Niche Site Project 4 Update for May 2019: Another Record Earnings and Traffic Month!

Another record month!

I'm excited to share the results for my niche site for Niche Site Project 4 for May 2019.  Overall, I'm very happy with the results, but I'm also a little disappointed that the earnings were not even more than they were.

I'll share why in a minute.

In a nutshell, I was able to ramp up content production a bit more (18 new articles this month) and the traffic from both Google and Pinterest continued on a nice upward trend. My site is now 9 months old (started in September 2018) and I fully expect to hit the $1,000 per month in earnings before it's a year old.

As a reminder, I plan to reveal my niche site once it earns $1,000 in a month.

Let's jump right into the results!

Earnings

In total, the site earned $740.45!  This is a nice increase from April (which was a record month) of $565.44.  

Amazon Associates brought in a total of $512.92 and Ezoic ads brought in a total of $227.53.

Amazon Earnings

Alright, here's why I was a little disappointed in my Amazon earnings this month.  What you DON'T see on this screenshot above is another $135 is commissions that I had earned around the 17th of the month.

I sold a couple of expensive items that totaled over $130 in commissions for me.  I was “banking” on these commissions all month.  Then in the last couple of days the customer returned the items and the commissions were “taken” from me.  Ouch!

So, my earnings WOULD have been about $650 from Amazon.

But it gets worse.  I sold another really expensive item on the second to last day of May.  This would have been close to $100 in earnings.  However, the item didn't ship in May…so I'll get those commissions in June.  So, it's not all bad…just means my May could have been significantly better if a couple of things had happened differently.

To recap, my earnings COULD have been: $750 from Amazon + $227 from Ezoic = $977.  I was actually thinking I might break $1,000 in earnings for a couple of days there.

So, while I'm happy with the nice increase in earnings from May to June, I was kinda expecting to earn a bit more.   However, don't worry…June should be another record month and I think $1,000 is a very real possibility.

Ezoic Earnings

In total, the site earned $227.53 from Ezoic display ads. That's a 3x increase over April!

I'll be honest, the longer I use Ezoic, the more impressed I become.  In full disclosure, the CMO of Ezoic has reached out to me via email and I've done a couple of calls with him.

I now understand how their company and platform work a bit better.

Ezoic is a platform that does more than just find and display ads on your website for you.  Turns out they have some pretty advanced artificial intelligence working behind the scenes to learn what ads and what ad positions are going to make you the most money.

As the team at Ezoic has explained to me, it can take a little bit of time for their system to “learn” the best configuration for your site.  However, the smarter the ads get over time, the higher your earnings should grow per visitor.

This appears to be the case with my site.  As you can see from the trend line of the Ezoic screenshot above, my site is starting to earn more and more each day.  This is partly due to the increased traffic of my website, but it also has to do with the increased earnings per visitor.

Earnings Per 1000 Visitors (EPMV)

This screenshot shows the trend line of the Earnings Per 1000 Visitors (EPMV).  As you can see my site has gone from earning around $5 EPMV to $16.63 EPMV. Over triple the earnings per 1000 visitors in the past 3 months!

So, I was initially saying that I wanted to leave Ezoic and head over to Mediavine as soon as possible…I'm now walking back that statement a bit.  Now that I understand that Ezoic is using artificial intelligence to help my site earn more money…and that it takes time, I'm going to stick around for now.

I actually think that my earnings from Ezoic display ads could eclipse $400 in earnings for the month of June.  

If you want to give Ezoic a try, I would be honored if you signed up through my affiliate link right here.

Costs

As I've explained in the past, I am outsourcing nearly every aspect of my niche site.  I am not writing any of the content.  I am not doing any of the link building.  

I make the strategic plans and put the right people in place and then I just monitor and tweak the business as needed.  So far this has worked pretty well.  However, it does come with higher costs than if I were to do everything myself.

So, in order to be 100% transparent, I am also sharing all the costs associated with running my Niche Site Project 4 site. The screenshot below shows all the income and expenses.

As you can see in May, I spent a total of $1,549 on the site, for a total loss of $808 for the month.  Yes, I lost money; however, the trend is that I'm now losing less and less money each month.

I expect in a few months that instead of a net loss, I'll be in the black and growing.

I also wanted to point out that I eliminated a couple of expenses for May: Pinterest Management and Pinterest VA.  I was able to eliminate this nearly $400 a month expense by finding someone new to work with.

Long story short is that a Niche Pursuits reader reached out to me and offered to manage my Pinterest and create new pins for me for free for a couple of months.  After those 2 months, we will figure out a rate going forward if he does a good job.

So far he's done a good job and I've already hired him to work on a separate website that I own.

Overall, I've invested a little over $16,000 to date on the site. I fully expect to make all the money back and then some, but only time will tell.

Traffic

The site keeps growing really well each month!  Traffic from both Google organic and Pinterest keep growing rapidly and I expect the trend to continue as I add more and more content.

Total Traffic

As you can see from the graph above, the traffic continues to trend in the right direction.  With just over 20,000 sessions during May, I love what I'm seeing.

Google Organic Traffic

The biggest source of traffic is Google – which is what I planned all along with the site.  As Hannibal from the A Team used to say, I love it when a plan comes together!

Over 10,000 sessions from Google Organic sources in May!  And yes, June will be higher than that based on what I'm seeing so far.

Pinterest

As mentioned, I “hired” a new Pinterest manager (he's working for free for a couple of months) and he is producing great results.

The site had just over 7,500 sessions from Pinterest last month; hopefully, things will continue to grow!

Rankings

In general, the site continues to rank higher and higher for it's targeted keywords.  In fact, the site hit #1 in Google for 2 of it's targeted keywords!  (Technically this happened int he first couple days of June, but close enough).

Check out this screenshot from the Long Tail Pro rank tracker with some of my top rankings.

The only page from this particular screenshot that I've build links to is the second one listed.  All the other articles are rankings without me building any links to them.

I should be clear that I've built links to other articles and I've also build links to the homepage.  However, I just thought it was interesting to note that most of my top ranking articles are ones that I've never built links to.

I should also be clear that some of these articles DO have links, I just didn't build them.  Any links that occurred to these articles happened on their own (maybe someone copied an image from Pinterest and linked to me, or just referenced my article on their own).

Content

I'm happier this month with the level of content production vs. the previous month.  Since I'm seeing great results in terms of traffic and rankings from the content I'm producing, I want to keep the number of articles published each month high.

Here's a quick screenshot that shows the content production for each month.

I also expect that June will be closer to 25+ total articles published because I just ordered 20 articles from the content writing service, Content Pit.  Content Pit has done a good job for me in the past and so I went ahead and placed a bulk order with them that they will finish up in the next week or so.

Link Building

Last month I wrote about how I was planning on doing a big outreach campaign and trying to generate a bunch of links.  Unfortunately, I never got around to it.   As my site continues to grow without lots of link building, I become less and less concerned with building new links.

I'll let you know if that changes.

The Hoth

I got a few links from The Hoth in May.  I had ordered these in April and they were completed in May.

I've been tracking 6 keywords that I've built links to using The Hoth.  The results are below.  Please note that keywords 2 – 5 I did not build any links to until AFTER April 7th.  (Keyword 1 got its first set of links from the Hoth on March 6th though).

Like I said, the results have been pretty good!  I like the fact that the Hoth uses real outreach techniques to find the guest post opportunities.  From what I can tell, these do appear to be on real websites with real authority and traffic.

If you want to order guest post links through the Hoth, check them out here.

Authority Builders

Even though I didn't order any new links from Authority.Builders during the month of May, I thought it would be worth posting an update on how those pages have done that I got links to.

Here's the results:

Overall, ranks continue to be higher than before I got the links.  You can check out Authority Builders here.

Email List

The email list for my niche site went from 118 subscribers to 230.  While that's great, I have yet to do anything with the email list.

My plan was to build out an email sequence, but I have yet to find the time or desire to do that yet.  Just being honest.

Tools I'm Using for My Site

In case you are wondering what I've used to build my site, what plugins I have, or other tools or services I've been using to grow, I've created this list for you below.

• Generate Press Premium (WordPress Theme). Super easy to use and fast loading.
• Long Tail Pro – for all my keyword research and rank tracking.
• Big Scoots Hosting – I moved to Big Scoots a few months ago for all my sites and love it.  Managed WP hosting at a fraction of the cost of competitors (and my sites got faster when I moved from the more expensive options).
• Table Labs – To create beautiful product comparison tables for Amazon Associates products.
• AAWP – To create product boxes for Amazon Associates products.
• AmaLinks Pro – To create great looking buttons for Amazon Associates.
• Link Whisper – To significantly speed up the process of building internal links. (This is my product I created that is not publicly released yet, but you can join the wait list here.)
• Short Pixel Image Optimizer – Reduces file size for images and increases site speed.
• Optin Monster – To capture leads with opt in forms.
• Convert Kit – For email automation and email list management.
• Tailwind App – For Pinterest scheduling and image management.
• Content Pit – Content writers that know how to do product reviews and more.
• The Hoth – Guest Post link building
• Authority Builders – More link building
• Ezoic Ads – Display ad management platform that uses artificial intelligence.

What's Next?

I don't plan to change much of my process for the foreseeable future.  What I am doing is clearly working, so I'm going to just keep doing more of it.

Namely, I plan to continue to publish 20 or so articles each month.  I continue to try to find low competition keywords and focus very little on search volume. In other words, I don't care if it only says it gets 20 searches a month…if it's easy to rank for and relevant to my niche, I target the keyword.

I will likely add a few links here and there when I find time, but it likely won't be a big focus.  I'll mostly just focus on new content and improving the site overall (speed, ad optimization, etc) as I have the time.

As a reminder, I DO plan on revealing the site when it reaches $1,000 a month in earnings!  I'm hopeful that will happen in June.  So, hang in there, we are getting close (I think) to when I'll share the actual domain of the website I've been building for the past 9 months.

Niche Site Project 4 Participant Reports

As usual, I've allowed those that are following along building their own niche sites the opportunity to report on their progress as well.  You can see their reports below.

It's exciting to see the Jae June continues to grow his business!  In addition, there are a couple of others earnings similar amounts to me with their niche sites and many are making great progress!

<td data-sheets-value="{"1":2,"2":"Biggest move to date and things are beginning to click.nWill likely stop reporting the earnings number once I reach $5000 which I think is possible in June.nnBut lots of things happened in May.nnTraffic hasn't jumped or anything like other people NSP4. But Google traffic is increasing and the visitors from Google are very high quality.nnIncrease in traffic because I'm also using Facebook ads to target and drive traffic with $5/day budget. First time I've done facebook ads so there is a lot to explore, learn and experiment to figure things out. But so far, traffic has increased. Haven't converted anyone into a customer 🙁 The number of leads and questions coming through the site has increased for sure. So far, it looks like Facebook requires a high quality audience target, an eye catching and intriguing offer, solid and professional looking landing page to match the offer. So many moving pieces.nnWas able to finish creating a package of free HQ spreadsheets for FBA sellers. High quality free spreadsheets that aren't just regular blank templates. These templates are fully loaded with calculations, and automation. If there are any sellers reading this, you can get it for free and improve your number analysis at http://bit.ly/2WbWALBnnAlso published our May Amazon FBA results and updates so people can check out our numbers too. https://www.gorillaroi.com/blog/nnnn "}”>

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