September 2022 Niche Site Income Report

September 2022 was an interesting month for my niche sites – so let’s dive right in!

Highlights:

• Portfolio pageviews are up 11.54%, with 82,820 pageviews vs. 74,249 pageviews in August.
• From Ezoic, I earned $1,055.82 from 68,869 Unique visits. That is an ad revenue increase of 34.61%
• From Amazon, I earned a combined total of $233.75.
• From my own digital products, I earned $306.45.
• From other affiliate programs (a combination of ShareASale, Awin, etc., as well as niche-specific programs), I earned $270.65

Now then, let’s tally that all up:

Total earnings: $1,866.67

Total spend: $920

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
• Content
• Virtual Assistants, AKA LIFE SAVERS! (x3 hired 👉here)
• Mailchimp
• Canva
• 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)

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 Has Happened This Month?

Sites 2 & Site 3 have begun recovering. WooHoo! 🎉💃🏾

They are not quite at the visits and pageviews they were at before being hit, but are on a gradual rise.

Site 3’s Recovery

Site 3 was on a decline for some time, as it went from $165 months to $25 months in the last few.

That was tough to watch, but frankly, I had other sites to focus on, and the work required, I was not prepared to do.

I finally decided to go in and tweak some stuff, and here is what I found:

• There were a bunch of broken elements, such as leftover shortcodes and scripts from things I uninstalled.
• Everything was out of date and vulnerable.
• The theme was not flattering.
• The list goes on.

I do not think the recovery was down to the algorithm solely on this one; as I mentioned, the site was on a slow decline for some time. After some love, care, and tweaks, I began to see an immediate improvement.

Here is what I did:

💫 Switched the theme over to the Popcorn Theme. It is clean and lightweight.

💫 Edited the about page and linked to it from the author bio in each post.

💫 Removed most of the broken script and shortcodes.

💫 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!)

💫 Added the current year where appropriate to post titles.

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Site 2’s Recovery

I honestly don’t think it was anything I did. It looks as though it was all down to the algorithm. However, as time passed and I was able to get some more data, I noticed the posts that are ranking at the moment and bringing in most of the traffic are not the old posts that were doing well before the hit!

If you read my last few updates, you may remember that over 60 articles were not on my sitemap, nor were they indexed. I remember thinking this was a good thing at the time and now I think that more than ever.

Those articles were not included in “The Hit,” and it seems like now they are ranking as if nothing happened and bringing my traffic up!

What I Am Doing Next Month

Next month, I am focussing on sprucing up older content and finding easy wins:

• Optimizing for keywords a post ranks on pages 2 & 3 on.
• Adding image and video content to more posts.
• Adding more internal links and focusing on tailoring the anchor text.
• Learning more about the ways Google Sheets can help me speed up and organise my workflow.
• Finally, planning my outreach strategy 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 longtail finder
👉 Keywordtool.io
👉 Low Fruits
👉 Reddit/Quora reverse (you need Semrush or AHrefs to do this)

I still use the KGR method, but these days I don’t really need to check the calculation; if it seems KGR it probably is! The keyword goes in the title with some clickbaity additions, and then I build the post out as normal.

Example keyword (so sorry if this is your niche…):- how to get your pet cow to sleep at night

Example title with keyword and clickbaity addition: How To Get Your Pet Cow To Sleep At Night: 3 EASY Tricks!

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 (free) 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 Highly Recommend

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

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