The 1k Niche Property Project – Month 1 (October 2021)

Welcome Back to The 1k Niche Property Project!

We’ve officially completed the first month of this project and are more excited than ever before.

Before we dive into everything that’s happened this month, let’s take a quick minute to remind everybody about what’s happened so far in our goal for this project.

The Goal

As a quick recap, we have 2 main goals for this project.

The first and most obvious is that we are trying to take a brand-new website from zero to $1000 in monthly recurring revenue in less than one year (ideally in between 8 to 9 months).

The second is we are testing a few different search engine optimization theories and some of our assumptions by combining the use of an expired domain with a content blitz strategy.

We also wanted to document each step of the journey and be as transparent as possible, so that anyone interested in trying something similar will have a deep understanding of what worked and what didn’t.

The History

As a quick recap for how we got to where we are now, in the first few weeks of this project (what we refer to as month zero) completed two important steps.

First, we worked with our friends over at Niche Website Builders to help us find an expired domain that would be appropriate to build a niche website in our style.

If you’re unfamiliar with why some might want to use an expired domain, I suggest you check out the month zero article, where we dive into all of the ins and outs of the strategy we will be using for this project.

Second, we worked with them to start doing the keyword research necessary to launch as many articles as possible right out of the gate.

That brought us into the middle of September, which we are counting as the official start for this project.

Now that you’re up to speed on how we got here….you might be wondering what we’ve been able to do in the month since our official project kick-off.

The Activity This Month

Between the official kickoff of this project (September 16) and today (October 11), we completed four major steps in our niche site development.

Keyword Research

While our keyword research process started almost immediately, it took several weeks to complete.

Our friends over at niche website builders gave us an idea of what their keyword research process looks like and we combined some of their findings, with the way we typically do keyword research.

This process has now been completed and we have more than 90 articles that we think will be a success for the site (92 to be exact).

While the keyword research process will happen at several points throughout this project, the initial phase is complete and we can move on to choosing the articles and getting them written.

Article Approval

After the completion of the keyword research phase, we analyzed the 92 ideas that we had and selected 50 of them to be our first articles on the site.

If you’ve been following along with this project, may remember that our initial investment included not only the purchase of an expired domain but also 110,000 words of content

These 50 articles will work out to about 110,000 words once they are written, meaning we’ve used our initial content budget on these 50 pieces of content.

Additionally, these 50 articles are a good mix of articles that answer the questions our niche has about the niche and a few posts designed specifically to help us drive some revenue through sales of related products.

Generally speaking, we use a guideline of about 1,500 words as the standard length for an article and if you read the month zero article, we initially thought that our content budget would allow us to publish about 70 articles.

The reason for the difference between the initial estimate and the outcome is simply that some of the topics we chose need longer articles for us to completely answer the topic and to compete with the content that already exists in the space.

The niche we chose for this project is fairly competitive and many of the resources that exist on keywords that meet our criteria are extremely detailed.

All this being said, we will never know the exact length of an article until it is completely written and published, so we may end up with a few more articles than our plan currently allows for.

Article Writing:

The third major thing that’s happened since our initial post on September 16 is that we’ve finally begun the process of article writing.

As mentioned previously, the niche website builders team is helping us create the first 50 articles and will be writing them all using their process.

These articles will be returned to us in batches to have all 50 posted within the first 6 to 8 weeks of this project.

We are currently in week five of this project and expect to start posting content soon.

Generally speaking, you can have a site built and your first piece of content up in as little as 5 to 7 days (check out the seven-day content challenge here), but since we are testing the content blitz strategy our goal is to post the articles as quickly as possible in bulk.

This means rather than publishing one or two pieces per week as we do with our other sites, we will be posting all 50 of these articles in rapid succession over the next few weeks.

Site Development

The last thing we worked on this month is some of the basic site development.

As with the actual creation of the content, our friends over in niche website builders are handling this part of the process for us and will be launching the site as soon as the first pieces of content are ready to be published.

We expect this process to be completed within the next week or two and once this is done, we will be sure to let you know. 

The Money

Now that you have an idea of everything that we did this month, you’re probably wondering what’s going on from a money perspective.

Each month we’re going to be breaking down our expenses, earnings, and giving you an idea of our net profit as we work our way through this process.

Let’s start by taking a look at our expenses so far.

Expenses

Other than our initial investment of about $9000 (it was slightly less, but for the sake of this project we’re going to round up our expenses and round down our profits), we had no additional expenses for this project this month.

This puts our total investment at this point at $9000.

Month 1 Expenses: $0

Earnings:

Obviously, since we haven’t launched the site yet, we haven’t earned any money from this project yet.

With any niche website, you can expect it to take several months for your outer place where monetizing makes sense.

Given our aggressive timeline for the site, we expect to start monetizing around month five or six of this project.

Month 1 Earnings: $0

Net Earnings

At this point, we’ve had no additional expenses (beyond the initial investment, but we also haven’t received any income from the site.

This puts our net profit for month one at this project at -$9000 (or a $9,000 “Loss”).

Obviously, we are in the very early stages of this project and expect that number to start shrinking within the next few months.

Month 0 Expenses: -$9,000

Month 0 Earnings: $0

Month 1 Expenses: $0 (Zero Additional)

Month 1 Earnings: $0

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Month 1 Net: -$9,000

That’s A Wrap

That’s officially a wrap for the first month of this 1K Niche property project.

While it is a little frustrating, to not have complete control of the process (something we’re used to), our friends over need property builders are moving everything along nicely and were extremely excited to have some content being published within the next few weeks.

Both Scott and I are excited to see all the progress we’ve made so far and are champing at the bit to get our first articles up.