Confession Time: I've Been Building a Second Site

A wee confession, because I promised myself I would stick to one project.

In the beginning, I went with what I know... Staffies. That's me, the Staffy guy. Mainly English, but I get traffic for the variations too. Amstaffs, Australian Staffies, short-haired Staffies (there's thick and short coats).

I figured it’d be my bread and butter.

Broad niche (dogs) narrowed by breed.

It’s pulling its weight.

Then I paused it.

Instead, I figured, that’s doing fine with just Google, and it’s what I want to be my “baby”.

Let me tell you why:

Years ago, I set a site up for memorabilia. A dog we lost. Then I lost the copy on the website. That was sore because it had a lot of memories, some really touching stories and very special photos. Not even archive.org has them now.

My dog site is a personal site and I need it to hold its own. If everything fell apart, I’d want to recuperate at least the cost of hosting to keep the site alive.

But… I’m not a fan of having all your eggs in the one basket.

So, on Feb 16 (2026) I registered a new domain.

For a new niche.

One to use for testing so as to keep my pet project as clean as can be. Make mistakes elsewhere.

Since Feb 16th, my dog site has had nothing done. Yet when I checked GSC and GA today, almost everything pointed at growth. Some maintenance work to be done but nothing drastic.

That’s the sign of compounding growth. The passive income affiliate marketers chase. It’s really just the initial stages (foundations) that set the pace for growth to happen.

My New Site (at little extra cost)

One of the things I love about WA is the hosting. It’s what brought me back. I only needed one, now I can have 10. Why wouldn’t you?

The new site is a completely different niche, but like before, one I know about. I’m able to spot AI tricks and hallucinations. That’s why you ought to be in a niche you know if you’re going to use AI for content.

The goal of this new site is not primarily cash in the bank. It’s a test bed. And the first test is going to be Pinterest. That thing Jay done a whole series on.

On the new site, I’m coming up to 10 clusters. That’s to say, 10 “money posts” with multiple feeders linking into them.

To see how it was working, I exported the GSC and GA data, uploaded to Claude (just what I’m using, you can use any AI) and asked it to analyse the data.

Here’s the AI analysis:

“It's started gaining impressions — we're into the thousands now over a 28-day window, and the trend is up across the board. Clicks have tripled in the last six weeks, average position is creeping in the right direction, and one post has even nudged its way to the top spot. All organic. Not a penny spent on marketing, not a single pin posted yet”.

“Indexing is the sticking point. A chunk of the site is sitting in that "crawled, not yet indexed" limbo, which is normal enough for a young site, and I'm working on the assumption the bulk of it gets picked up over time”.

Even if it doesn’t, I’ll have plenty of landing pages.

The Exciting Part

My dog site is the one I will never sell out on. The new one I could. I’m not emotionally attached to it.

But both do different jobs.

My dog site is my baby. It’ll be online for years.

The other site is the testing playground.

My message: If your site is going to be your “baby” build secondary income streams to keep it alive.

Plus: Having different topics to write about staves off boredom.