🏖️ How to build a honeymoon website to 7 figures

Welcome to Niche Site Digest!

Here’s what happened last week:

• 🏖️ Building a honeymoon niche site to 7 figures

• 🔨 7 underrated tools you should start using ASAP

• 🔍 How to conduct a content audit in 3 simple steps

Let’s dive in!

🏖️ How to build a honeymoon website to 7 figures/year

I find that case studies are usually the best way to learn about successful strategies you can implement on your own sites.

That’s why I love it when podcast guest reveals their URLs - you can actually see what a winning website looks like.

Jim Campbell does this with his honeymoon website and explains how he grew it to 7 figures in revenue in a few short years.

📉 Helpful Content Update has finished rolling out

The bloodbath has finished… or in other words, Google’s Helpful Content Update has finished rolling out.

If you’ve been hit, take at least some solace knowing that most of your competitors have been hit too (big winners of this update seem to be Reddit and Quora).

If you’ve been hit, what should you do?

First, wait a week or two before making any drastic changes to your site.

After that, take a deep breath, roll up your sleeves, and get back to working and improving your site.

If you make substantial improvements to your site now, you should see a rebound and a traffic increase in a few months when a new update rolls out.

🔨 7 underrated tools you should be using already

Want to collaborate with writers directly in WordPress?

How about creating affiliate product boxes that rival those of Fortune 500 companies?

What about a tool that helps you find extremely powerful expired domains that will boost your DR and rankings?

Gael covers all of those and more in this short video - I bet you won’t know at least 2-3 of these tools.

🔍 Site Spotlight

I have a confession to make.

Despite being a nerd, I’ve never really played Dungeons and Dragons.

But after seeing this site, and exploring this niche a bit more, I regret not getting into it (and making a site about the hobby, of course).

At a glance:

• Niche: D&D

• Traffic: 260,000 visitors/month

• DR: 31

• Posts: 667

• Monetization: Display ads (Mediavine), info products, affiliate marketing

Let’s dive in deeper and figure out the strengths and the improvement areas for this site, shall we?

✅ Content written by D&D nerds.

Google wants content written by experts, and you can tell from their About page and the articles themselves that authors are big-time D&D nerds.

The articles have great UX as well. For example, this article about the barbarian class has a handy color scheme to help you choose the best race for your character.

If we take a look at the spell articles, they have tables and links to classes that can use the spell, bringing a ton of value to the reader (and improving their internal linking in the process.

✅ Diverse monetization options.

From what I can tell, they make their money in several different ways:

• Display ads (they are on Mediavine)

• Affiliate marketing (here’s an example)

• Info products (their adventures)

To be fair, I’m pretty sure that display ads are 90% of their revenue at the moment. However, just the fact they have a shop and the ability to create a customer account makes them a much more legit site in Google’s eyes.

✅ Great topical authority.

One thing they have done exceptionally well is designing their site architecture.

Not only is every article properly categorized, but the articles link to each other in a way that makes sense and boosts their topical authority.

Here’s an example of their header:

And here’s an example of a hub page (classes in this case):

All of this combined leads to a site that has amazing site architecture, which allows it to get a lot of traffic with relatively low DR.

Now with that out of the way, let’s see how they could take this website to the next level.

🔥 Grow their YouTube channel.

While they started a YouTube channel in 2019, they only published 17 videos and have 233 subscribers.

D&D is huge on YouTube, and with SGE coming soon and Google favoring real brands, they have a big opportunity here on YouTube.

They could provide class guides, spell guides, live stream D&D sessions - the opportunities are endless.

🔥 Add more products.

While they do publish their own adventures, they could go all in on this and create a huge library of adventures and guides for D&D players.

If they create a large enough library, they could experiment with bundling or creating a membership site.

This would give them much-needed recurring revenue and lessen their dependence on display ads.

🔥 Get into eCommerce.

This would be a bit harder to pull off since it involves physical products.

But if they wanted to go this route, here are just some of the products they could create:

• Dice sets (“dice goblin” term exists for a reason)

• Character miniatures

• Grid mats

• Character spreadsheets & notebooks

• And a lot more

Creating their product lines would enable them to start paying for ads, further protecting them from Google updates and greatly increasing their value per visitor.

🚀 Featured Snippets

• 🕸️ Topical authority deep dive: When competing against DR 80+ sites, small niche sites need every advantage they can get. Topical authority allows you to get more traffic with less link building and should be used by any niche site publisher.

• ❌ Does Google hate affiliate sites? You can read these takeaways from Google’s Gary Illyes and come to your own conclusion (jump to #7).

• 📹 Is it worth embedding YouTube videos not from your own channel? This forum discussion goes into details of both approaches.

• 🔎 Content audit process: Want to quadruple your traffic (without building links)? Then learn how to perform a content audit and watch your traffic skyrocket.

• 🤑 How to make $73 per day from Facebook: With many publishers losing traffic from Google, it makes sense to diversify your traffic sources. Here’s a step-by-step plan for how to get traffic (and revenue) from Facebook pages.

🛠️ Tool of the week

This is one of the tools mentioned in the video above. This little plugin does one thing exceptionally well - it brings Google Doc-style collaboration to WordPress.

This is particularly handy when it comes to updating posts - pasting back and forth between Google Docs and WordPress is a PITA, and this solves that problem beautifully.

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

Niche Site Guy