic

• Estimated RPM: $5-$15

• Estimated revenue: $5k-$15k/month

Let’s dive in and unpack this site, shall we?

The site in question is https://www.thedonutwhole.com/ - it’s a site about, well, donuts (or so it would seem).

On the first look, it covers donut guides, recipes, and the best donut shops in different cities.

If you put it in the Wayback machine, you’ll see that it used to be a coffee & donut shop in Wichita, Kansas.

The domain was first registered in 2008 but dropped (and picked up) in 2022 and replaced with the current site around that time.

It’s monetized with Ezoic and currently gets 1 112 820 monthly unique visitors.

And how do they get these mouth-watering traffic numbers?

Simple: they have over 30,000 pages published.

When I saw that number, my jaw dropped.

I mean, I like donuts as much as the next guy, but is this niche really that big?

As it turns out… no, it’s not.

It seems that they quickly ran out of donut topics and started writing... well, about anything. They used AI to crank out 30k pages in just a few months.

What I find super interesting is that all of those pages are hidden on the site - there is no way for a user to find them unless they actually land on that page from Google.

(They did mess up, and a couple of those random pages are listed on their home page, but 99% of them are nowhere to be found except in their sitemap.)

I suspect this helps them hide their pages from manual Google inspections (at least at first glance).

So how are they ranking so well for so many keywords?

Having 30 000 pages helps. But they also have a really good backlink profile from MSN, Wikihow, NBC News, Thrillist, Food Network, and other quality sites.

We don’t know how much they’re making, but even at $5 RPM, that’s still over $5k/month… and it’s probably closer to $10-$15k/month.

And they managed to get there in a little over half a year (they started heavily publishing in December 2022).

Would I recommend you do this?

No. This is a pure short-term play, and they are bound to be hit by a Google update sooner or later and lose 99% of their traffic. I tend to focus more on long term assets that I can own for years or sell for a large sum to an investor.

No serious buyer would touch this site with a ten foot pole, so their only option is to milk it for all its worth until they get slapped by Google. They are making good money while it lasts, though.

If you don’t care about long term options and just want some quick cash now, here’s what I would do:

1. Subscribe to Spamzilla (a tool for searching for expired domains)

2. Connect it with Ahrefs so you get traffic and DR stats for all sites

3. Set your parameters (e.g., at least DR 40, etc.)

4. Find a good domain with a strong backlink profile

5. Buy it

6. Start publishing a ton of content with AI

7. Put Ezoic ads as soon as you can

8. Ride the wave until you get hit by an update

🚀 Featured Snippets

• 🕵️‍♂️ Here’s a cool little trick to find sites using Mediavine. This tactic can be useful for researching new niches or finding competitors you didn’t even know existed.

• 💵 Are content sites not selling at the moment? The market for niche sites definitely seems to have cooled down, and some publishers are sharing their experiences selling sites in this thread here.

• ✏️ PRO TIP: A simple introduction formula that helps you rank higher on Google AND keeps people on your page longer.

• 👨‍🔬 Most niche sites have the exact same 6 issues - how many of them does your site have?

• ❓Keeping with the theme of selling a site - here’s a list of 7 questions to ask yourself before listing your site for sale.

• 🔗 In 2023, link building is as important as ever. But how should you approach it? From calculators to stats pages, learn the exact tactics that work best today.

🛠️ Tool of the week

I shared a similar tool a while ago, but thought this is also worth mentioning. If you hate GA4 (and it seems most people do), then this Looker Studio replicates the Universal Analytics dashboard. I’ve tried it, and it’s definitely going in my bookmarks.

That’s it for today - see you next week!

Niche Site Guy