Thanks in part to Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping, I’m stoked to announce that case study site #1 reached its $500/mo goal in November. In fact, it soared right past it! Keep reading below to see just how much it earned and what else is responsible for that income boost.
What’s Happened Since The Last Update?
I decided to spend November focusing my actions on site #1 instead of splitting my time between both case study sites. And that focus was on content, specifically buying guide money posts to cover products in the niche that I hadn’t yet covered.
So, I added five long buying guides to site #1 during the second week of November. Since this site is already ranking well in the SERPs, it didn’t take long for the new money posts to start ranking decently and getting traffic. And yes, before the month was up, I was noticing sales of the new items that I was promoting on site #1. And, I spent some time lengthening some of my buying guides to cover more products and information that shoppers might need.
I also tested out two other affiliate programs for site #1 in November. They are very niche relevant, but sadly the site did not make a single sale through either of them. No matter how hard you try, sometimes you can only get your visitors to buy from Amazon.
And, I sent one new PBN backlink to site #1 to boost one of the money posts from the bottom of page one to a bit closer to the top.
Case Study Sites Status
As previously mentioned, I didn’t do anything with site #2 in November and just kind of left it marinating in the SERPs. So, here’s the current breakdown for each site as of November 30th:
Site #1:
- Number of posts live as of Nov 30 = 35 posts
- Number of posts added in November = five
- Niche: seasonal
- Number of keywords per SEMrush: 1.6K
- Backlinks: mixture of blog comments, web 2.0s, and my PBNs
- Content: mixture of outsourced and written by me
- Income status: profitable
Site #2:
- Number of posts live as of Nov 30 = 49 posts
- Number of posts added in November = none
- Niche: evergreen
- Backlinks: mixture of editorial, guest posts, scholarship, and web 2.0s
- Number of keywords per SEMrush: 2.2K
- Content: 100% outsourced
- Income status: still not profitable as of Nov. 30th
As you can tell from the image, site #2 still hasn’t fully recovered from all that dupe anchor text where the editorial link was syndicated across a ton of spammy sites. But, recovery is slowing happening. I plan on growing this site to a few thousand per month before selling it, so I’m not too concerned with this early hiccup.
Case Study Sites Income
I’m still amazed by how well both of these sites are doing, considering that I’ve put hardly any time into them – and hardly any backlinks! If you have a full-time job and family commitments, don’t let that fool you into thinking that you have no time to create niche sites that earn. These two sites are perfect examples of how possible it is for you.
Case Study Site #1 Income
- April: $14.19
- May: $22.07
- June: $185.11
- July: $273.17
- August: $390.37
- September: $260.14
- October: $339.17
- November: $608.91
Case Study Site #2 Income
- March: $0.02
- April: $1.77
- May: $2.26
- June: $75.42
- July: $156.37
- August: $199.14
- September: $196.08
- October: $186.60
- November: $371.08
Boom! How about them November numbers? I suspect that December will also be high since people are still shopping for the holiday season, but I don’t expect site #2 to stay at this level. Since I’m focusing on site #1 right now, I’m just not putting in the work to keep it at this level. However, I am working to ensure that site #1 stays at this income level, and actually increases. This will be a challenge since January is one of the low months for the niche on Google Trends. I believe that adding more money posts for products that I’ve not covered yet will give me a boost in keywords that I rank for, which should be enough to counteract the seasonal low trend. Fingers crossed!
What’s To Come?
Well since site #1 has already reached $500/month, I’ve decided to get it up to $750/month and then sell it via Empire Flippers. I expect that this goal will be reached by summer 2017, at the latest.
So, my focus is still going to be primarily on site #1 so that I can flip is as fast as possible and then use the proceeds to pour into content creation for site #2, as well as some of my other sites.
And, I’m taking three weeks off here in December to fly back to Europe (third time this year – all financed by my niche site portfolio) and check out some Christmas markets. I’ll also be spending Christmas in NYC because it’s one of my favorite places to be this time of year.
I’ll also be busy working on my finishing up my niche site course (still), which will be available by the end of Q1 2017. I’ve decided that there will be three levels to this course – level one will be the cheap option and just cover the bare bones basics, while levels two and three will be paid and cover advanced tactics (like how I took a site that I started in April from $0 to $4100 last month). If you want to be in the discounted beta pricing group, just message me to get on the list and you’ll be one of the first students at the lowest possible cost. And, you’ll get first access to it!
Other updates to this case study:
Hey, I’m Shawna. I make a living working from my laptop in places like London, Sydney, Dubai, Rome, Oslo, Bangkok, Las Vegas, Barcelona, and Amsterdam. I share how I do some of that on this website.