Niche Site Project 2 - January 2020 Update

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In December I added some content to this site that absolutely helped it to skyrocket. This month, I’m still feeling the results from that even though traffic has started to drop off significantly.

Lot’s of exciting stuff to report this month so let’s get started!

Project Dashboard

In January, I added three new posts to this site. This site is a little different than the other content sites I have. I create supplemental files to accompany the blog posts themselves that visitors can download for free.

As such, producing content for this site is a bit more time consuming which means fewer posts each month.

I continue to outsource the content. Right now I have a single writer that does an excellent job allowing me to focus on just editing the article and creating the freebies.

Content

The post breakdown is as follows:

3 posts published this month (January)
3 posts published last month
1 post published in September
3 posts published in June
51 posts published between March – May

Traffic

This month I set a goal of hitting 12,000 sessions in January. I chose that number because it was rounding up from the 11,595 I hit in December.

I want to set goals that are attainable and, since I jumped from 2842 sessions in November to 11,595 sessions in December, I didn’t want to set a lofty goal for January.

But, I should have. Traffic continued to skyrocket.

You can see where the first of the year traffic was super high and has started to taper off. Still, I hit 20,044 page views this month!

The December vs. January analytics comparison report is equally as impressive.

This site saw over a 100% growth in Users, Sessions, and Pageviews this month!

Now, I don’t expect that kind of growth to continue for February. You can already see that things are starting to plateau but I expected that. I’ll probably keep my sessions goal for February the same as January (12,000).

Income

Remember, this is income and not profit.

Signing up for Ezoic last month for this site was absolutely the right answer. I didn’t have the 10,000 sessions Mediavine needed for me to add a second site but I knew I wanted to monetize.

I am so happy I signed up with them and my experience has been 100% positive. In fact, if I had waited until my site qualified for Mediavine, I would have lost out on over $900 of revenue this month.

This is the earnings report dashboard from Ezoic for the month.

Now that I have had a full month on Ezoic, and because the site now qualifies for Mediavine as a second site, I will be moving the ads on this site to Mediavine.

My main reason for doing this is to have a true comparison between the two ad platforms and the RPM’s. Still, I 100% recommend Ezoic if you qualify and are currently running Adsense. The revenue increase is well worth it.

Goals

Last month my goals were:

Add at least 10 new articles each month. ❌ FAIL
Continue to increase traffic month over month. 🏆 WIN

This month my goals are to:

Switch email providers from ConvertKit to FloDesk (affiliate link)
Switch themes on the site.
Switch over from Ezoic to Mediavine
Publish 2 new posts.

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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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