As promised, I’m going another update of my new blog after 5 months and I’m excited to share the progress with you.
I’ve seen a slight plateau in traffic, but I’m very happy to see a steep increase in sales as I’m ranking for higher-value keywords now.
Currently, my only earning affiliate is Amazon, but I’m working on testing a few others in September hopefully.
As you can see I did over $500 in profit in August which is great. $500 / month after just 5 months is impressive progress, and I’m really happy about it.
At this point, I could likely sell the website for around $20,000 at the mid to low end of the market rate. Building something worth $20,000 in 5 months is excellent, especially considering it’s growing at 300% month on month so far.
I’m seeing a lot of potential for the site and I’m excited about that.
Here are the numbers:
Compared To Last Month:
↑ Traffic is up 107% (8,030 Users)
↑ Website Earnings up 313% ($541 USD)
↑ Rankings 28%↑
DA22 – DA25
Totals:
- The site earned a total of $541 USD From affiliates in August
- Traffic is up to 8,030 Users Per Month
- Users Per Day Peaking at 370 at the end of the month (11,100 users per month if it continues)
Content & Work (Lifetime)
- Total Posts Published: 121
- Total Links Built: 54 (Do Follow)
- Total Time Spent: 12 hours/week (Average)
- Total Money Spent: $5,500
What I did in August:
I actually worked A LOT less on the site in August. Dariece and I were offline for nearly 2 weeks and even when we were online, I was working a lot on our other projects, so I’d say that the site was lucky if it got an average of 5 hours per week of my time, and yet it’s still growing.
I managed to write and submit 8 guest posts for the site this month. I wrote all of these myself and that’s what took the majority of the time.
On top of that, I was able to build a few links through collabs, hotlink building, and outreach.I’m going to hold off on link building for a while and focus again on content for “low hanging fruit” type keywords.
My Recommendations to you based on what I’ve been testing on this site:
- Build links. Links still help to strengthen your site and guest posts still work for rankings despite what Google might say.
- Watch your anchors. Be careful with anchor text. If you’re building 2-3 links to a specific post, it’s okay to have somewhat optimized anchor text. Building 5-10, maybe only 1 keyword related anchor. 10+ and you should be extremely cautious. Likely using more soft anchors like “Click Here” or raw URL anchors and maybe 1 or fewer links with optimized anchor.
- Do the KW research. Find keywords in your niche with a 50-250 search volume. Check the difficulty score in KS, but more importantly, check backlinks to those posts from the top 10 results. If 3+ of the top 10 ranking posts have 0-1 links (“Auth” in Keysearch) then you have a good chance of ranking. Particularly if you see a lot of “No” for Title, Meta, Desc, etc.
- Write more content. I’m finding that around 70% of the keywords I’m ranking for are secondary keywords that I didn’t mean to go for. I check in GSC and find these secondary keywords for each post, then add them into the post and if they’re high volume I also build internal links to the post using those as the anchor text.
- Higher word count ≠ higher ranking. About 4 years ago, SEO was very different. Google gave massive amounts of weight to longer posts. This isn’t the case anymore. Now Google is using high authority sites as an example and ranking posts with a similar word count to them. When doing keyword research and planning a post, look in the SERPS tab of KeySearch, and see what the average top 10 posts word count are. Then just do the same or maybe 5%-10% more than that. Don’t go crazy.
- Diversify. I’m also trying to build up some socials and potentially YouTube for this site, as well as testing different affiliates. Always diversify your income and traffic streams as much as possible.
- Stay Positive. While this site is doing well, we are well aware that travel and some other niches are seriously struggling during these crazy times. Try to stay positive and keep working on your site even if it’s not growing. Things will somewhat normalize soon and you have an opportunity to get ahead of the pack right now by not giving up when so many others are.
- Consider starting another website. If you’re in travel or an affected niche, consider starting another website in another niche. I really can’t recommend this enough. We’ve been preaching diversification for the past 7 years, but we ourselves only had Goats until last year and we could’ve been way ahead on these other niches if we started earlier. If you have time and motivation (for 10-15 hours per week at first) then consider starting another site. If you do it through our link, we’d be very happy for your support
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If you read this far, I’m amazed! Thanks for your interest. If you’re one of the few that took the time to read this much of an update, please comment below.
Really!
Let me know what you think of these updates in the comments below. Do they inspire you or annoy you? What more would you like to hear from them, if anything at all?
Happy blogging,
Nick
