Transcription

Hey. How’s it going ZZZ Profit readers? This is my niche site duel update. Now, it’s been a while since I did an update. It’s been about a month. I apologize. It’s been a lot longer than I expected. My day job was the busiest year ive had do date as a surf instructor.  I run a surf yoga retreat here in Costa Rica. This is one of our busiest season and I got totally swamped and  haven’t been able to really update. Although, I have been doing some work on my site Zweapons.com.

What I want to do is update what i have been doing during this time. I have a bunch of things I want to talk about so I am just going to breeze through everything. The first thing I wanted to talk about is the status of the website Zweapons. For you that are following the duel. It’s me vs. my VA (virtual assistant). My VA is doing a dog training website(k9trainingden.com) and I’m doing a zombie weapon website or zombie apocalypse survival type of website(zweapons.com).

You can go back to our initial post when we started it to find more information and follow the history. You can go back and see what my VA is up to as well. He is more into stats and writing everything down whereas I just kind of wing it. I don’t do a lot of keyword research for this particular project. This is more passion, something that I am really interested in and that I really enjoy doing. Where I left off last time was picking the site, setting it up, getting it up and running, and begining to hire some writers.

My Niche Site Content Strategy and Monetization

I hired a couple of writers to write articles for my pages. I wanted to create a website, that had core pages that people could navigate and be found at any time from the main menu, but at the same time i wanted a blog so I could post random blogs with related topics. For the core pages I had the writer write articles about particular weapons against zombies. These weapon pages are to be the foundation of my monetization plan

For example, if you go to zombie vs. handgun It is about hand guns vs zombies and at the end of the post we have a table comparison plug-in of our top ten hand-gun pics (I got the idea from Spencer from niche pursuits). In this case however the guns do not link to any affiliate products yet because I haven’t found a gun affiliate site that sells online and offers an affiliates.

Most of the other zweapon  pages such as Zombie Compound Bow  are set up with Amazon affiliate links too . Just like the handgun article, at the end of the article we list our top choices of compound bows. What we did is list  information such as the materal, size, ratings stuff like that. Each product links through an Amazon affiliate link. That is the primary ways I was planning on monetizing Zweapons.

Since the website is primarily about weapons for a zombie apocalypse, I have created individual articles covering weapons such, Samurai sword, machete, axe etc. I plan on continuing until I have covered every weapon I can think of. I am also going to cover survival gear like portable water gear, food rationing, camping gear, survival knives and things of that nature. Once again they will link to either Amazon or other affiliate products that relate survival or zombie or weapons. That is basically the type of monetization that I am going to be targeting with this website.

I haven’t sold anything yet. I’ve really just been working on getting the content up and getting the site looking complete. For social media I set up a Facebook fan page, a pinterest page and a twitter account.  Currently I only have about five blog posts which is really not that much, however I have a more pages because that is what I want the core of the website to be.

Outsourcing Website Content

I have been paying 5 dollars an article on Odesk which is a really good deal in my eyes. One of the things I do when I hire writers is request they are a native English writer. There’s a lot of people on Odesk that are just starting out and they don’t have any ratings or reviews, so many times they are willing to do some work for cheaper than what they would normally do it for.

There are a lot of people starting to look for work on sites such as Elance, oDesk. When i post a new job, I usually get a handful of good matches. Depending on the subject you can get anywhere from a couple to 40 or more applicants. With the zombie topic I always get a lot of people.  A lot of people seem to be interested in zombies and are willing to write for cheap. Then, I may hire three or four writers, and repy, hey let’s do a two article test. I’ll do it at a trial rate and then I’ll pick the best writer and say, hey are you OK continuing at this rate for say another 20 to 30 articles? I found a really good writer whose really into zombies so the site is coming out really nice as far as the content goes. It’s actually very interesting and entertaining to read.

That is what I have been focussing on, just filling in the content, and creating Amazon affiliate links. I may look into other ways to monetize the site but right now it’s all about building the traffic.

Niche Site Analytics

So let me show you my traffic here. This is my Analytics(watch video attatched to see). What I wanted to show, is although it’s not getting much traffic because it’s a very new site(about two months old), it is however already getting some organic search traffic. Also I am getting some referral traffic and direct traffic. In fact I was already contacted by another popular zombie site and they asked if they could link to my weapon descriptions. I was like, of course. I wasn’t really expecting that so that will be a decent back-link.

My Niche Site Rankings

Next what I want to show you is my rankings. I just picked six keywords to track that I would start with, then as time goes on and think of more keywords I will probably grow the list. For now I am just tracking my main keywords.

•  zweapons
• z weaons
• zombie weapons
• zombie apocalypse
• best zombie weapons
• zombie survival gear

My primary keyword is zombie weapons, which I do not rank for yet, But I do rank first for Zweapons together which is my domain name Zweapons. But I also rank 12^th for Z weapons. I just got that ranking yesterday. So that tells me that I am on the right track. I went from no rankings, to my name, and now similar to my name. There’s actually some traffic that goes to Z weapons. My next goal is to start ranking for zombie weapons, best zombie weapons and zombie apocalypse as well as any other related keywords.

Sumary and final thoughts

The last thing I wanted to say is, so in our niche site duel we did give ourselves a budget of 100 dollars each. I’ve spent my 100 dollars on articles,  so i am pretty much right at my budget of $100 bucks. I haven’t checked exactly but it is around 90 or 100 dollars. I decided to stretch my budget a so I hired someon to write blogs. I found somebody who English is not their first language but they are a huge zombie fan and they seemed to write decently according to the samples provided, She wrote satisfactory and  had decent English writing skills. It wasn’t perfect but the price made up for it.

Normally I would only want to hire a native English writer but in the case where somebody has a passion in a subject I think that can actually overtake somebody with perfect grammar. Of course, I can always go in and edit. So I hired a girl from the Philippines who will be blogging. We agreed on 3 dollars a blog post for now. I told her let’s try it out for a month or two so if you check back to Zweapons you may see some new blog posts in the next week or so.

That’s about it. That’s what’s happening with Zweapons. Everything is going as planned. This is a long-term project so I plan to keep tracking progress. We’re going to track this for at least a year. I will try to do more consistent updates. I would love questions. If you have any questions or anything to add, please just leave them in the comments below. I will try to address them in further updates. So that’s about all I have to say. Until next time, ZZZ Profits.com, my niche site duel me vs. my VA.