$5,818 Last Month!? How My Website About Squirrels and Other Backyard Stuff Makes Money

Last month, OwnTheYard.com made $5,818, and this month it's on track to make more than that. Today, I’m going to show you exactly how it's making money and where the traffic is coming from.

Overall, this is the most recent update for Niche Site Project 4!  This is a public case study site that I started in late 2018 and the site continues to do well.

Enjoy the full report by watching the video below!

Read the Full Transcript

Hey everyone, Spencer here. So. Last month, which was May, 2021 own the yard.com made $5,818 in earnings. And this month it's actually on track to do more than that. And so really, I just wanted to sit down here today and explain exactly how it's earning its money and share the strategies behind that, where it's getting its traffic.

And everything. And so I'm going to dive in to Google analytics. I'm going to dive into the content published and of course their earnings and exactly where that's coming from. So let's go ahead and jump right into it. So first let's take a look at earnings. The site actually makes money in two different ways, Ezoic display ad. And then Amazon associates earnings.

And so if I jump into my egoic dashboard here for on the yard.com, you can see how much it's making, right. And this is even showing June. So today's actually June 16th. But if I go back here, And take a look at if I go monthly. All right. So if we, after clicking monthly, if we scroll down here and look at may.

We can see that the total earnings was $3,351 and 45 cents. Right? That's how much the site made in display ad revenue. And then if we come over here to Amazon associates, I've already got Mae selected and the proper tracking IDs you can see that it made $2,467 and 21 cents for a total of. $5,818 and 66 cents.

Right? So that's where that's coming almost $6,000 last month. And so let's look at his Zohak again, this is the display ad revenue. So if you come over to my site, you know, my site has ads on the site, which of course, it's not going to be showing up because I'm logged in. But if you go over to own the yard.com, you'll see that that is pulling.

One thing that I do kind of like about ease Zohak is that you can see the in-depth analytics. All right. So if I come over to big data analytics and click content, right. I can see which pages are earning the most display ad revenue, which I think is kind of interesting. Huh? Okay. And so as I pull this up, it shows that right now, I believe it's sorted by page views.

I actually want to sort it by earnings. If I can, it looks like I need to add a column here. Okay. So now I've got the revenue column over here. And if I sort by the revenue, I can see which page actually earned me the most money. And that one was walkway ideas. There you go. It made me $176, which is interesting because the best water garden ideas, which actually got more page views.

Almost $50 over $50, less $122. Right. And so there's lots of data here. I just thought it would be interesting to show you some of my top pages and then certainly some of my lowest pages there that made nothing right. And then if I go over to Amazon associates, we can see which products I'm actually making money from.

Right. If I just click on one of these tracking IDs, just to give you an idea, you can see that I've got a. Lego dots, magic forest bracelet. I don't even know shipped nine of those camping chair, camping chairs, right? That's what actually shipped the most items. What actually made me the most money.

Interestingly, really not nothing big. You know, I made 73 bucks on, on one of these, but it's a lot of individual items. Now I thought it might actually be interesting to also see what the earnings are like for this month as well. So in Amazon, I've made a total of $659 and 95 cents. And if we add that to my ear, Zohak, you can see that this month, so far, I've made 2000.

$69 and 91 cents, right? For a total of $3,729 and 86 cents. And it is a, I'm recording this on the 16th, but Amazon's a day late. So if I divide that by 15 days and then which is anyways, it's that number of times 30 days. It says that I'm on pace for $7,459. Right. So I should make more in the month of June than I did last year.

All right now, let's go ahead and take a look at Google analytics. Where's the traffic coming from, what pages are getting traffic, et cetera. I just thought it might be interesting to show you what is actually working and getting traffic. Right? So the site's getting, if I go to, let's just, I like to look at sessions, right?

It's getting anywhere from. You know, about 5,000 to six for F anyways, 4,500 to 6,200 sessions a day. Something like that. About 100 and well, it's 169,000, almost 170,000 page views in the last 30 days. Right. So if we just look at the site content, you can see what my top pages are. Right. Best post hole Digger, apparently a coy pond ideas, walkway ideas, best water, garden ideas, tree stump, ideas, how to get rid of mushrooms.

These are some of my top pages and what's the breakdown of where that traffic's coming from. If I take a look at the overview, you can see that about 62% is coming from organic search. That's Google. 23% is coming from social sources. Primarily Pinterest and 14% is direct. And so if I click on the social just so you can see the bulk of that, you know, 99% is from Pinterest.

All right. All right now, let's, let's take a look at the site itself. So this is what the site looks like. And if I look at the back end, you can start to see, I know a lot of people are always curious how many posts are published on the site. And so right now there are 625 posts published. I've got 16 drafts and some of the more recent articles that have been published, like best pressurized, water, guns, best putting mats and on down the line.

And if you want to see the plugins that I have installed, I'll show this backend. I've got a AWP that I use a lot, Emily pro and the Amazon link engine, which is genius links, all for managing Amazon associates links. Right. And then of course I've got link whisper, which I use to manage my internal links.

If you're not aware, I'm the creator of that plugin. And so if we look at LinkedIn, I really do use this a lot. My writers come in here and it's part of the process that they add an internal link to one of my other articles. Every time they write an article. And if I look at my links report, I can quickly come in here and see.

You know, for example, this best waterproof outdoor string lights article has 11 outbound internal links that are pointing to other articles on my site. And it actually has four internal links pointing to this particular article. Right. And so I can quickly see are my writers actually adding inbound internal links.

Which is definitely one of what I want to see. I want to see at least one inbound internal links. So I've got a couple of these that probably could use an internal link. And if I want to do that, I just click add link. Whisper will go out that and go out there. Find a link suggestions for me. And it makes it very easy for me to just click and click add.

If I liked those, I'm not going to go through that process now on this video. But I just thought it would be interesting. You can see that coming up. I've got lots of squirrel articles being published here. Where do squirrels sleep? What do squirrels eat? Then I've got some deer articles. What do a deer eat, et cetera.

So those are. Soon to be published on, on the yard.com. Now, just as a reminder, I actually don't do any of the writing or editing or really much of any of the work anymore on this site. It's all outsourced. I have an editor that gets all of the content from the content writers and the editor then formats them, ads, images adds the Amazon affiliate link.

And make sure they're following my process, which I have a spreadsheet that they follow with my entire process. And they hit publish. I don't even review it before it's published. And so the amount of time I spend on this site is almost zero. I get a weekly email from my editor and I basically say, sounds good.

If it doesn't sound good, I say, Hey, let's tweak this process a little. And change it. So maybe, you know, some months I do spend a couple hours looking for new keywords, but that at this point that's basically all, all the work that I do early on building the site. I did put a lot of time and energy into it, but the sites, you know, over two years old and it's now outsourced and managed and I'll go into how much I'm spending here and just see.

The other thing that maybe you might find interesting is a trust. Let's look at the link building. I haven't done a ton of link building, but certainly there are links. And so if we just look at the overview, you can see that the organic search traffic, it had this massive spike last year, which I called the COVID spike, even though my site is now ranking for more keywords than it did, you know, back then, There was just this massive spike.

So many more people were home searching for outdoor stuff and buying outdoor stuff. It was just a very unique time. So if then if I look at backlinks, you can just see where some of the links are coming from. You know, I have linked to it from niche pursuits, but a lot of these others, right. Are.

Just sort of natural links that have come in anyways. This is nature.org. That's cool. I didn't even know about that one. You know, I've got some Wiki, how anyways, bee keeping club. Oh, that's cool. So I share a lot on Pinterest and I do believe a lot of the links actually have come from people then using those pins or those images from Pinterest, they put them on their own blog and then they, then they linked to me a lot of times they use the images and don't link to me.

But other times they. Right. And so the site does have, you know, lots of links and it's getting new links every day. Now let's look at the top pages here. Okay. So top pages, you know, you can see that according to AA, my page is bringing in the most traffic, how to level your backyard, koi pond ideas.

That's not accurate. Right. You know, if we compare this little side note, don't always trust everything that you see in AHS, right? It does a decent job at just the best that it can. But. You know, so koi pond ideas, walkway ideas. Those are really my, so I don't know where the walkway ideas is. Okay. It's down here.

Right. So everything's not in the exact order, right. You know, dance, how to make a dance floor. It says is one of my top pages. It's not even one of my top 10 pages really in analysts. Right. So take things that AHF says with a grain of salt, salt, but it's an amazing tool. Now let's take a [email protected].

All right, I've already got lots of content and I've taken a break for a few months of really publishing a lot of new content. I'm going to go ahead and double down and start doing about 20 articles a month. That's the plan. I'm going to continue doing about five pins a day. I have somebody doing Pinterest for me, and then updating about one or two old pieces of content using market muse or surfer SEO per week.

So that's really just the plan going forward. I don't have any big link building plans or anything like that. Just continue publishing new content on low competition keywords, keep doing Pinterest and updating some old content. And again, this is going to be all outsourced, right? I, I'm not doing most of the work here.

The site is managed by my editor and I have writers and people doing everything for me. How much do I pay for this editor that is managing the site for me? I'm actually going to show here in Upwork is where I have them hired them from $1,400 or sorry, $18,000 total. That's over about two years.

And a lot of that was upfront. The last 30 days I've spent $245. So. Usually now on average, I pay her, you know, depending on how much she gets done that month between 200 and $500 a month, and then to publish 20 new articles a month. Right. I spend anywhere from, depending on the length, 50 to a hundred dollars per article.

So that's anywhere from a thousand to $2,000 per article. So maybe I'm spending 1500, $2,000 on average. So the site is profiting well, and it's pretty hands-off for me. So overall that's owned the yard.com. I just wanted to jump in, share how the site has made about $5,800 last month, and that it's on track to do even more than that.

Most of the traffic's coming from Google and you can go check out the site to see exactly how it's laid out, but hopefully you found. What I've explained helpful and overall, just an update on the site and how it's doing. Thanks again for watching.