October 2022 Site Income Report: Ezoic Ads, Affiliate Earnings, and Digital Products

October has been a good month for me. Q4 always is across all of my online businesses, (though I don’t share that info in these income reports!)

This year has been rough with all of the Google updates. I have been hit, and many people still have not recovered. Fortunately, my main site, “Site 2”, which was hit in July 2022, began recovering as a result of the Core Algorithm Update in September.

I never got around to recording a case study update with Doug to explain my thoughts behind this, but I did jump on the live chat and share my algo update theories.

Check it out below:

Highlights:

• Portfolio pageviews are up 7.18%, with 91,433 pageviews vs. 85,306 pageviews in September.
• From Ezoic, I earned $1,285.45 from 74,623 Unique visits. That is an ad revenue increase of 18.63%
• From Amazon, I earned a combined total of $301.46.
• From my own digital products, I earned $85.19.
• From other affiliate programs (a combination of ShareASale, Awin, etc., as well as niche-specific programs), I earned $1099.29

Now then, let’s tally that all up:

Total earnings: $2,771.39

Total spend: $1,508.60

Total spend includes:

DISCLAIMER: Some of my spend includes affiliate links (at least you know I only promote things I actually use, though! And using my af links is helping me, if you love me, you will be okay with this 🥰

• Ezoic Premium subscription (I upgraded to the next tier up, but the fee will come out next month)
• Content (my biggest spend)
• My lovely Virtual Assistants x2 (hired 👉here)
• Rank Math Pro + Content Ai Credits
• Mailchimp
• Canva
• Website Hosting (Cloudways)
• Domain Renewal (Namecheap)
• Jasper + Jasper Art
• Outranking.io (AI-Generated content briefs 🔥)

Site Portfolio

(The GSC charts below show the past 12 months of organic traffic)

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What Has Happened This Month?

I have only been focussing on sites 2 and 8. For the next 6 months, however, I am going to be laser-focused on Site 2 only.

Site 2 has the best EPMV and has a lot of solid opportunities beyond ads, such as digital products, courses, affiliate programs, etc.

I have noticed the EPMV has remained high while the traffic has risen since recovering from the update. Prior to being hit, the traffic was rising, but the EPMV was steadily declining.

I have made improvements on many articles since then, focusing on things like:

• adding more internal links
• improving the CTR using Tag Tester
• adding more images
• rewriting introductions, etc.

For some reason, writers never really nail that introduction, and I think your introduction is a key element in your post. I have clicked off of badly written introductions many a time, and I am sure visitors have done the same on my sites.

So, I’ve been trying to get my writers to think about the searcher and who might be stumbling on the post to begin with.

What do they already know about the topic? What can we assume?

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Algorithm Update Improvements I’ve Made

💫 Switched the theme (Site 3) over to the Popcorn Theme. It is clean and lightweight. So I didn’t need all of the additional design plugins slowing the site down. My page speed increased almost instantly. 91/100 on mobile, 100 on Desktop.

💫 Edited the about page and linked to it from the author bio in each post. I don’t have any additional plugins for the author bio, but as Popcorn FSE has the option to set this in the template, I made sure to add a link back to the actual about page. No idea if this is within “SEO best practices” or not, but it seems legit to me 🤷🏾‍♀️

💫 Removed most of the broken script and shortcodes.
Had a lot of junk left over from the days of trying new things. It all accumulates, and sometimes simply deleting a plugin doesn’t take all the plugin residue with it!

There were a lot of posts with visible shortcodes from stuff I installed but no longer use, so I had to clean that up.

💫 Bulk updated the post edit date on older articles with a randomized 2022 date using a sheet editor— (ain’t nobody got time for editing each post individually!)

💫 The newly indexed and ranking articles (on Site 2) were all interlinked well, so it looks like when those pages started getting love, some of that was passed through to the sites Google had kicked down, and it brought them back up!

…at least, that’s what it looks like.

💫 Added the current year where appropriate to post titles. I realised I couldn’t access the header.php in FSE so Phil from Spiderweb kindly made me a lightweight plugin to add the [year] shortcode to my titles.

Drop me an email/comment if you want the plugin 👇👇👇

Let’s Keep In Touch? 😊

If you want to know how much each individual site earned, look out for my YouTube video, where I detail all of this and more!

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What I Am Doing Next Month

Next month, I am focussing on sprucing up older content and finding easy wins on Site 2. I have to prioritise things and pace myself, but the main aim is more content and improved content; anything else I achieve is a bonus. 🚦

🟢 Optimizing for keywords a post ranks on pages 2 & 3 for using the Google Search Console REGEX method.

🟢 Using Rank Math’s Content AI to help all existing articles rank better.

🟢 Using the Topic tool in NicheIQ to find easy-to-rank keywords and clusters on my site.

🟢 Adding more image and video content to posts.

🟢 Adding more internal links and focusing on tailoring the anchor text.

🟠 Providing my writers with an AI-optimized content brief for every article.

🟠 I also have some very basic listicle-type articles; I may hire a new VA that has some experience with writing to handle them. The posts don’t require any expert knowledge, just research, and formatting. It should be easy to find a VA from the shortlisted pool I still have access to.

🟠 Planning my (soft)outreach strategy for my VA using the plugin I had developed months ago.

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Some of my SOPs

Keyword Research

My favourite ways to find keywords are:

👉 Google Autosuggest
👉 Keywords Everywhere
👉 Keywordtool.io
👉 Low Fruits
👉 Reddit/Quora reverse (you need Semrush or AHrefs to do this)
👉 New to the list is Ezoic’s NicheIQ Topics (I made a video on how I use this recently)

When I find new keywords, they get clustered and then put on a master list, ready for a content brief and outsourcing to one of my Upwork writers.

You can check out my video on free keyword clustering tools below:

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Content Outlines

As I’ve mentioned previously, I either use the Thruuu SERP analyzer (10 free credits a month) or Outranking to create a content brief for my writers (Outranking if I want the help of AI and to ensure the writer covers all of the key topics – I can always flesh it out myself later if need be).

When I give my writers outlines, I may also include a specific Youtube video on the topic or urge them to use Youtube and things like Quora or Reddit to help them form their article.

I do not expect the writers to be master SEOs – I include any additional keywords I want to support my articles in the subheadings of the outline. This way, they usually end up using and repeating the phrase naturally in the paragraph without keyword stuffing.

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Formatting

This is where the magic happens.

I definitely like my posts to be aesthetically pleasing. Formatting was the first thing I outsourced to my VA! It was important to me but started to get very time-consuming as I ramped up content publishing.

I think formatting with spacers, bolded text, bullet points, headings, images, video and then alt text, internal linking, proper anchor text, etc… are all signals to Google that the post was made with love and care… as well as being optimized for the reader!

It is a good way to get a balance between making Google happy with all the technical and semantic SEO and making the reader happy enough to hang about and see more ads!

My VAs have been trained on my formatting preferences using screen recordings of me doing it and talking through it – for this, I use Descript.

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Repurposing Content

I am a big fan of repurposing content. Whether that be creating pins out of the key points in your blog, making audio from the blog that you can embed, or making videos to use on Youtube.

I’ve stopped with the Pinterest pins, although that had worked pretty well. Pinterest no longer seems like a wise investment of time. Instead, I have my VA use Pictory to create a video for each of my blog posts.

It allows her to select the key text she wants it to include, and then it auto-selects stock videos related to that scene.

I love these videos as they:

• are clean, useful, and easy to make.
• provide value to the reader as they get the key information in your blog post in a more concise visual format.
• can be used for video ads
• can be repurposed for various social network platforms, including Youtube

4 Ezoic Tools I’ve Been Using The Heck Out Of…

Check out how I am using Flickify to build a moat around my sites in this video.

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