Today I’m going to prove to you that you don’t need a huge site with hundreds of pieces of content to start making any decent income online.
Because in this video I’m going to share a real-life, see-it-for-yourself case study of a website that I built up from scratch to over $1 thousand bucks a month in passive income.
And the craziest thing about it is it only has FOUR blog posts and four YouTube videos…
If you’d prefer a written guide then continue reading…
As per usual lets just skip straight past all of the fluff and get right to the meat. The mystery website that we’ll be taking a look at can be seen over at FreshAffirmations.com:
This is a random-ass site that I set up a long time ago that has continued to make me well over $1,000/month to this day that’s targeting the “Affirmations” niche.
Now you might be asking yourself – what the hell is an affirmation?
Well, simply put. They’re basically “motivational” phrases that people repeat to themselves to try to internalize them and psyche themselves up.
I got the idea years ago after discovering that one of my friends had affirmation posters all over her walls and would listen to recordings of affirmations playing online and it got me thinking “you know what… there’s probably a website in that”.
Here you can see one of the posts on my site that has a list of “42 Morning Affirmations” which basically consists of 42 phrases that are designed to be read and listened to first thing in the morning:
Really, it’s just a list of motivational phrases, some images to go with them and a video version of the same thing that reads out each of these affirmations over the top of some music. You might remember this kind of style of site from my ClickBank tutorial which I put out.
And as you can see this site really is very small and simple. It literally has just four pages along with four YouTube videos and that’s it. What’s more is I haven’t updated this site in an eternity.
But nevertheless it’s continued to make me a nice passive income month in, month out without me having to touch it.
So now that we’ve seen the site lets take a closer look at how I set it all up.
Setting up the Website:
Just like all of my websites this site runs on WordPress which is a blogging platform that makes it super simple to set up great looking niche websites. Something crazy like over 30% of all websites in the world run on WordPress and it’s because quite frankly – it’s the shit.
The site is hosted over at HostGator which makes setting up WordPress quick and easy. If you need a web host I highly recommend checking them out. They’re cheap, reliable and I’ve set up countless profitable niche sites using these guys:
Personally I recommend going for the “Baby” plan since it allows you to host as many sites on the one account as you want without having to pay anything extra:
You can also use the coupon LAZYCOUPON at the checkout to get a massive discount:
This coupon will give you your first month of web hosting for just $0.01 or over 60% off your total order.
By using this coupon code I’ll also get a commission at no extra cost to you which is how I’m able to justify putting out my content for free. Thanks!
If you need help with setting up your site I have a full step-by-step tutorial on you can create your first WordPress website.
Choosing and Installing a WordPress Theme:
Once I had my host and WordPress all set up I then just went on to install a nice WordPress theme.
The WordPress theme that I’m running on this site is called “Nexus” from Elegant Themes. I use these guys for a lot of my sites because their themes are high quality and well designed:
You can also get a special $20 discount off your membership by using this link.
As always though, you can definitely do this stuff with Free WordPress themes. Just because I use premium themes, doesn’t mean that you have to – especially if you are just starting out with this stuff.
Creating a Website Logo:
Then for the logo I just purchased a pre-made logo over at Graphic River:
It cost me $29 bucks and all I had to do was tweak the text and boom I had a great logo for my website.
You can change the text for these logos pretty easily in Adobe Illustrator and then just save it and upload it to your site. If you don’t have Illustrator you can get yourself a free 7-day trial here which is all you will need to edit these logo templates.
Of course you can also just make your own logo if you’re good at that kind of thing or even use a free logo creator or something like that. For me though the $29 bucks is worth it for a professional looking logo that I can instantly download and then use on my site.
Creating the Content:
Creating the content for the website was stupidly simple too. Each of the articles is basically just a short intro followed by a list of a affirmations themed around a specific topic with a few images thrown in for good measure:
As always you want to make sure that all of your posts have nice formatting which includes things like headlines, paragraphs, images and all that good stuff.
Targeting Profitable Keywords:
As with all of my websites each of these blog posts and is designed to target a very specific keyword that gets searched for a lot in Google.
For example if you plug one of my keywords “Daily Affirmations” into a keyword tool you’ll see that it gets around 22,000 searches a month:
None of these post topics are random or plucked out of thin air. Everything is based on a keyword that people are actually searching for.
Another example is “Morning Affirmations” which also gets several thousand searches a month:
As always none of these post topics are random or plucked out of thin air. Everything is based on a keyword that people are actually searching for.
And if I type these keywords into Google I can see many of these pages do in fact show up for these terms:
And on top of that my videos also show up for some of my targeted keywords which allows me to take up not just one but two of the top spots in the Google search results:
If you need a keyword tool recommendation then I recommend checking out KWFinder where you can get a free trial for the tool that I use myself to do all of my keyword research.
Creating the YouTube Videos:
Then to create the YouTube videos I simply found someone on Fiverr to do some voiceovers for me:
I simply sent them my articles to use as a script and the boom I had my voiceovers done.
Then I added some royalty free stock footage from Video Blocks:
These guys are awesome as they allow you to download and use unlimited stock footage for a low yearly membership fee.
Then I threw in a royalty free track over the top of each video. You can find a bunch of good royalty free music over at Audio Jungle for pretty cheap:
Or you can even find free stuff by doing a simple search for “Free Royalty Free Music” in either YouTube or Google.
To put them all together and edit the videos I use Adobe Premiere Pro.
And if you take a look at the YouTube channel for this niche site you’ll see that these videos are getting a hell of a lot of views too:
The lowest watched video is still sitting at over 170k views and the highest has over a whopping 3 million views.
On top of that the channel has also amassed over 50k subscribers from people who have watched these videos and hit the subscribe button:
And to this day this channel still attracts several thousand views a day and regular new subscribers and I haven’t uploaded to this channel in forever:
The majority of these views come from people finding my videos in the “Related Videos” section on YouTube which accounts for 23.9% of all the views:
So basically this is when people watch a video about a similar topic and then see my videos turning up and click them:
And the second highest traffic source is the YouTube search engine which accounts for over 20.7% of all views:
So this is from people searching for stuff like “Morning Affirmations” and then finding my video like that:
And the reason that these videos get so much damn traffic from the YouTube search engine is because just like my blog content I always make sure that every video targets a specific keyword that gets a lot of searches – which in this is are simply the same keyword that I’m targeting on my article.
As a rule of thumb if people are searching for something in Google then chances are they are also searching for it on YouTube.
Promoting the Site:
In terms of promotion what’s funny about this site and channel is just how little I’ve actually done. As with all of my sites I’ve set up some social accounts on sites like Facebook and Pinterest and have posted out from my content from there.
And by using these social accounts I was able to get enough initial reshares and backlinks to my content to get Google and YouTube to take notice. Then as more people have come in and started to engage with the content the algorithm has done the rest of the work.
And beyond that I have literally done nothing at all. But since I’ve chosen decent keywords and made half-decent content I’m able to get traffic and income every day.
How the Site is Monetized:
For monetization the site has two main revenue sources – Clickbank affiliate offers and YouTube Adsense:
And whilst it’s not exactly making millions of dollars it has been clearing well over $1000 bucks a month consistently month in and month out for a long time now which is pretty crazy considering how little content I’ve created, how long it’s been since I’ve updated it and how little promotion I’ve actually done on this site.
After re-examining it, I’m actually tempted to push out some new content and use it as a longer term case study where I can keep you guys updated on the progress. But I’m pretty bogged down in other projects right now, so we’ll have to see how it goes.
But hopefully for now this has given you yet another concrete example of how a good niche, solid keywords and decent content can lead to rankings and income even with very minor promotion.
There’s really no need to overthink or over-complicate this stuff.
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