($293.74) Niche Blog Income Report: July 2022
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It’s time for another update!
My main site took some damage back in the May core update, which was felt in June. But by the start of July, my main site had recovered from its dip and started growing again.
Some wins, but also some concerns. Let’s go into the blog income report for July.
Watch the income report video
If you prefer, you can just watch this full report on YouTube:
What happened in July
Here are some of the things I’ve been doing in July:
- Challenged my main (full-ish-time) writer with more commercial content
- Challenged my secondary (part-time) writer to move into more difficult informational
- Published 25 posts on my main site, a new record in a single month (though I have help)
- Site 2’s continued to be tanked with its main traffic post still stuck outside of the SERPs due to a DMCA
Site #1 Google Search Console
So GSC shows that my main site reached over a million impressions, which is dope!
For comparison, in June, it was getting 690,000 impressions; in May, it reached 859,000 impressions.
The site was in a growth spurt in early May before getting hit by Google’s May Core Update. It was felt most negatively in June, and now it has rebounded throughout July and hitting new records.
Site #1 Analytics
As you can see, July’s visits (blue line) have been consistently higher thaI’ll June (green line).
I’m using Ezoic’s Big Data Analytics for this data, as it seems I love to break my Google Analytics code every once in a while, so I can’t really trust it.
That said, GA often seems to be less overall visits data than what Ezoic presents. So take it with a pinch of salt.
Overall the stats are as follows:
- 37,172 visits/sessions in July (38.45% increase)
- 41,024 pageviews in July (29.81% increase)
- 02:40 average visit duration (10.60% decrease)
- 1.1036 page views per visit (6.25% decrease)
I can quite confidently say that I recovered from the May core update, after some delay.
I was closing in on these numbers by early May. Back then, it felt like a huge growth was coming. But then the update hit.
I’m happy to see that amount of sessions/visits. It’s just 13K away from 50K, which is when I can start considering Mediavine.
It’s possible to do that amount of extra traffic in one really good month. So let’s see if we can make it happen.
There’s not long left until Q4, and being on a strong network like Mediavine by then could be huge for my site.
Site #1 Ezoic vs. Adsense
An interesting change recently was how my earnings changed as soon as July hit. It’s the start of the new quarter (Q3).
So you expect to see EPMV drops. This graph below shows June at a higher EPMV towards the end of Q2 before dropping significantly when July hits:
In contrast, the earnings have stayed fairly stable across the month of July.
And that appears to mainly be Adsense stepping up and offering more revenue. Currently, on many days of a typical week, my earnings from meditation/Adsense are higher than Ezoic & Ezoic Premium put together:
This graph shows earnings over June and July. You can see as July comes in, the lightest green (bottom filled area) is mediation for Adsense, which covers much more of the area of earnings every day.
It’s even more obvious when you’re looking at your estimated earnings on the Ezoic dashboard (here’s a sneak into August when I’m writing this):
It fluctuates plenty often for this site. There are bound to be some of my choices blocking Ezoic from maximizing revenue.
Those choices are removing ads from any first load on mobile, no mobile anchor ads, no interstitials on mobile, and completely removing the Ezoic caching and Leap (speed).
I’m not happy with their caching, speed, or the way ads harass the user. So I took steps to ensure as best of a user experience while keeping a few bucks earning.
Right now, I’m all about the traffic. I need to build that traffic above 50K to give this site a real chance.
Site #1 Income
It’s getting a bit fiddly trying to track all the expenses related to this site and my niche site work in general, so I’m going to give you the important facts.
In July:
- Site 1 made $293.74 in income. A marginal $6.70 increase from June.
- Site 1’s total expenses were $489.41
- Site 1’s profit/loss was a loss of $195.67
The expenditure is somewhere between 80-90% weighted on the writing team I’ve built up over the last few months.
I’m using money from a previous niche site project which I sold and reinvesting it all into this site.
While it’s at a loss right now, I’m hoping the higher volume of content is going to pay off in the near future.
Somewhat interesting is how the income is made up of $236.38 display ads revenue. In June, display ads generated $258.83 revenue.
For July, a little extra help from Adsense and Amazon affiliates kept the earnings up while EPMVs have been dropping.
Site #1 Stats & Value
So looking at the overall stats of the site, I did hit a publishing record for July with 25 posts. Granted, having a couple extra writers doing most of the upfront work helps.
Despite a set back in June, I have regained May’s sessions and more. It’s been a good traffic month, but blended RPMs are sucky at $7.90.
Taking into account the profits and losses of the site over the last 6 months, a profit x 35 valuation would put it around the $1K mark. I actually think it would be worth way more than that, but sticking with the calculations as a reminder that profitability is extremely important.
Site #2 Google Search Console
As you can see, the second site has struggled since it was hit by a DMCA.
The impressions grew as a few AI-generated pieces of content kept ranking, but the main traffic driver (which was one page) for this site is still missing.
Not too fussed about any of this, the site is useful as a testing ground and takes up 1% of my energy.
Site #2 Analytics
Sticking with using Ezoic’s Big Data Analytics, you can see when the DMCA hit came in mid-June and the traffic dropped significantly.
The blue line shows July, and it looks like it’s regrowing on its own without a top page being there.
Site 2’s traffic numbers:
- 4,202 visits/sessions (20.82% decrease from June)
- 4,870 page views (18.47% decrease from June)
- 1.1590 page views per visit (2.97% increase from June)
- 01:43 average visit duration (40.65% decrease from June)
Moving swiftly on.
Site #2 Income
This is the first month the site has been at a loss for a while, with $3.78 down.
Previously it just pays for itself, and I’m sure it will return to doing that very soon.
Overall Profit & Loss
Overall, my niche site efforts are still net positive with $1,937.78 in profit.
Site 1 is slowly burning a hole in the cash accumulated with sale of Sites 3&4, and I’m hoping to push to turn that around by the end of the year.
What I’ll Work On In August
So looking ahead, what I would like to achieve in August:
- I’m trying to hire one new full-time writer. I’m already testing several potential writers via OnlineJobs. Soon I will have essentially two part-time writers, and I really need at least one who can produce 10K+ words per week.
- I’m considering hiring an editor, also, in order to help me process the feedback and revisions of my current writers. It may be an expense I don’t need to add. It may be that my writers are getting lazy or don’t understand my feedback well enough to retain the learning. Either way, I’m spending too much time doing tedious revisions and something needs to change.
- I’m running data collection for a PR campaign I want to run. I’ve been saying this for months now, but struggled to get together a solid idea I can pitch from. Hoping that if I do it right, I’ll gather a good handful of high quality backlinks for my main site.
- I have various plates spinning across my niche sites, the Niche Campus brand, workshop I created, and trying to keep freelance work alive while I need a regular income. It’s a bit of a struggle, but I’m sure that niche blogging will be the best long-term opportunity.
