As I recently outlined in this post, we’re on a mission to beef up our existing batch of approx 100 sites that we have built so far this year and turn many of them into broader authority sites.
Only a handful of months ago, we were focusing our efforts on building a ton of smaller 5-25 page sites, perhaps a stretch to 50 page sites, with a view to flipping them after 9-12 months for 16-20x.
As it turned out, we managed to do just that thanks to selling a site through the Empire Flippers marketplace, just as many others have done too, including Josh from FormYourFuture.com, Doug from NicheSiteProject.com and Hieu Nguyen, who Tung Tran recently featured on his blog.
Clearly, the model of building, ranking and flipping small niche sites is a viable business model, at least in the current Google landscape. We’ll continue to show TLC to our current stable of smaller niche sites with a view to either pocketing the ongoing income, or flipping them when the time is right.
However, Google is continually changing things up and there is a trend to larger sites being more prevalent in the SERPs and there is certainly a trend to thorough, resourceful, 1500+ word pages dominating the SERPs. Furthermore, starting new sites from scratch will have you waiting a good 4-6 months before you see too much income.
Add to that an apparent “new” Google 30 day sandbox (which you can find out more on here, and how to deal with it here) and we’ve come to a conclusion, that we will achieve superior ROI (time and $s) by both adding content to our current authority sites and through building out any new authority sites vs setting up more niche sites.
A note:
We’re able to turn our attention to building bigger sites because we have sufficient systems and resources to do it. We are ALL FOR small niche sites still. They are an awesome way to practice and refine skills and the ROI on a site flip in under 12 months is very solid. Plus, niche sites are easier to build out to complete stage and there are more buyers in the $20k and under price range, so there are plenty of benefits to building smaller sites.
This is not a “stop building niche sites” post.
We have a surplus of niche sites that do need TLC as they’ve been left to sit without enough love! We are at the stage in our business where it’s time to take stock and maximize the potential from the sites we already have as opposed to churning out more. We have sufficient resources to focus our efforts over the coming months on expanding sites into true authority sites and have put together a team of about 30 people, including VAs, to fulfill the requirements of the project. Frankly, we’re ready for a new challenge.
NoHatSeo Authority Site Case Studies
Oh to have a dollar for every case study on an internet marketing blog… There are a lot to follow, but our aim is bring a little bit extra to the table in terms of genuine insights on the ROI of both adding content to current niche sites, building broader authority sites from scratch and also launching sites on expired domains.
As part of this case study, we will be providing regular updates on the following two experiments:
Launching money sites on expired domains:
We have launched a batch of sites on expired domains. In addition to testing to ROI of building out very broad sites, we are also going to be testing some ideas we have on specific types of expired domains that can potentially achieve faster than normal rankings. This in itself will be an interesting test! Find out more here.
Adding content to high RPM niche sites:
We have started adding tens of thousands of words of content to existing high RPM sites that we have. We’ll be taking some from approx 15-50 page sites up to as high as 2000+ page sites, whilst others will likely max out at 200 pages. We’re keen to see the potential ROI, particularly on long tail KWs and also test the impact of adding social media profiles to sites to become a true authority in the niche. Is it worth the effort? Time will tell! We’ll be documenting the process of a handful of our sites over a 90 day period. Read more here.
Summing up
We have everything from amazon affiliate sites, sites currently earning through Adsense to some sites that have potential to morph into genuine businesses in their own right. We’ll be strategically adding content and testing, testing, testing as we go through. It’s gonna be fun!
What’s to be revealed?
The NoHatSeo way is to hold nothing back. Hayden’s public reveal of his strategies for finding expired domains paved the way for thousands of people to find a simple way to rank sites. We’ll be opening the doors to our business again as we go through a large-scale authority site build-out.
We’ll be providing updates on everything from individual site earnings through to our monetization tactics, ROI on added content, areas where we tanked and probably a whole heap of things we’ve not even thought of yet!
Bottom line is, we’re going all in on this project. It’s a very exciting project to be a part of and I’m certain that it is going to reveal some sensational information for you all, so I can’t wait to share!
Have you got anything in particularly that you’d like to learn from this case study? Something you’d like us to test? Let us know below!
James says:
So we should stop building niche sites? Kidding! Can’t wait to see some of the results of this. It will shape how many of us move forward with our own sites!
GregNunan says:
Can’t wait to share the results! And yes, we’re in a unique position to do large-scale testing, so hoping to provide plenty of valuable insights.
Luke Mitchley says:
Guys, a big thanks!
Josh Shogren says:
I know it depends on the niche but I feel like in almost any niche 2000+ pages of content seems out of reach(Unless you are reporting news). So it will be interesting to see how this goes, I will be following!
GregNunan says:
Hi Josh, yes reporting on news is certainly in our plans for the bigger sites. Google news is a focus for us.
Alex A says:
hmmmmm, I like your theory on adding more pages and reviews to amazon sites – if your reviewing almost every product in the niche (and if there is a good number of products) it will sort of be like an authority review site in that niche wont it….Cant wait to see how you go
Jatin Chhabra says:
hey greg, very optimistic post. Will keenly follow it. But I have a off-topic question. I refereed the Aug PTC to one of my student ([email protected]), but he ain’t getting any healthy response. Would be great if you could interfere in it.
GregNunan says:
Hi Jatin, we’ll be sending out information to August PTC and Internship applicants in the next week. Thanks for the referral, greatly appreciated!
Theodore Nwangene says:
That will be a good move Greg,
Building of authority sites is indeed better off than small niche sites in terms of durability. I will be looking forward to the updates.
Thanks for sharing.
GregNunan says:
Thanks Theordore. Nothing wrong with niche sites as we keep pointing out, but we’re definitely focusing on authority sites right now.
Carlo Angel says:
It will not be easy to write 2000+ words of contents Greg,
How do you intend to do that? And i wonder the niche you want to target this time.
I can’t wait for more updates.
Good luck
GregNunan says:
Hi Carlo, as I mentioned in the post, we have sufficient resources to be able to pump out content. However, the rationale for documenting what we’re doing as a public case study is to prove our theory that building out authority sites will superior ROI to continually building niche sites. That being the case, our readers can take the information and apply it on a whatever scale they can manage. It’s not the volume of content we’re testing, but rather the theory of adding content. (I presume you meant 2000+ pages as opposed to words by the way).
Sean Jenkins says:
Hey Greg,
I’m very eager to see these case studies but one thing I don’t understand here is all the hype lately around adding lots of content to our sites.
Is this done only because a “big” site will sell for more?
I agree that in terms of rankings it’s good to have a big authority site but at some point we gotta draw the line here, don’t you think?
GregNunan says:
Hi Sean, the “hype” surrounding authority sites, and by that I presume you’re referring to our recent posts discussing what we’re up to (including this case study post), is because authority sites are our focus right now.
Beyond being able to sell the sites for more, we feel that the logical next step for anyone that has already built successful small niche sites is to then build out authority sites (or turn existing niche sites into authority sites). Our theory is that we can get superior ROI through adding content to existing sites vs building new niche sites right now, due to faster rankings for new content, broader monetization tactics being available etc on authority sites.
If that is the case and ROI is superior from authority sites, it’s exactly the type of information we’ll be screaming here because our mission (see NoHatDigital mission statement) is to share that knowledge to anyone who wants to read it!