How This Social-First Niche Site Started Making Money in Its First Week

• The site was launched on June 24.
• In 90 days, the site had over 25k sessions.
• The site got most of its traffic from Facebook and email — not Google.

In May 2024, we teamed up with NSL to create a public case study website for her.

After everyone in SEO was sick of the constant Google algorithm updates that made almost zero sense, we decided to stray away from the norm and go for something slightly different.

While NSL was on a trip to Amsterdam, we set up the site and made it ready for her to launch: https://veganwins.co.uk/.

We did everything – design, build, research, content creation, images, internal links, etc.

Here’s how it went.

Finding Topics for a Social Media Audience

The goal for this site was for it to make money without Google.

The articles weren’t written around search keywords. They were evergreen, long-form articles written to appease to a social media audience and get them to click on them.

Examples of titles we used:

• “The Biggest Mistakes People Make When Switching To Veganism”
• “Why Vegans Should Stop Eating Rice And Start Eating Quinoa”
• “How to Avoid Feeling Isolated as the Only Vegan in Your Circle”

As you can tell, the goal with these topics isn’t to answer a question. It’s to make the reader stop scrolling and be distracted/entertained/informed via the article.

After all, who wants to skip an article that tells you all the mistakes you’ve been making in your vegan breakfast?

Creating Not-Boring Content

We wrote out the content for NSL and added upwards of 5 engaging images to each post.

1. A social audience runs on engagement and a short attention span. So incorporating a high percentage of images to the content was a big priority and one of the ways to retain their attention.
2. We made sure to nail the intro so as to not lose readers in the first few seconds of them landing on the article.
3. When writing the headlines, we made sure we were thinking from the perspective of a social user. Old habits die hard, yes, but we knew those SEO-optimized headings wouldn’t really work on Facebook.

What nobody on Facebook wants to read: “Best Cruise Deals 2024: Cheap Cruise Vacations, Discounts, and Affordable Cruise Packages for Families, Couples, and Solo Travelers.”

What people will read: “The Secret Cruise Hack That Lets You Sail for Almost Free (Cruise Lines Don’t Want You to Know!)”

4. For high engagement and interesting content, a promising strategy we used was to collate data that already existed out there, but to present it in a form that was:

• More interesting and 
• More comprehensive.

Creating & Promoting its Facebook Page

While we built the site, NSL created its Facebook page and started off by posting some simple memes and status posts.

To get the ball rolling, NSL spent $69 on running ads for the page, and gained 1,143 followers in the first few days.

How did the ads look? Here’s an example:

Once the site was live, we started publishing articles on it. NSL shared article links on the Facebook page to drive traffic back to the site.

Some posts had short captions, some were image posts with the article link in its comments.

7 Days After Launch

A week into the site, the VeganWins Facebook page was at 5k followers and the site had 323 visits. Compared to the alternative (SEO), where a site takes months to even get indexed and start showing up on Google, VeganWins was already miles ahead of that just 7 days into launch.

A Month After Launch

By the end of July, the VeganWins page was reaching 1.3 million people.

At this point, NSL had spent $720 on Facebook ads and the page had 12k followers.

2 Months After Launch

By the end of August, the site was already getting 3,577 sessions from Facebook.
At this point, the page had grown to 15k followers with an ad spend of less than $1k.

3 Months After Launch

At 90 days, the site had 25k pageviews, here’s where they came from:

And here’s how organic search was looking:

5 Months After Launch

As of Nov 19, the site was getting 36k sessions, with 8k organic social visits.

At this point, the site was monetized for display ads, though it wasn’t the main source of revenue as RPM for a UK audience is generally low.

Just a week after this, the NicheToolbox was launched which made it easier than ever to share articles on the Facebook page and create relevant memes.

Here’s how it affected the site traffic coming from Facebook:

Monetization of the Site and Facebook Page

There are several ways to monetize a social-first site and its Facebook page:

1. Display Ads
   The site had display ads set up via Raptive so every site visitor generated ad revenue.
2. Affiliate Links
   The niche had a lot of potential for product recommendations, such as vegan protein powders, breakfast bars, etc. Simply adding these links to articles, emails, or Facebook posts helped earn a commission on them.
3. Facebook Bonus Program
   VeganWins’ Facebook page was accepted into the Facebook Bonus Program within the first month, and with 5k followers, the page made $8.62 in just two weeks.
   As soon as a few posts go viral on the platform, creators make thousands of dollars from a single post.
4. Email List
   The VeganWins site offers a free PDF cheat sheet to readers. They simply enter their email address to receive the PDF in their inbox. 

Here’s how the user journey was planned for a VeganWins site visitor (summarized by NSL herself):

The Challenge with VeganWins

Is veganism in the UK the best niche choice for a public case study?

Well, no.

It’s not the most lucrative niche in terms of profits, to be honest.

But sometimes it’s more important to have personal interest in a niche than for it to be the most popular choice.

This niche was something that NSL had personal experience with, as she was vegan for almost 5 years and lived in the UK.

This meant she had a very good sense of everything related to the niche — if the content is correct, if the audience would like it, if the recipes are ones that would actually appeal to UK vegans, etc.

ROI Timeline for Social-Sites vs SEO Niche Sites

• Social-First sites like VeganWins.co.uk bring in ROI within the first few days. As soon as a means of monetization is set up, you can start earning without waiting for the site to rank on search engines.
• Social-First sites have a self-sustaining audience growth with evergreen content and an email list.
• In comparison, SEO sites have a painful wait of 6 months to a year before you can even think of making any money at all.

Related Services

If you want to create a website that doesn’t have to rely on Google for traffic and revenue, you can avail our services here:

• DFY Social First Niche Sites
• Social Engagement Content
• DFY SEO Content