What’s going on folks?
It’s the first of the month, so we’re doing first of the month things. Updates to the main niche site. Still on the up and up, with some major gains being seen … for the most part.
Inevitably, here’s the video.
The Website
I started out with an eBook I wrote back in 2014, broke down the chapters into long posts, and went from there. Starting off creating a dozen or so pillar posts, those posts laid the foundation for the rest of the website.
Maybe someday I’ll expose the website. Right now I’m keeping it under wraps because there is so little competition. For the record, Amazon affiliates make up less than 1% of my overall revenue so far.
So it’s not a review site.
The Stats and Progress
Previous Month’s Goals
My goals for the website last month were to
Create an automated e-mail sequence for mailing list signupsRelease 5 to 10 new articles
The e-mail sequence has been setup, but I consider it a constant work in progress. When new articles are released I can add them to the automation.
Instead of just bombarding the list with constant sells, I’m doing it with a few emails of content then one with an upsell. Keeping it at a 3:1 or higher ratio.
Articles
Alright, so this month I had the good ol’ content writer do 10 more articles, all between 500 and 700 words each. Nothing major, just something to keep the search engine gods happy.
I’m aiming for about 10 articles a month for now on. One new post ever 3 days is a good enough schedule to maintain.
For the month of August, I’ll have my writer write to target one particular affiliate program that I want to have success with. They have a much better revshare program, so I’m trying to shoot for that.
But of course, you can’t rely on affiliate marketing, so I’m planning a few things this month.
Read on.
Keywords
According to SemRush, as of July 31st, I was ranking for 756 keywords. That was an increase from the 422 on the 1st of July.
- 8 keywords ranking in the top 3.
- 43 keywords ranking in positions 4-10.
- 49 keywords ranking in positions 11-20.
- 656 keywords ranking in positions 21-100. I lumped these in one because so few people go past the 1st page of Google, let alone the 2nd.
I only look at keywords I rank for in the USA, but I still get a significant amount of organic traffic from other countries.
Visitors
- 5112 visitors | increase of 2033 from June
- 8511 pageviews | increase of 2836 from June
- 72.57% bounce rate | increase of 2.57% from June
- 1.60 pages/session | decrease of .06 from June
- 1:38 average session duration | decrease of 9 seconds from June
Yeah, we’re still moving up in the world when it comes to visitors and pageviews. With the increase in traffic, we have people that come for 1 article and leave, so that’s understandable why the bounce rate went up a hair and the pages per session and average session durations decreased by a bit.
One thing that I’m pretty stoked about is that no matter what time I go onto Google Analytics, I have people on my website. Hell, at the time of writing there are 5 people on in 3 different countries.
Cashflow
Revenue
- Affiliate program 1: $72.25
- Affiliate program 2: $1.81
- Affiliate program 3: $0.53
- Affiliate program 4: $0.48
- Others:$39.23
Because I am a member of a number of affiliate programs, for this month I’ve decided to lump a bunch of them together. I’ll start tracking individually and give codenames for the different programs.
Expenses
- Articles: $100
Total revenue: $114.30
Total expenses: $100
Income: $14.30
Next month goals
For this next month, I’m planning on the following
- 10 articles posted all related to that one affiliate program
- Create a new digital product for the number 1 post
So, I’m sure a lot of people with niche websites have 1-5 knockout articles that drive a majority of their traffic. My top article doesn’t have a product out for it at all, so I’m going to create it.
Rather, commission it.
Over 50% of my traffic for this 1 topic, and there’s no way for me to monetize it.
Yet.
Conclusion
The 6th month was pretty tame as a whole. Saw a decrease in revenue, but also left 50% of my income on the table. Oh shit, not again.
That’s alright, lessons learned.
Notice anything about that graph? My damn previous month’s pageviews is nearly on level with my next month’s visitors.
Big dawgs gotta fill gaps in the market