[Ian]

Final update:

Total articles: 174
Total traffic for March: 657
Organic sessions in March: 567
GSC total clicks: 251

My site was really starting to take off in early March, but got badly hit on the 7th. The site even had a forum, but that didn’t seem to help haha (granted, it only had one thread).

Thanks for the great contest Spencer, I had a lot of fun with this!

And congratulations to whoever ends up winning!

[Ian]

My site stats for month 5:

Total number of articles: 156
Total traffic in Feb: 716
Organic sessions: 607
Total clicks in GSC: 476

Only spent an hour or two on the site in February.

I’m seeing significant traffic increases in the last couple days, so March should be interesting!

[Ian]

My January numbers:

Total articles: 131
Users: 454
Organic sessions: 408
GSC clicks: 286

Progress is slow and steady. I’m only spending about an hour a month on my site, so I’m happy with the results given the amount of work I’m putting in.

[Ian]

Barely touched my site in December cause I was so busy with other projects.

Total articles: 123 (+32 since last month)
Users: 201
Organic Sessions: 48
Total Clicks in GSC: 50

Most of my traffic is from Yandex which is a first for me. Thankfully, Google traffic just started ramping up in the last few days. January should be more interesting!

[Ian]

Hey all, here’s my month 2 report:

The tool I mentioned that I’m now using to create articles is Poe. I simply made a GPT-4-powered bot, gave it my detailed instructions, and now it outputs articles exactly to my specifications. All I have to do is provide the target keyword.

[Ian]

Hey all, here’s my month 1 progress report:

This is essentially the prompt I use in ChatGPT. I say essentially, because mine is customized to fit my site’s needs. The one below is a very general prompt that would work for almost any type of article. Of course, for certain use cases (like recipes or product reviews), the prompt should be more customized. I’m sharing the general one below because it’s more universally useful than the very specific prompt I use. Mine is extremely similar, though. Replace the words in [brackets] with the appropriate information. Use the GPT-4 model.

Prompt:

Instructions for article targeting the keyword “[your keyword]”:

Title should be simple and descriptive, and list the target keyword first.

Article body:

[Insert your outline]

Guidelines:

Please add a quick summary after the introduction section. Concisely summarize the important points from the article using bullet points. Label as “Quick summary”.

Use simple wording that is easy for anyone to understand, but always use proper terminology.

Be thorough.

Do NOT leave any section unwritten.

Use short paragraphs.

Use formatting like bold, italics, lists, and tables where possible.

Avoid fluff.

Avoid explicit section and heading labels like “V.”.

Optimize for NLP with the provided target phrase.

Format using markdown for CMS compatibility.

Maintain proper heading structure. The title should be H1. Main headings should be H2. Sub-headings should be H3.

If the article is too long to create in a single output, simply stop when necessary and await the user to prompt you to continue.

End Note:

Take a deep breath and ensure you grasp the format and guidelines. Do you require any clarifications before we proceed?

Once ChatGPT confirms that it understands the requirements and is ready to proceed, simply ask it to begin.

ChatGPT will pause at some point. When it does, simply ask it to continue.

NOTE:

If ChatGPT isn’t following one of your instructions, specify what it did wrong and ask it to try again.

For example: “Looking good, except that you forgot to ______. Please try again”.

If ChatGPT continues to forget your original instructions, the context window was likely exceeded. If that’s the issue, you will need to begin a new chat.

The context window basically means how far back ChatGPT can remember. For GPT-4, the context window is about 6,000 words (which includes both your instructions AND ChatGPT’s output). However, in my experience, ChatGPT begins to forget things even before it reaches 6,000 words.

Feel free to adjust the prompt as necessary. The real customization is within the outline. The rest of the prompt simply helps minimize the need for editing, and helps ChatGPT to follow best practices.

[Ian]

Spencer, I’m using Plausible for Analytics. Plausible doesn’t delineate between traffic types, so there’s no “organic” traffic metric. However, it does show traffic sources. You can see a live example of the data it collects here: https://plausible.io/plausible.io
Any traffic from Google would be organic. May I use Plausible and count Google traffic as organic traffic, or am I required to set up and use GA4?

[Ian]

Hey guys, my name is Ian, and I’m from Illinois.

I’ve been a long-time reader of Niche Pursuits and have been building niche sites since 2016.

I started a site in 2021 to experiment with AI content, and so far it’s been going pretty well. That’s the site I’ll be growing for this challenge.

Here’s my entry video:

[Ian]

Hey guys, my name is Ian, and I’m from Illinois.

I’ve been a long-time reader of Niche Pursuits and have been building niche sites since 2016.

Here’s my entry video:

[Ian]

Nope, same Poe. poe.com

[Ian]

Madison, changing titles can affect click through rate, but otherwise shouldn’t hurt anything. You don’t need to reindex. Also, it’s better to just change the title tag (that shows up on the SERPs), not the main H1 heading that shows on your page. All the SEO plugins I know allow you to just change the title tag without changing the heading.

[Ian]

Thanks, Alpi! Cool tool! I entered a few of my headlines and they scored higher than the tool’s alternative suggestions so I’m not sure the headlines are the CTR issue. I think the bigger issue is that a few of my articles rank at the bottom of the first page, and the keywords that I’m targeting can be answered satisfactorily by any result. There’s no need for the user to scroll down and click a lower result. The niche is English grammar, by the way.

[Ian]

Spencer, can you clarify whether this is alright? I also found a domain that shows up on the Wayback Machine in 2015 as a “coming soon” page. But doing a site:domain search in Google returns nothing, so it’s not indexed.

[Ian]

Sorry! Lol
I don’t expect to win just cause of time constraints, but I am pretty competitive so we’ll see… I have a lot of unique ideas I want to experiment with on my challenge site, and will share those along with my learnings. Whatever the outcome, I’m sure we’ll all learn a ton by the end. It’s gonna be a fun six months!

Great to hear you have Curated Niches! You’ve already got a head start then haha. I’m also doing one from the list. 😉

[Author]

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