Slow and steady is the motto of this site.
Are things progressing? Yes.
At the pace I’d like them to be? No.
But hey, progress is progress, right?
If this is your first time here, the I suggest catching up on the old updates first:
I’m still really excited with how it’s going with the site, so let’s dive in!
**And as always, I’m an affiliate marketer and this post probably contains affiliate links, meaning I will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on my links
Month 7 – What Happened?
So, the seventh month of this site being live wrapped up a few weeks ago.
The referral spam problem seems to be gone, though there was a one-day traffic spike that seems to be 100% legit.
I’ll take it! Now, if I could just get a few more!
If you recall from last month, my GA4 analytics broke, so I didn’t have complete traffic data for the 30-day period. Though I think it was around 20K sessions.
And now for the most recent 30 days, the site is showing a bit of an increase at 24K sessions.
Now I just need to double that traffic to get to 50K sessions and qualify for Mediavine!
The new keywords report from Ahrefs does show an overall increase in keyword positions.
So, I’m happy to see that things are still chugging right along there.
Okay, let’s talk money now.
Right now this site is monetized with Ezoic and a couple of Amazon links.
I also have a few private affiliate program links on the site, and I’m still testing out others.
Since the last update, this site earned $294.21 (in March 2021).
So, that’s a slight increase over the previous month.
This income came from:
- Ezoic
- Amazon
- Other affiliate program
My Ezoic ePMV hasn’t changed much, so no big surprise there.
Now let’s talk backlinks for this site.
In regards to backlinks, I just want to remind you that I’m not planning on doing any link building for this site anytime in the near future.
That’s the whole reason for buying an aged domain from Odys.
Month Seven Summary & Thoughts
I managed to get 29 new articles up on the site, which is a decent amount. So I’m happy with that.
Here’s how the six month of this new site looked:
- Traffic: 24K sessions (approximately)
- New Published Posts: 29 (mixture from WordAgents and from a longtime writer that I’ve used)
- Total spent this month: $10 for hosting and $1335 for content ($6,977.45 to date)
- Per article average cost of outsourced content: $46.03 this month ($42.05 to date)
- Total published words to date: 165,542
- Average word count per article: 1,178
- Income: $294.21 this month ($725.04 to date)
- Links built: 0
- New natural links: 0
- Initial Budget Remaining: $0 (I’m over-budget)
This site is closing in on 200 live posts, so I’m really hustling to reach that number before the next update.
You’ll notice that I’m still failing in one area – I never got around to doing Pinterest for this site.
Still a big failure on my part since I know there’s good traffic there. I think I’m actually going to need to hire someone to do this for me since I keep not having time for it (or making the time).
Questions?
Did you miss how this case study started? Get caught up from the beginning here.
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.
With all of the changes to Pinterest, do you still think it’s worth the time/effort/money? I’m starting to think that all three of those would be better spent elsewhere rather than trying to feed the Pinterest beast.
yeah, I know lots of people have been saying it’s not as good, but I’m still getting decent traffic from it. So, I guess it will be interesting to see how it goes with a new account. Plus, traffic diversification is always worth the effort.
I’ve had a lot of success with it in the past (sold 3 sites that were around 80% Pinterest traffic.) Things are definitely different now, and I’m finding that the (little) rewards are not worth the effort, tbh. Traffic diversification is definitely important, I agree. Just not seeing it really from Pinterest, unfortunately.
Are you using Tailwind? I have seen people saying that they’ve had to switch to pinning directly on Pinterest for better results.
Yeah, I switched to pinning directly on Pinterest after reading the same advice. I’ve seen no change from it tbh. I know it’s considered a long game now like SEO, but after almost a year at it I get WAY more return from SEO than Pinterest (plus I just like the process of DOING SEO better than Pinterest, so there’s that.)