Niche Site Project 1 - January 2020 Update

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This month I am really feeling behind on all of my sites but, the truth of the matter is, I got a lot done on the backend Admin side of things.

I expected earnings to go down this month, and they did. Almost every monetized blogger everywhere exclaims that January revenue is almost always lower than any other time of the year.

Even so, it wasn’t as bad as I thought. That being said, let’s have a look at how this site did in January.

Project Dashboard

Back to my favorite tool for monitoring blog progress, my blog dashboard.

RPM’s fell this month from $39.72 to $16.13. I forgot to update the last month’s RPM field in the dashboard below which is why it is different.

I’ve been playing with this dashboard to get it to auto calculate some stuff and I still need to spend some more time with it!

Content

I have 5 -10 posts at least for this site waiting to be reviewed and published. I just haven’t had the time to do it. Even though I now outsource most of the content for this site, I still review every single post and often add more to it.

That takes time, though, and this month I just didn’t get to do as much as I had hoped.

I published 5 posts for a total of 8,028 words on this blog in January.

Traffic

Pageviews and sessions are both up this month. Which I expect to continue as long as I am adding new content each month. In this chart, it’s hard to see the growth that is happening.

At the start of the month, I decided to set traffic goals for each of my sites. If you read December’s update, traffic for this blog was at 33,423 sessions. I set a goal of 37,000 sessions. A roughly 10% increase.

Boy did that number get blown out of the water!

There was an over 30% increase in users, sessions, and page views overall. Organic traffic was up over 40% for those values which is incredible!

As I mentioned before, I love seeing organics increase month over month because I want to have traffic that is more diversified. Right now I feel like the blog is too reliant on Pinterest for traffic. That means if something were to happen on Pinterest right now, my traffic and income would be greatly reduced.

Slowly but surely this organic number will get bigger and even things out.

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.

Ads continue to be my #1 income source. I don’t expect that to change anytime soon although I am working on a new product for this site that I have high hopes for.

Overall, there is just under $80 difference between this month and last month which is pretty darn good considering last month was Christmas season.

A lot of that, I am sure, is due to the traffic increases I had this month. That’s OK with me though! I’ll take it!

While I do have a block on this dashboard to track writer expenses, that expense is not deducted from income, it is more for my reference. That value is how much I paid for the posts that were published in that month.

Goals

Last month I set the following goals:

Continue to increase traffic month over month. 🏆 WIN
Add at least 15 new articles each month. ❌ FAIL

This month my goals are to:

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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