Niche Site Update – Month #1

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Written by Liz

Just your regular 27-year-old, queer, super-introverted, FIRE-chasing, frugal Singaporean, who lives a pretty good life while earning only a modest salary, but still plans to retire at age 40 with $1,000,000. Click here to read more

August 9, 2020

Hi! Welcome to the first-ever niche site update.

Recap:

I’ve been thinking about starting a niche site for 2-3 years now, and documented why I decided to finally start it last month. This series is to provide you with updates on my niche site (as a beginner blogger) in case you’d like to follow on this journey with me.

This blog post is the first of this new series, and will summarise my first month of niche site building.

Articles Published

As of the date of publishing this update, there are 4 blog posts up on my niche site.

 

Summary:

  • Total Words Published: 48,561
  • Total Articles Published: 4
  • Average Words/Article: 12,140

Further Details:

Article #1:

  • Words Written: 11,793
  • Date Published: 28 July 2020

Article #2:

  • Words Written: 9,973
  • Date Published: 1 August 2020

Article #3:

  • Words Written: 15,562
  • Date Published: 9 August 2020

Article #4:

  • Words Written: 11,233
  • Date Published: 9 August 2020

Further Comments:

  • Articles #3 and #4 are kind of unfinished, as I was a little lazy to whip out my gear to take photos. The only thing that’s lacking are the photos, so I plan on doing that another day (in other words, procrastination). It’ll take me 1-2 hours at most for both posts.
  • I actually wrote all the articles in July, but spent some time publishing it in August. I finally hit publish on Articles #3 and #4 today, only because of this update.

Traffic and Monetisation

As you might have noticed, I published all my articles only recently, a few short hours before this niche site update. I guess I was having too much fun writing the articles, and I was procrastinating on the publishing (because that involves a lot of formatting and editing).

As such, for this month, I won’t be showing my Google Analytics and Google Search Console on details of my traffic – the short answer is that I don’t have any traffic. Zero. Nada.

As for monetisation, I’m always slow to monetise, and I have not signed up with any affiliate networks yet. As such, my niche site is currently unmonetized. Profits = $0.

 

Summary:

  • Traffic: 0 visitors, 0 impressions
  • Monetisation: $0

Other Activities

For the first month of building my niche site, I spent a lot of time dealing with formatting issues and plugin issues. I think I’ve gotten used to the page builder plugin that I bought, so hopefully this is less of an issue going forward.

Thoughts

On Writing

So far, I am really enjoying the writing process. I’ve been tracking the number of words I write every single day, which has been quite encouraging. I guess the writing habit from writing my book earlier this year is coming in very useful.

On Giving Up

To be brutally honest, I’ve never been one to stick to goals well. Apart from my financial goals that I detail on this blog, I’ve taken up and given up on more passion projects that I can count. I’ve had numerous passion projects in language studies, music, and even entrepreneurship. And somehow, I’ve always let life get in the way, and I’ve always let my passion projects fall by the wayside when the going gets tough.

But I don’t want to be that kind of person anymore. Especially not when I’m working part-time, and working from home (away from the crazy office culture).

Thankfully, I didn’t have thoughts of giving up this blog or my niche site during the month of July. In fact, on most days, I still found myself excited to start working and writing in the morning before my office job started. And I’m really happy about that.

I’m not sure how long this will last (because I’m sure the novelty of having a new niche site will wear off eventually), but I really want to stay as positive as I can for now.

They say that most people give up on their blogs or sites after 6 months, so let’s see where I stand at the end of the year!

Goals for August 2020

I’m reluctant to set crazy goals for my niche site and to force myself on a punishing schedule, because I want to enjoy this as much as possible.

As such, I’ve decided to make August 2020 (Niche Site Month #2) an easy month as well, with relatively easy goals (especially since I’m new to blogging and niche sites).

All I plan to do is to:

  • Write one new article a week (in other words, another 4 articles for the month);
  • Not procrastinate on the publishing and the photo-taking of these new articles;
  • Complete all the photo-taking for Month #1’s articles; and
  • Continue to have fun and be happy when writing.

As I mentioned in another post, starting a new niche site is extremely slow and can be quite boring to some without all the traffic and monetisation. I don’t plan on using social media soon, or even monetising until closer to the end of the year. Hopefully in 6-12 months, I’d have more exciting updates for you ?

As always, thank you for reading and supporting this blog. I hope to update the format of these niche site updates over time for better readability.

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2 Comments

  1. Jenn

    Starting a niche site sounds so fun!! I get what you mean about not monetizing this website as it is about your personal (finance) journey. Some of my friends discover my blog and i get a little shy haha.

    • Liz

      Thank you, Jenn! It’s definitely fun, just that it involves a lot of writing and patience. Oh wow that’s really cool! How did your friends discover your site? 🙂