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Several months into this year.
Progress is happening, but as always, not at the rate I’d want it to be.
Patience. Young Padawan.
My two niche sites made $372.99 and a tiny slither of profit in April 2023. Below are the details!
Everything in these income reports is accurate to the “niche” sites I run. This doesn’t include any earnings or benefits from the “Niche Campus” brand.
To get more insights into my day-to-day tinkering with niche sites and other useful content, follow me on Twitter and get on my newsletter. You can also book a call with me.
What happened in April
- 17 brand new articles were published on Site 1. I wrote most of them, and some of them were old articles I pulled from Site 2, improved, and republished.
- 35 articles were pulled from Site 2 to add to Site 1. I removed them in December (after which my traffic continued to drop considerably) because I thought it would improve relevancy, but I’ve realised that’s BS. And I need all the traffic I can get!
- That ended the month with 270 articles, 52 more than the previous month.
- Improving/recreating featured images for a lot of Site 1 content.
- Redirected previous PR project into a landing page on Site 1.
- Lots more social work recently in YouTube Shorts and Facebook Reels that are presenting great results!
- Bits and bobs!
Site #1 Google Search Console
Site 1 reached 26,200 organic clicks (+27.18%) and 1,053,915 impressions (+13.69%).
Last month was the start of regrowth for the site, and it’s continuing here into April.
Most notable is the improvement in CTR, 2.2% -> 2.5%.
This is where the nice increase in clicks comes in while the impressions weren’t such a huge jump up.
Lots of nice spikes on that graph showing that trending topics and events in my niche are contributing well.
Site #1 Analytics
Site 1 had 32,156 sessions in April 2023 (+32.43%)
A very nice increase in overall traffic for the site, over 30% is considerable!
Every other signal is moving in the right direction, too. With slightly more pages per session and even more return users.
My recent social activity for my brand is perhaps helping here.
Site #1 EPMV (Ezoic)
EPMV has been somewhat stable, reaching a height of $9.11 in late April.
Site 1’s average EPMV for April 2023 was $6.38. Which is a slight drop from last month.
Site #1 Earnings (Ezoic)
Site 1’s earnings for April 2023 on ads were $218.84.
Site #1 Amazon Earnings
This site earned $126.71 from Amazon Associates in April. Which is -$29.20 then the previous month.
It’s stable above $100 mark, but the Amazon earnings are lowering right now, as is direct affiliates elsewhere which is contributing to lower overall earnings.
I feel that as the site gets into summer, it will continue to be lower because of the niche.
Site #1 Total Income
Here’s an overview of the total income for Site 1, as well as the two previous months:
| February 2023 | March 2023 | April 2023 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ezoic | $0 | $125.21 | $ 144.05 |
| Ezoic Premium | $0 | $35.69 | $ 63.09 |
| Adsense | $26.25 | $8.91 | $ 11.70 |
| Newor Media | $36.77 | $0 | $ 0 |
| Amazon | $142.92 | $155.91 | $ 126.71 |
| Skimlinks | $116.20 | $50.05 | $ 6.30 |
| Direct Affiliates | $0 | $16.56 | $ 0 |
| Total Income | $322.14 | $392.33 | $ 351.85 |
| Running Total | $6,078.50 | $6,470.83 | $ 6,822.68 |
Site 1 earned $351.85 in April (-10.32% from last month).
Overall earning has lowered than last month, but is better than February. So it’s a mixed bag of progress. Amazon earnings dropping and less coming in from other affiliates seems to have been the main negative.
Here’s a summary of profit/loss for April 2023:
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Income (Month Total) | $ 351.85 |
| Expenses (Month Total) | –$ 335.37 |
| Profit/Loss (Month) | $ 16.48 |
| Profit/Loss (All-Time) | $ 390.02 |
Last month was a loss, but we’re back in a little slither of profit this month for the site.
The main reason is that the expenses have been HIGH because of some of the PR work I did last month, which involved using some tools that cost a pretty penny.
Moving into May, those costs shouldn’t be there at all anymore.
And generally, I did my best to cut down on costs across the site so that’s why there is still a little profit leftover.
Site #1 Stats & Value
Here are some basic stats for the site for ending March 2023:
- Articles published: 52 (17 brand new, 35 migrated from Site 2)
- Total articles: 270
- Blended RPM: $10.94
The blended RPM has dropped considerably as traffic has grown, but the actual earnings haven’t increased much on ads or affiliate.
This seems to be the way with Ezoic, even when you bring more traffic, you don’t always see a big increase in earnings from it.
And here are some numbers on valuations for this site:
- Last six months’ profit valuation: $3,857.93
- Last six months’ revenue valuation: $14,750.40
Both these figures use the standard x35 multiplier for niche site valuation.
Site #1 Historical KPIs
Updated my KPI tracker, which, first of all, I’m going to show GSC impressions and clicks, UA sessions, and revenue — and the growth of each.
Almost every stat has been regrowing nicely since a real low point in February 2023.
Impressions and clicks are up from Google, as well as overall Universal Analytics sessions. Revenue has gone down a bit this month, but every other indicator looks good.
In fact, there is a 66%+ increase in overall sessions between February and April 2023. Which in two months is actually a huge turnaround.
I’m am tracking many more metrics, including email subscribers, YouTube subscribers, and also now Facebook followers, as that is growing rapidly. But I’ll show these separately below.
Here’s how email subscribers and YouTube is growing:
As I hinted at in previous reports, YouTube has been kicking up a storm. Forgive that not every field is filled in, as I’ve only just begun tracking these figures properly.
But you can see that since February there has been a huge increase in YouTube subscribers, views, and watch time.
And very recently, Facebook has begun to explode as I have put efforts into migrating YouTube content over there:
Facebook followers have grown extremely fast in April (and is continuing to) and Instagram is increasing a little bit.
Looking into May, I expect to be reaching the 5K followers requirement for Facebook Reels monetization soon.
That would mean a brand new revenue stream for the brand!
My site’s regrowth began after February, which lines up with the social reach improving massively. Coincidence?
Site #2 Update
I’m going to stop reporting on Site 2’s details, except for telling you how much it contributes to overall earnings. I want to move my attention all into one project.
In the last month, I have purposely dug into that content to pull out handwritten articles that are OK to then migrate over to my main site and improve them for publishing.
This is simply because there is half-decent content there. It just needs improving to make it quality enough for the main site.
The more content I publish to my main site, the faster it can grow to get over the 50K sessions mark it needs for Mediavine.
Site 2 is becoming a fully-fledged testing site, mostly for AI. It earns a tiny bit of money, so I keep it going for now.
Site 2 Income
Site 2 earned $21.14 from ads in April 2023, with $24.71 in expenses, making a -$3.57 loss for April 2023.
This will be added to the overall profit and loss.
Overall Profit & Loss
Here are the overall profit & loss stats for April 2023:
- Site 1 had a $12.91 profit for the month and a $390.02 profit all-time
- Site 2 had a -$3.57 loss for the month and a $159.05 profit all-time
- Sites 3&4 continues to include a $2,595.42 profit due to being sold in May 2022
- $12.91 total profit from niche sites for the month
- $3,144.49 total profit from niche sites all-time (0.41% increase)
Just edging out a profit for April 2023, and increasing the total.
Final thoughts on April 2023
The main site is making its recovery at the moment.
After getting hit quite hard last September 2023, and then when I took off a chunk of content in December 2022, the stats just kept going down and down.
But recently with more updates released, and my site seemingly being unaffected, they kept regrowing.
Add onto that the social activity I’ve been doing recently, it’s potentially contributing as well.
The earnings haven’t gone up much with the regrowth, though.
I can put that down to some affects of updating affiliate content and it lowering in rankings, as well as just most of my new traffic going to informational content which doesn’t earn a lot.
Next steps for May
- Continue to minimize costs! This shouldn’t be a huge problem anymore, but because of choices I made in February/March those costs were delayed into the following months which are now all but paid up. Still, I need to keep an MVP mindset and spend as little as possible and use more of my own time to keep growth going.
- Will keep working on social content – with help from my VA – like Shorts/Reels as they are helping my social channels to grow, and hopefully hit Facebook monetization very soon.
- Because I’m on a regrowth trajectory on traffic, I’ll be publishing content to try and maximize that.
- I’m considering using more social ‘engineering’ and even low-cost ads to send more traffic to the main site.
My attention has been refocused on traffic due to its growth recently, and getting over that 50K sessions mark would be an amazing step if I can reach it and get the project on Mediavine.
I know in the start of 2023 I was talking about working harder on affiliate content. I am still doing this, but there are reasons why it’s not as quick to turn around results from it.
See you next month.
Hi Joe, are both your sites in the same niche? Curious to know since you migrated 35 articles from site #2 to #1.
Thanks!
Similar enough to make it possible to transition those articles, yeah. Thanks for commenting.