Rank & Bank: Week Two Niche Site Update

Today marks the end of the second week of my rank and bank blogging challenge. In case you are wondering what the rank and bank challenge is, kindly see more information about it on the first post I made.

I’ll also do a quick recap here as things have changed a little bit since I started the challenge. I also like to keep my goals in sight. So, I might be repeating the goals of the projects in every Ranks & Bank update that I make.

Goals and Timeline of the Project

Can you make money blogging in Kenya? It is a question that a lot of people ask me. But instead of giving a blanket yes or no answer, I like setting the example.

I have been making some of my income from blogging for the past two or three years, albeit in the service industry. But I understand that no everyone can start a blog in the service industry, especially if you are in high school or college.

But everyone can make a niche website that is monetized through affiliate programs and products and make it big. You could also create a niche website targeting a high CPC keyword and monetize it using Google Adsense (though I really wouldn’t recommend this especially if you don’t have a Google Adsense account already.)

So, for this particular project, I am building two brand new websites, and aiming to be making at least $500K from each one of them by the end of one and a half years. That’s about 1M Kenya shillings in total.

The blogs will be primarily monetized via the Amazon Associates program.

Here is what I have managed to do so far:

1. In week one, I registered domain names for the two niche blogs
2. I hired two writers to write content for the two websites. I initially hired 3 but one ended up bailing out as she was totally new to the writing industry
3. One blog has 3 posts as of today. The only one has just one post.
4. I have not done any SEO for the blogs. Although I did create a Twitter account for one of them.

Google Indexing

Should you or should you not submit your blog to Google Webmaster console?

It is a question that I have seen raised elsewhere by SEOs. So, I did an interesting quick case study. I submitted one of the blogs to the webmaster console, and didn’t submit the other. Guess what happened? The submitted blog was being indexed while the other one was nowhere to be found in Google using the ‘site:’ search parameter.

Lesson: Don’t believe every bit of information you read from internet marketers. Some of them want you to be an epic flop. Some of them have never started a successful niche blog in their entire IM careers. Always take everything you hear with a pinch of doubt.

Goals for Next Week

I am excited about next week.

1. Create social media accounts for all the blogs (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. I might also consider LinkedIn)
2. Add 5 posts to each of the blogs (I am doing long posts 2000 words and above)
3. Start creating backlinks for the projects.

Challenges

Chase Bank went down.

Seriously.

It was my only bank and I liked the fact that I could shuffle money back and forth from the bank account to Mpesa. It made hiring online so much easy.

What am I gonna do about it? Open a bank account with Cooperative bank. It is the first thing I’ll be doing tomorrow morning.