May was a sad month for many, and while I am grateful that I am not here, reporting tragic news – I am mindful that Big G has made an absolute mess with this update.
A mess that has cost many people their earnings and time – and there is no guarantee anything will recover or bounce back.
I hate gatekeepers with a passion; I have had many run-ins with gatekeepers 😒… I know it can happen to anybody.
But, for whatever reason, 90% of my portfolio withstood the G-bomb, and most of the sites are better off for it…even site 6 🤔.
Highlights:
- The overall Portfolio EPMV is still on a race to 0, at $14.86 this month (Down from $17.94 in March) (Down from $20.35 in February) (Down from around $22 in January), so despite seeing leaps in traffic, I do not see the same level of leaps in ad revenue.
- From Ezoic, I earned $752.57 (from 50,630 Unique visits)
- Portfolio pageviews are up 22.93%, with 60,543 page views in May vs. 49,248 page views in April.
- From Amazon, I earned a combined total of $187.10
- From my own digital products, I earned $44.94
- From other affiliate programs (combination of ShareASale, Awin, etc., as well as niche-specific programs) I earned $362.14
Total earnings: $1,346.75
Total spend: -$2320.50
This month, my expenses totaled $2320.50. This included fees for my Ezoic premium subscription, content, a custom plugin and CSS, my virtual assistant, hosting, and Jasper.
Overall, I spent more than usual this month, but that was due in part to some one-off expenses like the plugin and shortcodes.
Even so, I’m confident that these tools will help me to save time and money in the long run. And of course, the content spend goes without saying.
Other Affiliate Earnings Breakdown
But look at this 👇…
| Shareasale | $1.40 | |
| Awin | $3 | |
| Impact | $14.85 | |
| Pepper Jam | $0 | |
| Niche-specific Aff Program | $342.89 |
I am either leaving a lot of money on the table or these are just not worth the effort, let alone the effort it takes to log in and check them.
My Portfolio Reinforcement Strategy
Many people wanted there to be a correlation between sites utilizing AI tools to create content and sites hammered by the update, but that just wasn’t the case.
In fact, beyond the loss of snippets, there doesn’t seem to be any solid pattern for any type of site or niche that was hit (from what I have seen).
All this says to me is, “anyone can get it!”.
Nobody is safe from being hit by a G-Bomb, and whether you were or were not hit, I think it will be beneficial to do one or both of the following:
- Reinforce your site or portfolio.
- Diversify.
1. Reinforce Your Site Portfolio
What do I mean by reinforcing your site portfolio? I mean, wherever you know that you have weak areas, go back and fill those in. Maybe you were just throwing posts up as quickly as you got them back from your writers and need to format them and optimize them a bit better.
Maybe you know your site speed could be better, but it has not been on the top of your list to sort out (I can definitely relate!)
When it comes to reinforcing my sites personally, that means all of the above and a whole lot more.
Here are some of the areas I am focussing on:
- Adding more images and infographics
- optimizing alt tags
- optimizing tag pages (using Jasper and Sheet Editor, of course!)
- creating and implementing a video strategy (mostly using AI-generated video ) and possibly doing the voiceover myself or using my cloned voice (yep, AI again!)
- email capturing (I am using Ninja Popups)
2. Diversify
The combination of these random Google updates and the loss of third-party cookies has everybody rattled. There are talks about the death of display ads, the death blogging – generally, people are very concerned about death, lol.
I reckon we just have to adapt and keep swimming.
This could mean spreading your risk with a second site in another niche, or it could simply mean looking at different methods of gaining traffic besides organic search traffic.
Social Media Branding
Social media is usually the first port of call for most people, but people often make the mistake of trying to be in too many places at once and not being effective in any of them.
Every niche has social media platforms that it does better on than others. For instance, if you’re in the wedding industry, obviously, Pinterest is going to be a big one for you. If you’re in the tech industry, Twitter might make more sense.
The key is not just to be on social media, but to be effective on social media. This means having a strategy and sticking to it. The good news is that there is an abundance of social media scheduling tools to help.
One I have been playing around with is this AI Twitter automation and scheduling tool. It can help you come up with 100s of tweets in an hours work, and schedule them. All you need to do is go back and engage with your audience.
I suggest you focus your attention on one or two social media sites that are most relevant to your niche and audience and then build up a presence and following there.
Growing Your Email List
The other area people often diversify into is email marketing. Growing an email list can be a great way to insulate yourself from G-Bombs, as well as give you another avenue to sell products or services.
Email marketing can be very profitable if done correctly, but it’s important not to spam people or buy lists of emails (both of which are against the law in many countries).
Start A Youtube Channel
This could technically fall into the social media category, however, Youtube is it’s own beast and deserves it’s own mention.
Youtube is a fantastic way to build an audience and it can be very profitable if you know what you’re doing.
There are two main ways to make money on Youtube. The first is through advertising, and the second is through affiliate marketing or selling products.
Both of these methods can be effective, but it’s important to remember that Youtube is a search engine, so you need to treat it as such. This means creating videos around keywords that people are searching for, just as you do with your posts.
You can then use them to benefit each other by embedding your videos on your posts and linking to your posts in your videos.
Tighten Up Your Branding
When this recession eventually lands and the death of something eventually occurs, branding is going to be more important than ever.
Your brand is what sets you apart from the competition and makes people remember you. It’s one of the most important things you can focus on, no matter what niche/business you’re in.
Make sure your branding is on point and that people know who you are, what you do, and why you’re the best at it.
Things like a uniform color scheme, a recognizable logo, and font, help to establish trust and credibility and can be done very easily using Canva (free!)
Build Relationships In Your Niche
No matter what happens, relationships are going to be key. Building up a good network of contacts in your niche is going to be important for weathering any storm that comes our way.
I have mentioned many times that I am not a fan of link-building, however, I have seen some success with what I call “soft outreach”, and all that is is creating listicle/roundup-type posts and then reaching out to the people or businesses you mentioned, letting them know you featured them and that they can share the post if they want.
This is a great way to get your foot in the door with people in your industry, and if you can provide value to them, you’re likely to build a good relationship which will be beneficial in the long run.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – that’s the moral of the story here!
Were you hit by the G-Bomb? Is your site recovering? Are you doing anything, in particular, to help reinforce or revive it? Let me know in the comments; I would love to hear from you!
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