Record Month for Traffic and Earnings! Niche Site Project 4 April 2019 Report

What happened in April with my site was EPIC!

I knew that April was going to be a good month, because I could see the traffic trending up.  However, I was not expecting the site to earn as much as it did or the traffic to increase as much as it did.

Long story short, the site went from earning $128.41 to $565.44!  I was not expecting the earnings to more than quadruple.

Today I'm going to share exactly how the site made its money and why things have really started to take off.  The best part?  The traffic continues to trend up (especially from Google) in the early part of May and I expect that things will continue to grow all around.

Let's jump into the monthly report.

Earnings

In total, my Niche Site Project 4 site earned $565.44 in April!  A record month by far…and I love the trend line on this graph :). 

Where did the earnings come from?  $494.46 from the Amazon Associates program and $70.98 from Ezoic display ads.

Amazon Earnings

As you can see, I had a few really big days.  This happened because someone bought a really expensive item on those days.  I sold a $1,700 item on 1 day…nice! I can't expect that to happen all the time, but when it does it's great!

However, you can still see that most days of the month, people were ordering items.  So, the “small” green bars you see are still close to $10 in earnings, they just look smaller because of the $100+ day I had.

Ezoic Earnings

This screenshot shows how my earnings has grown on Ezoic each month.  (Ignore May, since that only covers the first few days of the month).

I'm okay with the $70.89 in earnings from Ezoic (display ads); however, I can't wait until I can get approved on Mediavine.  My earnings from display ads should at least double when I switch to Mediavine.  And my site is just about at the traffic level where I can apply. 

Hopefully, in the next 30 days I can make the switch!

Costs

Last month I wrote an extremely in-depth post about all the costs associated with Niche Site Project 4.  I'm outsourcing nearly every aspect of the project and so my costs are higher than they would be if I did everything myself.  

I've included an updated P&L that includes my costs for the month of April.  

So, you can see that I spent over $1,600 on the site in April, for a total loss of $1,100.  In total, I've spent over $15,000 on the site since inception.

I do have a plan in place to eliminate some of the Pinterest expenses, so I'll let you know how that goes (if it happens next month).

However, my investment in content is clearly working, so I plan to continue investing in more content and will likely be spending $1k to $2k a month on the site for the next year or more.  The idea is that in the next few months the site is making more than I spend obviously :). 

Traffic

So, where is the traffic coming from?  Well, I can now say that it's mostly coming from Google.

In previous months most of the traffic was from Pinterest.  However, the traffic from Google has really started to pick up and Pinterest has still increased, but not as quickly as the traffic from Google.

Total Traffic

As you can see the site just cracked 10,000 total users for the month…a nice milestone!

And here's the total traffic growth since inception (I know you guys like this stuff…)

Google/Organic Traffic

Organic traffic essentially doubled during the month of April.  In fact, to make the trend even easier to see, here's the organic traffic over the life of the site.

Pinterest Traffic

Now here's the total Pinterest traffic since the inception of the site, it's also still growing, but not as quickly as Google traffic.

So, in total, the site had roughly 4,000 sessions from Pinterest and almost 6,000 sessions from Google.  I expect that gap to continue to grow as the traffic from Google increases at a more rapid pace.

I built the site to primarily perform well with organic sources, so I'm happy to see that things are starting to pay off.

In general, my site is starting to rank higher for my targeted keywords.  A few months ago, I wasn't ranking in the top 10 of Google for any of my targeted keywords.  Now I'm ranking on the first page of Google for a couple dozen of my targeted keywords (and of course for a ton more long tail keywords and variations).

I believe this mostly just has to do with age.  

Here's a screenshot from Long Tail Pro, which I use to track my rankings in Google, that shows a sample of some of the keywords that are ranking on the first page.

Content

Last month I published a total of 13 articles on the site.  I'm not happy with that.

I would like to be publishing closer to 20 to 30 articles a month.  I've asked my writers to increase their output a bit, an I believe that May should be a higher production month.  

My site is doing well and Google appears to be liking the content I'm putting out, so I see no reason to not increase the content production over the next several months (and maybe permanently).

The more articles I write, the more keywords I can target and potential traffic I can capture from Google.  Every single article targets a different keyword or set of keywords, so they each have the potential to help the site grow and make more money.

Link Building

I did not do very much link building in April.  

I got 1 guest post from my own outreach efforts (i.e. my employee did the outreach, writing, etc.).

The Hoth

I also finally got the links that I ordered through the Hoth in March added in April!  In total, I ordered 3 guest post links through The Hoth and it took a bit longer than expected to get the link.  But I guess that's just because they do actual outreach to find the opportunities.

So, I was fine with the waiting period.

With those 3 links from the Hoth, I went from ranking #14 for my chosen keyword to high as #5 after the links.  I've settled back down to rank #8 for that particular keyword.

As you can see, the traffic overall has grown quite a bit for that one page after using The Hoth for links.   The traffic increase is partly due to ranking better for my exact targeted keyword, but also due to ranking better for lots of little long tail keywords that I wasn't specifically targeting.

When I ordered, I asked for links on sites with a DA of 30 or more.  The 3 links I got were on sites with a DA of: 43, 58, and 62.  So, they definitely delivered there.

If you are interested in links through The Hoth, check them out here.

New Plans for Link Building

Overall, my site is growing and the authority of the site is growing as well.  My plan is to try a couple more link building “campaigns” over the next couple of months, and then honestly I might chill a bit with new links.

That all depends on how well my site is performing.

Most of my content is ranking without any links, meaning I haven't built links to the specific pages for most of my content.  In fact, the large majority of my articles ranking on the first page of Google don't have any links pointing to them.  And if they do have links, they were links that just happened on their own without my involvement.

So, is link building needed beyond what I've already done and a couple more “campaigns”?  Probably not, unless I try to target more difficult keywords.

Here's the steps of my link building plan:

1. Create an epic piece of content based on original research and surveys. I plan to create an original survey and get hundreds of responses from real people using FB ads (as needed) to get enough responses to make the data relevant.
2. Find websites that are covering similar types of content in my niche or other relevant niches using Ahrefs or Scrapebox. This will likely be several thousand websites.
3. Use tools like Hunter.io to automatically find the email addresses of all those websites.
4. Use tools like Mailshake to automate the outreach emails and responses (as much as possible) to find interesting websites in linking to my content.
5. Additionally, reach out to some targeted contacts and journalists from larger publications depending on how interesting the data is from the surveys I collect.

This is the process that SEOs have used for years…other than step 1.  Yes, most people try to create an epic piece of content. However, my plan is to do some actual original research, survey people, put together beautiful charts/graphs, and make the content quite unique.

It's a lot more work.

However, if I can put together an interesting study related to my niche, it's something that I believe people would be happy to share and link to.

A big part of my plan is to make the survey niche relevant, but also potentially humorous (in certain circumstances) and timely with current events.  Then I open up the potential for sites beyond those just in my niche to get a link from, but larger news outlets and blogs that cover more current events as well.

I won't go into any more detail because at this point I haven't done anything.  This is my rough plan and I'll share more details when I've actually done something and seen some results.

Email List

I've been collecting emails for a couple of months now.  Beyond just a welcome email though, I haven't done a single thing with it.

I'm a little embarrassed.

My goal for May is to build out a longer auto-responder series that drives subscribers back to my site.  I'd like to have 30+ emails that drip out over 90 days or so.

Right now my email list has 118 subscribers.

What's Next?

So, to recap what my plans are next for the site, it's basically more of the same.

• Continue publishing lots of content on the site: 20 to 30 articles a month would be good.
• Continue growing Pinterest traffic.
• Try 1 or 2 more unique link building campaigns over the next couple of months.
• Build out a longer email autoresponder series.
• Make the switch to Mediavine as soon as possible.

I'm super happy with the progress of the site and I expect even better things to come!  The traffic in early May is continuing to grow, so I expect that May will be another record month.

Niche Site Project 4 Participant Reports

As usual, we have lots of people that are building niche sites right along with me.  I love seeing that people are also starting to see more traffic and more earnings for their sites.  All the hard work is starting to pay off for some people.

In fact, it looks like we had a couple more people break the $1,000 earnings mark in April. Keep up the great work everyone!

<td data-sheets-value=”{“1″:2,”2″:”Month 4: My niche site received 92 clicks on affiliate links, some of which were myself testing links. My site made $4.38 which is slightly up from last month. No purchases have been for the actual products I write about, but still made some commissions. I guess that’s the plus side of amazon associates…”}”>

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