Niche Site Project 1 - December 2019 Update

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This month things are continuing to increase for this site. All in all, I am extremely happy with how things are turning out for this blog and I have to say, I could not have done any of it without the things I learned as part of the Project 24 course.

December brings about yet another month where I experienced my highest earnings yet for this site. I have heard that is normally the case for December, due to the holidays, but it is still nice to see!

Let’s have a look at how the site did during December.

Project Dashboard

Whenever I am working on this site, the first thing I typically do is look at my project dashboard. It gives me awesome information at a glance. As an end of month reflection, it’s a perfect way to see the “state of the blog”.

In this case, I can’t believe the site is already up to a whopping 265 posts! I still have plans for a ton more articles but it’s nice to see.

RPM is higher this month than the last month but I know that is likely due to the holidays. Keep in mind this RPM value isn’t the RPM from my ad provider, Mediavine, it is an overall RPM based on all income for the blog.

I love seeing that there is still a ton more content that hasn’t fully “aged” on Google. This means that I should continue to see an upward trend for this site.

Clicking on the image opens it larger in a new tab.

Content

This month 18 articles were added to the site. Here are some fun facts about that.

33,387 total words added
1,855 Average Word Count
4,098 words on the longest post
783 words on the shortest post

Traffic

Let’s look a little more in-depth at the traffic this month.

Overall page views are continuing to increase. That is hard to see here but more evident in the second picture where I compare this month’s stats with the same amount of days from the preceding period.

Almost a 20% growth in organic traffic! That is awesome. One of the things that I have been seriously lagging on this month is Pinterest. I have not kept my Tailwind queue filled which means that my Pinterest traffic has decreased.

Knowing that my organic traffic is continuing to increase gives me the reassurance that it is OK if my Pinterest queue is empty every once in a while and to not be so hard on myself to keep up with everything.

Income

Keep in mind that this is not a profit report, it is an income report. I do show writer expenses on this dashboard but, they are not my only expenses.

This site did not make a profit this year but, if things continue on the same trajectory, it will make a profit next year.

Ads are still my #1 income source. I don’t see that changing in the near future. Other income like Amazon and product sales (mainly through Etsy at this point) fluctuate from month to month with no consistency or predictability.

Goals

For this site my goals for 2020 are simple.

Continue to increase traffic month over month.
Add at least 15 new articles each month.

Ideally, I’d like to keep Tailwind full as well but, I have so much other stuff going on I’m OK with that not being a goal.

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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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