Display ad rates in October were lower than the rates in September (~20-30% lower).
But thanks to growth in traffic, the impact of lower RPM was more than offset by the higher traffic on all the niche sites.
Also, Amazon had the Prime days which helped boost the income from that front. While I am not big into Amazon affiliate, one of the sites did see a big jump in affiliate income.
So overall, the revenue in October increased.
And unlike August and September 2020, there were no major expenses, which led to a much higher net income this month.
October 2020 Highlights
In October, I published a total of 22 articles across all six niche sites.
I planned for a lot more, but changing weather got to me and I was out of action for about a week. I did catch-up a bit with publishing in the last week of the month.
There are a couple of noteworthy things I did for the niche sites.
Moved Sites to Kinsta
So far, all the six niche sites were on three different hosts – Siteground, WPX, and Kinsta.
I decided to move all the sites to Kinsta, as it makes it easier for me to manage. Kinsta is a far superior hosting that comes with an expensive price tag but an even more important peace of mind.
It took me less than an hour to get the new account set up and put in the requests for transfer. Rest everything was taken care of by the Kinsta support.
I still have the SiteGround subscription till 2022 and will continue using it when starting new sites. CraftofBlogging also continues to be hosted on SiteGround.
Trained on Google Data Studio
I spent some time learning how to use Google Data Studio (it’s quite easy to learn).
With this new-found knowledge, I created a couple of dashboards that I can use to better manage my niche sites (and it saves time to have all the site’s data in one dashboard).
For example, I can quickly see what pages on a site are getting the most clicks on Amazon affiliate links and use this to optimize these pages.
If you’re a numbers guy like I am, it’s worthwhile learning about GDS.
Failed Non-Amazon Experiment
For one of the niche sites, I tried adding a pop-up to recommend a relevant product from a ShareASale partner.
Despite getting decent clicks (and sending people to the partner’s site), there was no conversion. Had I got so many clicks on Amazon links, I could have made some money.
While the sales page of the partner site looked good, it didn’t convert well.
I will continue to test in case I find good partners with decent products and better-optimized sales pages.
Now, let’s get into the October 2020 numbers.
Niche Sites Income in October 2020
- Site 1 (Home Improvement) – $2,231
- Site 2 (Home Improvement) – $2,872
- Site 3 (Pets) – $371
- Site 4 (Outdoors) – $31
- Site 5 (Tech) – $319
- Site 6 (Broad Multi-niches) – $0
If you’re interested in learning more about the sites, check out the first income report.
As these new sites age, more pages are now ranking in the top 10, which is leading to more traffic.
Most noticeable is the jump in the income of Site #5, as I added to the Ezoic ad network. The RPM on Ezoic reached as high as $40 on some days. As the traffic continues to grow, I hope to see better earnings for this site in the coming months.
Some $$ screenshots:
Now let’s have a look at the expenses.
Expense in October 2020
I already ordered the content last month, so this month, the expenses were a lot lower.
- Kinsta: $200
- Manage WP: $10.8
- ShortPixel (Appsumo): $245
- SerpWatch (Appsumo): $295
Expenses related to some tools/services are paid yearly. I will add these whenever they come up for renewal.
I expect the expenses for November to be higher, as many useful deals are offered around Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
I might also order more content for these sites in November (depending on if I can stick to my publishing schedule).
What Am I Reading/Learning?
As a part of my book club, we chose the book “The Art of Thinking Clearly” by Rolf Dobelli.
It’s a very good book (8/10) that talks about various cognitive biases and how to be aware of these to think clearly.
This is the second book by Rolf Dobelli that we have picked up in our book club (the first one being ‘The Art of the Good Life’), and I highly recommend both of these books.
