Niche Sites Income Report – September 2020

September is known to be a good month for display ads income.

It’s the last month of the Jul-Sep quarter, which also means that advertisers have a budget to exhaust. This drives up the RPM.

The impact of this was visible in this month’s display ads earning.

While the overall income (revenue) increased in September, the expenses increased even more. This led to a lower Net Income for the month.

September 2020 Highlights

In September, I published a total of 33 articles across all the six sites.

I also spent a few hours improving some of the articles (the ones that were ranking in the 5th – 15th  position in SERPs).

I also spent some time cleaning up my Amazon affiliate links. There were many out-of-stock products and 404s (checked via AMZ Watcher). These were replaced with the ones that are available now.

October-December is a good quarter for Amazon affiliate sites (Prime day in October and November/December benefits from the holiday/festive shopping).

Now let’s get into the September 2020 numbers.

Niche Sites Income in September 2020

• Site 1 (Home Improvement) – $1,697
• Site 2 (Home Improvement) – $2,390
• Site 3 (Pets) – $71
• Site 4 (Outdoors) – $32
• Site 5 (Tech) – $36
• Site 6 (Broad Multi-niches) – $0

If you’re interested in learning more about the sites, check out the first income report.

So far I’ve been using Google AdSense on my Tech site (Site #5), but in the last week of September, it was accepted in Ezoic.

Although it hasn’t reached the 10,000 pageviews a month mark (which is the Ezoic minimum required pageviews condition for adding a new site), it’s on its way. They are not too strict about this threshold (especially if you already have some sites with them).

Since Ezoic pays a lot better than Google AdSense, I expect the site to have much better earnings in October.

Some $$ screenshots:

Now let’s have a look at the expenses.

Expense in September 2020

I placed a 100K word order with one of the content writing agencies. Apart from this, there were no major expenses.

• Content Writing (Content Development Pros): $3,750
• Manage WP: $10.8
• Upwork: $103
• Appsumo (Blogely): $79

Expenses related to hosting and some of the plugins/tools are paid yearly. I will add these whenever they come up for renewal.

What Am I Reading/Learning?

I am a part of the book club where we choose a book every month and then discuss it once a month for an hour (it’s not as boring as it sounds).

For September, we chose the book Super-Forecasting by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner.

It’s an Okish book (4/10) that talks about what makes people good at forecasting when dealing with regular and critical events. Even if you’re not interested in learning about forecasting, it covers some good psychological studies.

I found it a bit overwhelming as it talks about a lot of situations and people and doesn’t have too many takeaways that I can use in my day-to-day work.

Hopefully, we will pick a better book for October.