Blog Income Report: June 2022

($287.04) Niche Blog Income Report: June 2022

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It’s mid-July, and I’m finally getting around to creating a written-up version of my regular monthly blog income report!

If you’re new to Niche Campus, you can learn more about me here. Or keep scrolling for the juicy numbers.

Watch the income report here:

If you’d rather get the bite-sized version, keep reading. Let’s get on with the blog income report for June 2022.

What happened in June

First off, I always start by telling you what I was working on in June:

  • Feeling the Google May Core Update coming into full effect
  • Spending most of my time working with assistant writers I hired from OnlineJobs.ph
  • Published 18 posts in the month, mostly from my writers
  • My 2nd site got a DMCA hit and is yet to recover from it. But I don’t care too much because it’s a “dud” site that I’m not doing any work on.
  • I removed Ezoic Leap and the whole Speed integrations from Ezoic. I didn’t feel like I was getting any real performance to improve Core Web Vitals, so I decided to go at it alone.
  • I’ve further improved the user experience, particularly on mobile. I’m now running zero ads above the “fold” on my main website. Right now, it is super important to me to improve the experience and try to improve things like time on page and pages per session.

Site #1 Google Search Console

In June, there were 690,000 impressions and 20,000 clicks from Google. The average CTR was 2.9% and the average position 13.6.

For comparison, in May, there were 859,000 impressions and 25,200 clicks from Google. The average CTR was 2.9%, and the average position 12.2.

There’s one less day in June than there is in May, so this has some slight effects on the clicks. But mostly, it was clearly due to a position reduction from Google’s May Core Update.

There’s been many theories about what the update was about, but it seems not to be easily identified with any one particular change. Perhaps many. This is the best source I have for analysis of this issue:

Site #1 Analytics

In June, there were approximately 26,069 visits/sessions, 30,729 pageviews, 1.1788 page views per visit, and an average visit duration of 3 minutes.

I say approximately with these because I’m sourcing the data from Ezoic’s Big Data Analytics instead of Google Analytics this month due to a faulty JS installation for a while.

For comparison, May had 31,375 visits/sessions, 35,833 pageviews, 1.1421 page views per visit, and an average visit duration of 2 minutes 58 seconds.

At the start of the core update in May, I lost around 30-40% of organic traffic in the following week. Things kept moving downward, but luckily we started to see a flattening of the drop and some slight recovery in late June.

Overall, it results in an (almost) 17% drop in visits. Although I want to see this growing, and I expected I would continue growing after an excellent May, it’s not a hugely poor result.

There are some slight signs of hope with the pageviews per visit and average visit duration going up (although this is a pretty small percentage to get hyped over).

Site #1 Ezoic EPMV

Despite the drop in traffic from May into June, the EPMV rose slightly.

In May, the EPMV was $8.81, but in June, the EPMV was $10.37.

There’s a very gradual increase in this value. The likelihood is that some of the content I would get more traffic from in May (that has lower EPMVs) dropped in positioning, which meant that slightly higher-EPMV content became more dominant and rose the EPMV.

So it’s swings and roundabouts. It’s difficult to analyze unless digging into specific pieces of content and see what dropped and what rose. But I ain’t got time for that!

Site #1 Income

The overall earnings in June were $287.04. By comparison, the overall earnings in May were $360.90. That’s an overall reduction of $73.86.

The big difference between the months was the basic revenue earned by Ezoic’s primary ads. The Premium ads stayed about the same. Adsense went up. And most noticeably, my affiliate revenue from Skimlinks (and most other affiliates) was non-existent.

When considering the total expenses of $355.77, which were mostly spent on hiring new writers, my main site was at a loss of $68.73 for the month.

Despite this, the funds for hiring writers and creating content are 100% funded by selling two niche sites that I wasn’t actively working on (back in May).

SourceJune 2022 Earnings
Ezoic (Ads)$118.97
Ezoic Premium (Ads)$65.15
Adsense (Ads)$74.71
Amazon (Aff)$28.21
Total: $287.04

Site #1 Writer ROI

I pay my writers a per-hour rate. And as I have had more time with my small writing team, I’ve been also tracking the pay, hours, word counts, etc., to be able to estimate an overall cost per word and words per hour.

With these two sums, I can identify the return on investment and see how it trends over time.

For example, for the week ending June 25th, I paid $50 for 20 hours of work. With those hours, I got 3 finished posts of a total word count of 3,808.

This becomes an effective price-per-word of $0.013 (slightly over 1 cent). In previous weeks, it was even lower than 1 cent at $0.009 per word.

This is a simple example of the power of hiring Filipino writers per hour. The rate I am currently paying is an entry rate, and many writers would expect much higher. Still, I specifically looked for hiring writers who were passionate about the subject material and motivated to learn and grow with my brand/site.

Over time I will absolutely be thanking my writers that stick with me and if they keep performing as well as they have. I can do that in many ways in bonuses and eventually a whole pay rate upgrade.

If you’re interested in finding a Filipino writer yourself, I’d recommend trying out OnlineJobs.ph and then reading this tweet:

Site #1 Stats & Value

Quickly going over some basic overall stats for June:

  • 18 new articles published
  • 150 articles total by the end of the month
  • 32K new words published
  • 262K overall words total published
  • 1750 is the average word count per article
  • 26K sessions for June
  • $11.01 overall RPM (including ads and affiliate income)
  • $550.54 is the estimated revenue (based on the current RPM) when the site reaches 50K sessions
  • $2,324.26 is the approximate value of the site (based on last 6 months profit x 35)

Site #2 Google Search Console

Site #2 (which I don’t really care about) had a huge spike and then confidently dropped alongside the May Core Update, but also its biggest page being met with a DMCA hit. Oh well.

Site #2 Analytics

Site #2 dropped 58% in visits. Eventually, the DMCA should be removed, and the site will likely go back to its easy 10K hits per month.

Site #2 Income

At least Site #2 provides a little bit of income and profit. The costs are super low. The only thing I did in June was to add three new articles by using an AI tool.

I don’t use or recommend AI tools for main projects, it’s mostly just to test it and soak up some keywords. It’s actually working for one high-volume keyword already. You just never know what’s going to work sometimes.

Overall Profit & Loss

So let’s sum it all up:

AprilMayJuneRunning P&L
Site #1$196.80$109.08-$68.73-$597.71
Site #2$19.61$21.53$3.75$115.69
Site #3&4-$10.86$3,880.50N/A$2,595.42
Totals$205.55$4,011.11-$64.98$2,113.40

What I’ll Work On Next

So let’s finish up by discussing what I’ll be working on next to get my main niche site to grow:

  • Working on some unique data capture for a PR campaign. I’ll be researching lots of case studies that companies and brands use to create topical content that makes sites want to link to it.
  • I’ll be working on lots of specifications for my writers. I’ve removed most of my writing and focused on editing the content of my writers and adding my original value to improve it.
  • I want to push to get 30 posts out the door in July. An average of 1 post per day is the aim.
  • I want to pay some attention to affiliate content. That will be improving informational content to add in more affiliate product recommendations and adding a few affiliate/commercial posts like reviews and roundups.
  • I’ll be thinking about working on a new site that focuses entirely on affiliate content. I’m getting lots of offers for freebies from the niche site community and I may have to take them up on those offers soon!

That’s it, see you next month!

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