How To Make $10k Per Month Online

Once again I'm sharing my notes from a Niche Pursuits podcast that interview Aisha Preece. She shares her secrets on how to make $10k per month online with her niche websites. I like her business acumen and style a lot, she reminds me of some of the people I used to work with in a scrappy startup. There's to learn from these notes and you should read them carefully.

Introduction

• Aisha has a background in Law and Finance
• She made a lot of mistakes in the beginning but now her website portfolio makes $10k a month
• She attributes this success to a solid process for building sites and writing content
• She uses both active and passive means to generate income
• She started her first blog / side hustle when working in Finance
• Wanted to work remotely and control her own destiny
• Quit her job and started writing freelance
• Set up first blog in 2017, did nothing with it
• Friend passed away overnight and that shook her out of her analysis to paralysis
• Set her dream to start a blog and help people and earn a living
• In 2020 learned SEO, first site went to 7k page views to 100k page views in 7 months
• In 2022 it all came together and now she earns $10k
• Realized that her first site was a bad niche

Running a Niche Website & SEO

• Don't make the mistake of being overwhelmed and not getting things done
• If you're not seeing results don't believe you are a failure, we live and die by Google SERP, it might take time
• Her biggest mistake in the beginning was not knowing SEO and not listening to successful bloggers in her chosen niche
• Moral of the story, if you want this to work, you need to treat it like a business
• You need to to allocate work and time to make it grow
• In 2019 took the "right" action after the death of a friend, that was a pivotal life event for her to focus on the right things
• You can take risks and still fail, but that cushy job isn't safe either - you could still get made redundant
• Making money online is about implementing the right strategy
• Her first blog is in the finance niche, a very competitive but very lucrative niche
• She made sure that her About Me reflected here experience, and credentials at the bottom, EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)
• That side currently has 223 articles (that's it?!?!) that focus on finance and earning money online
• It's 90% info, 10% affiliates but every article is monetized
• The monetization comes from ads (20%) and affiliates (80%)

Active Income

• Started a course on how to become a freelance writer
• Monetized by doing workshops, marketed them on Instagram
• Learned into active income sources: Writing a course, creating a digital product,
• When the pandemic hit, a lot of travel work dried up for her (she worked as a freelance writer after her finance job)
• Realized that people learn on Instagram
• You can really monetize it if you have the right audience
• Now her monetization includes ads, affiliates, and niche products

Strategies for Site

• Struggled at the beginning to get traffic, then took an SEO course and followed it exactly.
• Fixed site speed to get to less than 4 second loading time by changing theme
• At that time she had 30 articles and added 40 more, she updated 20 articles with SEO optimization
• Her pageviews skyrocketed to 100,000
• Then she used ahrefs.com to do competitive analysis and write better content and provide better value over her competitors (key trick).
• Once she had her template for success, she just puts amps it up.
• Targets low-competition keywords and runs them through keysearch.co (affordable)
• Focuses on topical authority and focuses on keyword clusters
• What Topical Authority looks in a competitive niche?
• Take the keyword and add modifiers, for example use: "rock climbing" + "women", "men", "teenagers" AND "rock climbing" + "gear" + "plus sized women", "fat men", etc
• Minimum 10 articles with keyword clusters but in some cases she has 50 articles per cluster
• Writing with keyword clusters makes it easier to do research
• If someone outranks her it means they're providing better value
• Target same keywords on lower domain authority websites and provide better articles then them
• Starts with 10 articles, if sees positive ranking on Google Search Console, then goes all in
• Need credibility, provides LinkedIn so people can people can search her, plus Google wants to know if you're not a scammer.
• Doesn't do link building, it happens automatically if you provide good content
• She pitched as a freelance writer, guest post has a link and made it better than an article on her site
• Had to learn to pitch clients and build guest blog posts as part of her freelance career
• Uses data from research to provide the pitch (I have this keyword, this data, I can write you an article in 2 hours, etc)
• You don't need a high DA to get a lot of traffic
• If you can link build, then great but always focus on content. Content will generate links organically
• Started a second site to give her workshop students the ability to be featured to help them
• Was up to 90 articles and Google ignored it, give yourself 12 months and 100 SEO optimized articles before you quit
• Runs her team with Google Sheets, Google Docs, and Zoom
• Started by hiring writers from her workshops, She doesn't hire from any sites
• Promote people that do great work

Organizing Team

• Ask the question, what is the priority for the quarter
• Writers are trained to write across all of her niches (35 people)
• The team is non-traditional, more passionate and loyal team
• Started with a paid workshop as it gets rid of riff-raff
• Teaches them to find freelance work, asks them to pitch to Aisha with a template
• Teaches how to write a good outline
• Uses non-passive to build out website first
• Starts on Instagram, has less than 10,000 followers
• Shares a quick video on SEO everyday, records all her videos in one go then schedules them out
• Tips for sites getting unstuck
• Recommend look at site speed and theme, under 4 seconds
• Do you have 100 SEO optimized blog posts?
• Picking the right topic that people are searching for and the right topic to rank for
• Finding good keywords (low competition, good volume), put those keywords in the right location (H1, H2, URL), supercharge with secondary keywords
• Put yourself in the seat of reader, does that article answer the question? Get to the point
• Find the right strategy and keep taking action, the magic happens around 100 posts
• It takes time for Google to find you, need to wait at least 12 months
• Don't compare your start to someone's middle

End Notes

I learned a lot from this interview. I like her systematic approach to building out her website from research, to writing articles with keyword clusters, and organizing her team. She treats it like a business and if you want to make money online, you should too. Focus on better and more valuable content over your competitors and you'll see the pageviews grow.