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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