I’m Ranked Number One in Google!!

In my last niche site duel update, I was extremely excited to share that I landed on the first page of Google. I’m proud to say that one week later, my site is now sitting at the number one spot in Google for my primary keyword!

Based on my keyword research and analysis of the competition, I knew that I would eventually get here, I just didn’t think it would happen this fast.

• August 25th: Site went live. Not ranked.
• August 29th: #184
• September 6th: #162
• September 8th: #135
• September 9th: #119
• September 13th: #117
• September 14th: #53
• September 21st: #38
• September 29th: #27
• October 22nd: #16
• October 27th: #6
• November 2: #3
• November 6: #1

TIME SPENT

It took a total of 73 days (2 months and 12 days) from the launch of my site to when it climbed to #1 in Google.

On average, I would say that I spent about an hour a day on the niche site, for 5 days a week. Most of that time was spent researching and adding content to the site, as well as building backlinks. After calculating that out, including an initial 8 hours to do the keyword research and actually build the site, I would guesstimate that I’ve spent a total of about 60 hours on it.

Not bad!

Although I am now earning residual income from Adsense each day, I still think it’s a bit too early to just “set it and forget it”. I do want to take the income to the next level and I definitely want to stay at #1 (once you get there, it doesn’t mean you’re there forever!), so I will continue my one hour a day / 5 days a week schedule to add content and build backlinks, plus work on my new monetization strategies.

RECAP: SELECTING THE KEYWORD AND NICHE

When I first started, Market Samurai was telling me that the strength of competition for the top 10 sites in Google was not incredibly strong, although there were some sites to be worried about. The domain ages of some of those sites worried me and a high ranking New York State site sitting at the top was scary too, but I was confident with my selection because as you can see in the SEO Competition chart below, the number of backlinks going to those sites was fairly low and after analyzing the backlinks for each of those sites I found that they were not that strong either.

I selected this niche not only because the competition looked like something I could handle, but also because of the potential traffic that I could receive. Again, Market Samurai told me that if I were to achieve a #1 ranking in Google, I would potentially see at least 167 visitors per day coming from searches for that exact term (this is what SEOT means in the screenshots below).

Tip: Broad match shows more traffic, but it’s a less accurate reading because it’s showing me potential numbers from searches that include the term “security guard training” but may also have another term to go along with it, such as “security guard training in California”. When you’re selecting a niche, it’s always smart to look at the exact match just to make sure you’re still seeing favorable numbers. As you can see, “cop training” drops off heavily when I switch from broad to exact. I explain more about what all this means in a previous installment.

Broad Match

Exact Match (this shows numbers based on people searching for the exactkeyword phrase, nothing more)

TRAFFIC

So now that I’m sitting at the number one spot, do the numbers match up? Did the search engine traffic increase?

Well, I only recently found out about my achievement on Saturday, so I currently only have one full day at #1 recorded in Google Analytics since I’m writing this post on Sunday, but I did see an increase traffic coming from that one keyphrase:

After climbing to the number one spot, I saw a 200% increase in traffic from my #6 position a little over a week ago, and a 100% increase from the day before, where I was actually sitting at #3.

Although my traffic doesn’t match the SEOT numbers from Market Samurai, I have only been at the number one position for one day and it was for a Saturday. My previous experience with websites tells me that generally the weekends see much less traffic, so I’m expecting that once Monday rolls around the numbers will be a lot closer to what my keyword research software tells me.

Even so, seeing 120 visits in a single day for a single keyword is great. It’s even more traffic than I receive for the keyword “passive income” for this blog, which sits at the #2 position.

With “security guard training” selling at a cost-per-click of $2.32, you could even say that I’m “saving” over $250 a day by grabbing organic traffic instead of paying for it from Adwords. Interesting…but thinking about it like that doesn’t make me any money.

However, because I know there are companies willing to pay that much money per click for traffic for this keyphrase, and there’s traffic coming to my site, it gives me all the more confidence in my monetization strategy where I plan to sell advertising space to companies in this niche. I hope to get off of Adsense and into private advertising soon because I’ll definitely see a lot more profits coming my way.

Exciting!

BACKLINKING DETAILS

A number of people have been asking me for more detail about my backlinking strategy because as I’ve mentioned before, backlinks (links coming from other sites to your own) are one of the most important ingredients for climbing the ranks of Google. I’ve outlined the basic strategy inNiche Site Duel 006: My Backlinking Strategy, but I do want to show you allexactly what I’m doing because what I’m doing is working.

So, get ready for my next post because I’ll be going into massive detail about my process – more than my previous post. Someone actually suggested that I charge for the information I’m about to reveal, but to stay true to the nature of the Niche Site Duel and showing you my entire process, I’d like the information to be totally transparent and free.

And, per the request of several people, I will be walking through my article writing, spinning and submittal process, step by step (with video), to show you how I can turn one primary article into several hundred different links all working to increase the strength of my site.

My Monetization Strategy

When I started my security guard training site for this niche site duel, a lot of people had asked me how I planned to monetize it. In this post, I will answer that question for you.

Because the niche I chose is an education & career driven niche, I plan to follow a similar progression of monetization that I used when I setup my LEED Exam website.

GOOGLE ADSENSE

There are a lot of mixed reviews about adsense.

I like it because it’s quick and easy. Insert some code onto your website, advertisements are automatically generated and you get paid every time someone clicks on an ad. Nice.

I don’t like it because you’re working so hard to bring traffic to your site, only to redirect it elsewhere. In some cases, you’re helping your competitors more than you’re helping yourself.

Let’s say, for example, I’m getting 100 visitors a day and 5% are clicking on my Adsense ads. At a generous $2.00 per click, I’m making $10.00 per every 100 visitors (this click-through-rate [CTR] and cost-per-click [CPC] are quite high, but I’m just using these figures to prove a point). I’ve made some money, but who knows how much more my competitors have made from my “leads”.

Now, let’s say I have an eBook or course that sells for $20. Even if I convert only 1% of my traffic, at 100 visitors a day I’m still making twice as much as with the ads (which again I provided a very generous CTR and CPC for). Furthermore, each customer could be worth more than $20 if I were to later come out with more products or had some type of backend offer or affiliate promotions within my eBook or course.

This is why I’ve taken Adsense out of my LEED Exam website. I have my own products and I don’t want to feed leads to my competitors, which will automatically show up in the Adsense ads.

I am, however, using Adsense temporarily on my security guard training site. The reason is because I don’t feel I’m qualified enough to create my own product for this niche just yet (the last thing I want to do is force out a crappy product), but I am learning more and more about it each day and believe that I will have the ability to create some kind of product in the future. As to exactly what that product will be, I honestly don’t know, but when my site starts to get more traffic and I begin to communicate with some of the visitors, I should be able to deduce what people want and what they would pay for.

Additionally, seeing what kinds of ads show up in Adsense would give me an idea of what kinds of things people are paying for too.

So far, my niche site has earned about $50.00. It’s definitely a great start, and I’m currently running ad-type and placement tests to optimize my results. Again, this is temporary while I climb the ranks of Google, get more traffic and eventually look into other monetization methods that I will outline below.

PRIVATE ADVERTISING

Private advertising, or directly selling ad space on your site to another company, is the next logical step for monetization in these kinds of niches.

When I was ranking high in Google for my LEED exam site, several companies contacted me personally to advertise on my site. They know that traffic is coming through (probably by doing a Google search), and they want to be there to funnel some of it onto their own sites. I also contacted some sites on my own who were happy to advertise on my site as well.

I won’t go into detail about how private advertising works (I’ve written about this in detail before), but if you have the traffic, companies will pay you big time to get in front of it, especially if you can show that they will be saving money going through you instead of going through other advertising avenues (i.e. Adwords).

I’m quite excited about the opportunity for private advertising I have with my niche site because every state has different security guard training requirements. If I have one page per state (which I’m working towards), and only one security guard training company buys advertising for each state, that’s 50 paid advertisements. At a low $25 per month, that’s a total of $1,250. I could eventually create an entire directory of training facilities on the site which could yield me an extremely large amount of money every month.

And, it’s happening already!