February 2022: Niche Site Case Study Update

This Month in a Nutshell

I am pleased to say that I earned 50% more this month than last month, despite the shorter month! I wouldn’t be mad at all, if this sort of growth continued. I didn’t make any digital product sales, which is a shame, but I am seeing consistent growth in all areas of the site. 

Results Snapshot

Earnings 

This Month: $148.44

• Ezoic: $40.26
• Amazon: $108.18

Lifetime: $316.99

This site is at the top of the leaderboard for Amazon earnings and it seems to be picking up with clicks and the number of orders each day. It will be interesting to see how the Amazon Affiliates side of things continues.

The Ezoic earnings are pretty self-explanatory. While the EPMV is static, the daily visits and pageviews are going up every day.

Traffic

Pageviews This Month: 6,232 (vs. 4,371 last month)

Lifetime: 13,806

Sessions This Month: 5,052 (vs. 3,562 last month)

Lifetime: 10,821

Expenses

This Month: $474

This month’s expenses include;

• the articles published (32 in total but I did end up writing a few),
• hosting,
• a percentage of the Ezoic Premium fee
• RankMath
• Content AI credits

I wanted to try out Content AI, although it probably wasn’t needed on this site as the terms are not very competitive – but I wanted to try it out and see how it compares to something like Surfer SEO. To be honest, it is pretty good and I actually like the pay-as-you-go aspect of it, so you can choose which posts and keywords you want to use them on.

Activities & Accomplishments

Focus Area: Finding more keywords

This month I tried a few different things when it came to finding more of the keywords that are working, it involved messing around with the VPN as many people have mentioned they get different results on their local IP address.

I also used Answer Socrates which is a free equivalent to Answer The Public. It is AWESOME when you are creating topic clusters and gives you more seed keyword ideas to go back in with later.

Focus Area: Content planning

I mentioned last month that I’ve dropped all of those fancy project management tools and I’ve been using Google Sheets (simple and free!) to manage my writers and map my content out for the month.

I have gone even further and mapped it out even further ahead. The keywords are there, and, as I am about to mention, my silos are organised. Planning ahead keeps me on track and stops me from going off and doing too many unnecessary things.

Focus Area: Organizing my site silos.

I realized there was a better way I could have structured some parts of the site which would make internal linking even easier so I managed to organize this in a non-obtrusive way so as not to break or 404 any links or pages.

I added two pages to the menu which both target broader keywords, wrote some short, optimized page descriptions, and then linked to the categories or articles (long-tail keywords)

Focus Area: Looking at the best-performing articles and adding more links to them. I’ve been in Ezoic’s Big Data Analytics section more this month than I have been in the year I’ve been with Ezoic! I’m finally learning how to use some of those intimidating-looking sections.

I spent some time looking at the best performing articles and how long visitors spend etc. However, there isn’t a handful of pages getting the majority of the traffic, it is a bunch of pages getting between 30 and 75 visits. In any case, I added 3 internal links to the top 10 performing articles so hopefully they pass some link love around.

What’s Working

Info Content:

The site is 90% informational content, and while the EPMV is still low, each informational article presents an opportunity to link to a buyer intent article.

I still have an abundance of informational keywords I can rank for that will continue to bring in new visitors.

Pinterest:

The pins I had automated a few months back are still circulating and bringing in a few clicks a day. I know Pinterest is a hungry beast that needs feeding every now and then so I do not expect this to grow much longer and will steadily decline, so I may do another campaign soon.

It doesn’t take too much work. I make 5-10 pins for each post from my templates in Canva, attach them to their specific post, then, set it and forget it.

Keeping it original:

The topic clusters have been great to give the site more depth of the overall niche and also to try and keep visitors on the site longer, as 75% of the articles on the site are geared towards targeting that one new user and sending them on their way.

However, those original one-and-done articles that I’ve populated the site with are continuously ranking in the top 10 positions, ranking for multiple keywords, and bringing in the bulk of the traffic.

What’s Not Working

Other Affiliate Programs

The two main niche-specific affiliate programs I fully expected to do well have not produced at all. They get clicks but do not convert well. Maybe it is my strategy, and I could be force-feeding the links a bit too much.

Or maybe it is too soon to tell (probably the latter). However, compared to Amazon, which is performing well, those programs are a fail.

Infinite Scroll

Infinite scroll is when your site automatically loads the previous article, so as the reader gets to the end of one article, they keep seeing more. It forces them to stay on the page and view more ads in the process. 

Granted, it sounds quite annoying and unethical reading that back!

However, I thought this was an awesome idea! I asked Doug about it in the last update as it seemed like the perfect way to increase time-on-page and bring my EPMV up, but after a chat with Ezoic, they explained something about their system not measuring those types of visits (not in the way that I would have liked, at least.)

So I have since taken infinite scroll off. It did increase my time-on-page in the end, but I guess I will have to figure out another way to keep my readers engaged.

On the Horizon 

Next Month

From the networking I have done in this niche, I get the sense that the influencers want to be heard, understood and share their knowledge and work. They all seem to be happy to help but it may be due to no bugged for something.

I mentioned this in a recent video, as did Doug. I’ve been reaching out to the businesses and influencers in my niche, offering them something of value, whether that be exposure, recognition or asking them their thoughts on the matter. They are always ready to participate and want all the details so they can share them.

As I’ve said before, this may not necessarily lead to a link as they are not typically bloggers or in the know of all of that stuff. But they always want to share the content to their following which is great!

Next month I will continue to do outreach in this manner and figure out what the best course of action would be to scale this up.

Parting Thoughts

My biggest question is, do I continue adding articles each month despite the low EPMV and rely on the increasing Amazon sales going forwards. Or is that a bit risky given that Amazon is then in total control and can cut or change commission rates whenever they please?

I don’t want to jump ship just yet, but it would be logical to step back for a moment and watch what it does.

I am confident that the content and effort put on it thus far will continue to result in more visitors and revenue, and eventually, the site will be in profit.

But, the whole idea was for the site’s primary source of income to be ad revenue and any affiliate earnings secondary. At this rate, to get the site to a monthly income of $1000 from ads, I would need just over 130,000 visitors per month. That isn’t to say it cannot be done; I would need to stick to the original plan of getting to 500 posts.