- December Website Earnings: $4,391
- December Traffic: 37,774 Sessions
- Total Site Value: $158,076
December was another great month for my new niche site and as always, here’s the update of everything that went on.This was the first month of MediaVine earnings and I’m happy to say that I hit just shy of $1,000 from ads alone.
As you can see, I’m not at the 50,000 sessions required for a first site on MV, but because this is my 3rd site on the platform, my threshold is 25,000 sessions.
Amazon did very well this month, pulling in $3,192 and one of my new affiliate programs earned the rest (around $220).
Compared To Last Month:
↑ Traffic is up 13.2%
↑ Earnings up 74.9%
↓ Rankings 7%
✓ DA26 – DA26
I’ve now surpassed my 1-year goal for this site after just 9 months. I was hoping to get it to $3,000 in revenue and this month was over $4,300 revenue with over $3,000 in profit which is fantastic.
I’m excited to keep working on it and seeing where it goes. I’m sure that next month I’ll have paid off my initial investment of over $10,000 and will now have a property worth $150,000+ and earning $4,500+ per month.
A pretty great set-up after working just 10 hours per week on average over the past 9 months.
This month we had some awesome wins!
We received our first offer for sponsorship in November, but it wasn’t until December that we had over $1000 of gear shipped out to our content creators to do reviews of and we’re hoping that same sponsor will pay a monthly fee to be featured on our YouTube Channel as well.
After that, I also had a chat with some other gear manufacturers and in 2021 I’m hoping to work closely with them. The goal is to grow our E-A-T by having more hands-on reviews of products.Content & Work (Lifetime)
- Total Posts Published: 192
- Total Links Built: 65 (Do-Follow)
- Total Time Spent: 10 hours/week (Average)
- Total Money Spent: $10,571
As always I have to mention that yes I spent $10,571 on this site including hosting, Pinterest, and about 95% of the total was spent on content.
I don’t have time to spend on this site because we have 4 other businesses running currently, so instead I spend money on content creators and an editor.
If you were to do this without spending any money, you’d have to do all of the content yourself so you would likely be working 22-25 hours a week instead of my 10 hours per week.
What I did in December
I GOT HACKED!
That’s right. It was a really big pain in the ass, and my entire site was redirecting to a spam site for almost 24 hours until I got it fixed. It cost me a few hundred dollars but is fixed now.
I’ll be updating you guys on best practices soon.
I also spent a lot of time on my speed. After first getting NitroPack my speed was insanely fast, but after getting on MediaVine there were some conflicts that were slowing down the site.
I went into Google Analytics and checked individual page load times, any that were slow I put through GTMetrix and Pingdom and checked the waterfall for what was slowing it down.
In my case, it was mostly images that I just removed and some code from Amazon that was loading slow which I deleted from the HTML of the blog posts in qeustion.
I also updated my About Page in December. Each of my writers now has a 300+ word author’s bio there which explains their expertise in detail.I updated the About Page and fixed the Speed in the same week, and 4 days later my rankings and traffic jumped by 30%. I’m thinking it was the latter that caused the jump but who knows.
I worked a bit on reaching out to different companies to sponsor us and even had a phone call with one of the reps. Sounds like we might be able to get some more gear to review and maybe get paid.
I also spent some time on the YouTube Channel (but not enough time). I decided to have my content creators edit the videos themselves to save me time and hopefully, in 2021 we can get the YouTube Channel monetized and growing (it’s almost there already).
In December, a lot of my time was spent on our other New Niche Site (more on that one to come) so I spent even less on this website. Maybe just 3-4 hours per week on average.
My Plans Moving Forward
Mainly I’ll be focusing on YouTube and the E-A-T moving forward. I want to diversify the income streams by having our YT Channel monetized and by working with more brands.
One of the things I was spending the most time on was creating templates for the writers, but I’ve now handed that off to our Editor which should give me more time for keyword research, brand building etc.
I’ll also be updating all of my posts at the start of 2020 to reflect changes and make the titles say “2021” instead wherever possible. I already updated 20 of them and I’m going to wait a week or so to test and see how it affects their rankings before going through all 192 posts.
My Recommendations For You
- Follow basic security practices (there’s a post in this group you can search for) to ensure you don’t get hacked. At the very least have WordFence and consider paying for SiteLock through Bluehost (that’s who fixed my hack).
- Focus heavily on E-A-T in 2021. Build up your DA with high authority links from top websites in your niche and update your author’s bios and about page to reflect these features. Also consider publishing an ebook on Amazon, getting interviewed in podcasts, and growing connections on LinkedIn for added business cred.
- Update your content to be new for 2021. Update the date as well and any info that is out of date. If a post is ranking, I wouldn’t change the first half of the post, but maybe add some useful info to the end, update the meta, title, and date, then annotate those changes in G.A and see if it helps or hinders.
- Work on Speeding Up your site’s load speed. I highly recommend getting NitroPack. I’ve tried probably a dozen speed and caching plugins and NitroPack is by far the best. use this link for 20% off https://nitropack.io/#WSZTUG
- Consider diversifying. Would YouTube work in your niche? If you’re not great on camera, can you think of a way to make videos without your face on Camera at first until you get better at it? How can you make the most useful videos possible? Treat YouTube like a Blog and build authority and trust by creating the best videos out there. Also look for other diversification traffic sources like social, podcasting, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc.
- Hunt for unicorn keywords. Can you find any keywords in your niche that have a good volume (500+) and a few blogs in the top 10 with a lower DA than your blog and N/A under “Auth”? If so, go for it. Write a better post than all those top 10s, build a couple of backlinks, build lots of internal links and see if you can rank.
- Set an alarm for yourself to go back and interlink your blog posts on your blog. Never publish a post and leave it. Within a few days you should go in and create 5-20 new internal links to that post if you want it to rank. SEO Smartlinks can help with this but it’s best to build some yourself as well.
- Try to find new affiliates and see if you can diversify your potential affiliate revenue streams.
- Consider spending an hour or two per week pitching brands. Can you get a sponsor? Can you get free trips or free gear in exchange for awesome content? It can be worth your time.
- Keep creating lots of content. Can you do 3-4 posts per week in 2021? Try your best! Make challenges for yourself. Optimize your workflow and see what kind of amazing things you can accomplish this year.
- Plan for 2021. Visualize what you want to have happen with your blog, in your life, and in the world.
I hope you guys are still enjoying these case studies! I try to make them as transparent as possible which is why there are so many income numbers and traffic numbers.
Case studies for my brand new site will be coming and I’m considering turning some of these into YouTube videos to make them easier to follow & understand.
Thank you so much for reading!Keep up the solid SEO work.
It works!
Sincerely,
Nick
