It only took publishing 8 posts in 3 days
Niche Sites are dead, but AI just might be the savior.
After all, there are still billions of Google Searches happening so why can’t we get a slice of the pie?
I took my brand new blog from 0–10k views by publishing 8 AI articles in a 3 day period. That’s how long I played with the software before I got bored and moved on, unconvinced.
But then I started getting emails from Google Search Console…
“Oh cool, 50 clicks,” I thought.
Then, two weeks later, “Wow, 100 clicks!”.
By the end of the year, it was 1200 clicks, and I realized I was on to something.
Since then, the site has grown to around 12,000 hits, and I’ve actively begun pushing content again. But we’ll get to that. In the meantime, here’s the method I used that you can steal.
Keyword Research for a Zero Authority Domain
Finding those first keywords is the hardest. You need to find keywords with enough volume to be worth your time writing but a low enough difficulty that you’ll actually get traffic.
So, how do we find these? I recommend two approaches: one is active, and one is much more passive.
Active Keyword Research — the Lazy Way
“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
― Bill Gates
All keyword research tools have a difficulty rating. So as a new blog, we’re going to want to find the lowest difficulty possible. I used Semrush for this project, but in the past, I’ve used Ahrefs, which is also great.
I started with the broad seed keyword of “podcasting”. And used the Semrush keyword difficulty range “very easy” to start. I recommend doing exactly that with your niche instead of “podcasting”
From there, you have a list of keywords you can rank for as a new domain. It’s not a guarantee, but this is your best shot.
Not every keyword will be suitable, if someone is searching for a brand name, like the Geekzilla podcast, then that’s not something you can try and rank for.
For instance, “podcasting” and “very easy difficulty” resulted in a surprising amount of “adult” keywords… Just another reason we need to narrow down the list!
You want to go through each keyword, noting down what topics you think you could write about and keeping an eye out for patterns of keyword
For the podcasting niche, I managed to find the formula “Best X podcasts” where X is every niche imaginable. Check it out:
Bingo! 383 searches with 29,000 total volume.
Now you’re not going to want to write 383 articles, so you need to pick a cut-off point, I like a search volume of 200+ as a rule of thumb, that’s low enough traffic that it often is deemed “not worth it” by big sites so I can swoop in but it’s high enough to still see an uptick in your Google Analytics traffic.
From there, you can keep exploring and building up your keyword list. You might want to increase the keyword difficulty to include “Easy” keywords, not just “very easy”.
Put all of these into a spreadsheet, and now we can narrow down our hit list using the audience-first approach.
Passive Keyword Research
I love the Ahrefs toolbar. It’s a free way to spy on competitors from Google search results. And it’s a wonderful way to try and find blogs like yours whose keywords you can jump in on.
This is 2024, so most searches are locked down by major players. In fact a tiny 16 companies account for 3 billion searches every month. But there’s still room for the little guy.
Having the Ahrefs toolbar allows you to see a site’s Domain Rating and how much search traffic it gets. We can use this to find blogs with a similar DR to ours and then analyze their traffic to find keywords.
Boom, DR11, which is on the low side and 10k monthly traffic. Definitely worth investigating.
DR0, no links, and 100 traffic. It’s not the biggest win, but I’ll take 100 traffic a month if it’s going.
You can then plug these sites into an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush and find the organic pages they’re ranking for. Look at the posts getting the traffic and decide if you can do it better. If you can write a better post, then you’ll be able to steal their traffic.
I’ve found this isn’t an active strategy you can follow, but if you leave the Ahrefs toolbar turned on all the time, you come across sites as you’re researching other articles.
Audience First Approach to Content
Before I write any piece, I ask myself, “Would I write this if I couldn’t get traffic from SEO?”
SEO is a tricky devil to play with. One day you can have a 9-month-old site earning $3,000 in a single month, and the next day you watch traffic crash like the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Yes, that happened to me…
I’ve been stung since then by various updates over the years, which is why I declared the Niche site dead.
The problem is that if you have endless articles like this:
- Can you blend orange peel?
- Can you blend pomegranates whole?
- Can you blend whole apples?
You have nowhere else to market them outside of SEO. They aren’t shareable, you wouldn’t click that if you were browsing Reddit, so you have SEO or nothing. Too risky.
You want an article that benefits your audience AND can get traffic from search engines, not the other way around. But what does that look like you ask?
Well, in my case, my audience are podcasters. If I have lists of best podcasts I can offer it up to my audience to feature them. They, in turn, might share it on social media or link back to it. I’ve been trying to share the lists on Reddit but I’m getting mixed results…
So now this content:
- Helps get my audience’s podcasts exposure (by including them on the list)
- Acts as a point of outreach to other podcasters (who might want to join my email list)
- Is social media friendly (I’ve made the interactive; more on this later)
AND it has SEO potential.
With this approach, your risk of time wasted on useful content is so much lower while simultaneously your value to your audience is higher. Apply this logic to your list of keywords, and you’re ready for content.
Elevated AI Content
From here, I’m going to share affiliate links to my favourite AI writer I’m currently using, Scalenut. I find it the most intuitive to use so subscribed for one month to get my 30 articles and then canceled my paid subscription. I’m not an AI expert so maybe there are better alternatives out there, but this is working for me.
AI content is fine. It’s slightly above average. It does a surprisingly good job. But it doesn’t have the wow factor that you get from the best human-written content. But I spent three days creating and posting 8 AI articles on my blog that led to my first 10k views. So what gives?
AI content needs to be elevated by you. You do this by doing your own research to expand the outline, adding in your own intro, creating your own images, or finding better ways to present the information it gives.
Basically, if it takes you 15 minutes to go from article title to publication then you haven’t tried hard enough.
I use Scalenut for my AI content,it’s great but here’s how you elevate it. Check out what I did for my article on the best NFL podcasts:
You start by giving the context of the article and setting the tone of voice. To get the correct tone of voice, you can copy in 300 words you’ve written, and it will analyze it to match your tone. Please do this yourself so it at least resembles the rest of your writing. Most people will just type in “use an authoritative tone,” which doesn’t cut it. This is your first elevation.
Next is the title, self-explanatory, after that is the outline. Scalenut analyses the current search results to build out your outline. This is great because it will help Google know that your article is, in fact, about the best NFL podcasts, but it’s not enough.
This is where you want to do your own research and build out the outline. Check out Reddit, read Quora posts, add your knowledge, and watch YouTube videos.
SEO comes down to “Match & Exceed”. Take what’s already there and expand it beyond that. If the top result is 10 best X, you do 15 best X, for example.
Yes, this is time consuming but if you want great results, you have to spend the tie. Think of tools like Scalenut as AI “assistants”, not AI “do everything for you while you sit on your ass and cash cheques”.
Most AI writers work similarly to this so take, say, 30 minutes of additional research to again elevate your content.
From there, the content gets generated, and you’re almost good to go.
Again, there is no value in dumping a 3000-word article with no formatting or images. You take the written content and craft it together. For my articles, I thought it would be an extra value-add if you could vote on which podcast is best, and I knew there was a WordPress plugin for that, so we were off to the races!
I also added the logo to every podcast so readers can recognize the correct one in their podcast player. Lastly, I made sure to link to at least one place where they can listen now.
Bring it all together, and we have an elevated AI article, written with my audience in mind, that has also started to bring in traffic from Google. Bish, bash, bosh.
Pitfalls
For some reason not every article has appeared in search from this method. Two of the 8 created aren’t even registering impressions in Google Search Console. This could be because the search is too difficult or the content isn’t considered unique enough. I’m not sure.
But don’t worry if not every article is a runaway success, this happened even when I wrote all my articles without AI. That’s why it’s worth experimenting with 5–10 articles to give you room for some duds and some winners.
Besides, the results from the articles that do gain traction are worth the time spent on the few that don’t.
Once you’ve found your content group that works you can scale it up to hit all the keywords. I’ve since started adding in more of these articles using the above method and so far I’m up 8,000 page views in the last 30 days.
AI writers aren’t a secret home run that will earn you money on autopilot. They are a tool like any other. Learn how to use them properly with these 3 steps and you can explode your blog’s growth.
- Keyword research matters — aim for the lowest difficulty
- Audience first approach — decide how much value the post creates
- Elevate your AI content with extra research and formatting.
Go give it a try.
Supercharge your traffic with the free Free SEO checklist I use to get #1 rankings in Google.
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