Happy to report that all the sites reported in this income report are now monetized and making at least $100 per month.
The Redirect Experiment Continues to go South
In last month’s income report, I shared that I changed the domain name of one of my sites (Site #1 in this income report).
I bought a brand new domain name and redirected the entire site to the new domain. You can read why I did it in the last month’s income report.
While it’s too early to know its fate, the income continues to drop this month (dropped below $1K, a decline of more than 50%).
While I am adding more content to it, new content can take anywhere from 6-9 months to rank and get traffic.
Let’s see how the next few months go. In the meantime, I will continue to add a few articles every month.
Google Loves Me, Google Loves Me Not
Site #6 started to get some traffic and I thought it would be a good time to add it to an ad network.
I reached out AdThrive to check if they would be willing to add the site (even though it was only getting ~10K pageviews).
AdThrive has been good to me and has allowed me to add relatively new sites with less traffic to their network.
However, they came back after a few days and informed me that they won’t be able to add the site to their network as the domain was rejected by Google.
The reason for the rejection – “Valuable inventory: Templated page”
There could be many reasons for this, but here are two that I thought were the main culprit:
- A few days ago I realized that I made a mistake and copy pasted the same content on two different aticles. So, while the article topic were different, the content was exactly the same. As soon as I came to know of this, I corrected it
- AdThrive pointed out that some of the artilces were very similar to other published and ranking artilces. I got these articles from WordAgents and it looked as if the writer simply rephrased an existing ranking article
While the first issue was already taken care of, I quickly reached out to WordAgents and demanded a rewrite (which they did).
I also checked all the other articles on the site, and I didn’t find any issues with the others.
In the meantime, I also applied to this site for Google Adsense approval.
And to my surprise, it got approved in a day and I could show Google Adsense ads on it.
So Google didn’t approve it for AdThrive but did it for their own ads.
Anyway, I am sure there must be an explanation for it. Maybe these are two different departments that are not synced with each other.
As soon as it got approved by Google Adsense, I also applied for Ezoic and got approved in a few days.
To cut the long story short, the site currently shows Ezoic ads and getting a decent RPM (~$20).
Learning for me – Every article that I now get from my writers/agencies should be manually checked with existing top-ranking articles. Copyscape and other plagiarism tools are not able to identify smartly rephrased content.
Niche Sites Income in August 2021
| SITE | # OF ARTICLES | MONTHLY PVs | INCOME |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site 1 | 122 | 35,907 | $ 929 |
| Site 2 | 259 | 74,725 | $ 2,110 |
| Site 3 | 221 | 68,388 | $ 1,568 |
| Site 4 | 72 | 10,596 | $ 229 |
| Site 5 | 125 | 263,595 | $ 19,728 |
| Site 6 | 105 | 12,634 | $ 100 |
| Site 7 | 154 | 20,452 | $ 537 |
If you’re interested in learning more about the sites, check out the first income report.
Total Income in August 2021 – $25,201 (vs. 18,203 last month)
Some $$ screenshots:
Now, let’s have a look at the expenses.
Expense in August 2021
Total Expense: $1,550 (vs. $2,190 last month)
Expenses related to hosting and some of the plugins/tools are paid yearly. I will add these whenever they come up for renewal.
Net Income for August 2021: $23,651 (vs. 16,013 last month)
What Am I Reading/Learning?
For August 2021, my book club buddies decided to read The Cult of We by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell.
It’s about the story of WeWork and how it got crazy valuations and why it all came crashing down. I listened to it on Audible and really enjoyed it.
So if you’re looking for a light read with lots of drama, go for it.
