Niche Site Project 1 - February 2020 Update

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Project Dashboard

RPM’s are starting to go up this month. One of the things I did this month that may have contributed to that is that I turned on site-wide video via MediaVine. Prior to doing so, a video would only play on a post if I had specifically uploaded one. Instead, I created a generic video and enabled the feature to have that video play if a specific video was not available.

I also added more post-specific videos to the top-performing posts. The videos are supposed to earn more income if they are specifically created for a post vs. displaying the generic ones so I did that for a few of my posts that bring in traffic.

I definitely have seen an increase in income. I am sure other factors are at play but I do think this helped as well.

Content

I got more posts published this month vs last month (11 vs 5), but still not as many as I would have liked. I have more posts pending review and pictures that I just didn’t have time to get to this month.

All 11 posts this month were outsourced. A total of 19,717 words were published to the blog.

Traffic

Pageviews and sessions are up again. This month I set a goal of 50,000 Sessions. I figured that is just shy of a 15% increase over January sessions (44,411) and would be doable.

If you will remember, in January I only set a goal of 10% over December and that was blown out of the water. For March, I think I’ll round up a new goal to an even 20% increase.

For the comparison, I’m comparing 29 days to 31. Still, the growth is awesome!

In fact, just for fun, I calculated out how a 20% growth in sessions, month over month, would change income for this site assuming the same overall RPM from this month.

Now, I know there is no way to predict traffic growth or income potential, but it was still fun to create! I mean, I’d be thrilled if this site was making almost $7k in monthly revenue by December!

What this chart does do, though, is give me a goal value for sessions for March. I think I’ll make that even 64,000 sessions.

Income

Keep in mind this is not a profit report, it is an income report. Just because I “earned” the income this month doesn’t mean I received it this month.

There was a nice jump in ad revenue this month. I think that is partly due to increased page views and partly due to adding video for all posts, as I mentioned earlier.

Amazon earnings are up this month too. Late in the month I went into my top 10 posts by traffic and made sure they all had one or two Amazon affiliate links. I am hoping this will help things grow for Amazon next month as well.

Product sales and other affiliate income were down. But that’s OK. I haven’t really focused on them much.

Goals

Last month I set the following goals:

Publish all paid-for content / get caught up on my backlog. ❌ FAIL
Get at least 25% completion on my new product. ❌ FAIL

It was a fail for both. I just focused on other stuff and didn’t make progress on these. So, they will continue to be my goal for this month.

Reach 64,000 Sessions
Publish all paid-for content / get caught up on my backlog.
Get at least 25% completion on my new product.

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MY NICHE SITE PROJECTS

Interested in reading about my niche site projects? Check out my Niche Site Project List to see my projects & their individual status.

Niche Site Project List

RESOURCES I USE

I keep an up to date list of all of the tools and resources I use to manage my blogs, including how I create the awesome dashboards in my income reports, on my Tools and Resources page.

These are my top tools:

ClickUp – It has easily helped me 10x my productivity.
Big Scoots Hosting – (or, alternately, SiteGround)
Tailwind for Pinterest
ConvertKit for Email List
Airtable for data tracking/spreadsheets when I first started (though I use ClickUp Exclusively now)
Project24 the main course I took to learn how to blog, and my primary blog course recommendation.
BloggerPlot for Analytics and Search Console Analysis in one place.
Amalinks Pro for Amazon links and awesome tables.
OnlineJobs.ph for my Virtual Assistants
Pinteresting Strategies Course for Pinterest

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