Case Study & Income Report #16 [March 2021 edition]

Since I’m already a couple of weeks late getting this report live, I don’t want to waste any time with nonsense.

I mean, not with a lot of nonsense. There’s still gonna be a gif.

Anyways, let’s jump in and see how the heck these sites did.

Remember, the sites in this report are only a portion of my portfolio and not the only sites that bring in revenue.

**And as always, I’m an affiliate marketer and this post contains affiliate links, meaning I will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on my links

What Happened In March

I feel like I spent the month running in all directions at once, which is to say that I was quite busy.

Busy with these sites.

Busy on the new aged domains course.

Busy writing guest posts and doing podcast interviews.

Busy finding new hires for my agency.

Just busy, busy, busy.

But it’s good to be busy cause that means the business is doing well.

The Sites – March Update

In case you missed it in the announcement post, or just can’t remember, I’ll be recapping the basics of each site before I give you the details on what the month looked like for each site.

Site #1

Remember, I got a surprising offer on this site in February and I sold that shit.

So, no more updates on this one.

Site #2

I’ve been putting a lot of my focus on this site.

If you recall, I’m completely focused on content for this site.

So, I’m not really sure how I only ended up with three new live posts on the site. All two written by me and one outsourced to Word Agents.

Actually, I did outsource more content for this site late in the month, and I just didn’t get it back before the end of the month.

Yeah, that’s a bit of a fail.

But hey, traffic is up! And so is income!

You can see in the screenshot that traffic spiked on the 24th.

I assumed it was referral spam, but I can’t find any evidence of that – so, no idea what’s going on there.

That spike added around 300 session higher than normal.

And the overall increase compared to the previous month is around 2,000 sessions – so, still a good increase when you take away those 300 that I’m not sure are legit.

But the big win of the month for this site is that income increased by a decent amount compared to last month.

New posts for this site: 3

New links for this site: zero

Total income for this site last month: $126.50

Last month’s income is a mix of AdSense, Ezoic, Amazon affiliate, and other affiliates. I use the AAWP plugin on this site.

Summary for site #2: A nice boost in income with a decent rise in traffic + not enough new content added.

Site #3

I have every intention of selling this site by year’s end, so I need to be hustling on content to grow the traffic and revenue.

Despite that, I only managed to get up five new posts.

Five! What the hell was I doing?!?

All five were outsourced to Word Agents, my preferred place for content.

This site did see a nice jump in traffic though, likely due to the blast of fresh content from the previous month.

Overall, that increase is around 13,000 sessions, which is really something that I like to hear.

Other good news for this site is that income rebounded. So, I’m really happy about that.

New posts for this site: 5 (outsourced at Word Agents)

The articles were all informational.

New links for this site: one (via HARO)

Total income for this site last month: $2,470.81

Last month’s income is a mix of AdSense, Amazon affiliate, and other affiliates. I use the AAWP plugin on this site as well.

Summary for site #3: Traffic increased, but income jumped quite a bit. Overall a good month for this site – if only I’d gotten more content up!

Site #4

Like the previous month, I only managed to get a couple of new posts up on this site since I was so busy with the other sites and such.

Also like the previous month, even though my work on the site was minimal it did manage to grow in a traffic a bit.

As you can see, another weird traffic anomaly happened to this site.

I’m certain it has to be referral spam, despite me not being able to really tell.

The end result is that the site got 330 more users than normal on March 22.

So, when you adjust for that, the traffic increase compared to the previous month is around 500 more sessions.

Not awesome, but certainly better than a loss – so, I’ll take it and consider it a win.

New posts for this site: two

New links for this site: zero

Total income for this site last month: $0.00

Only has one post live with an affiliate link, though AdSense goes on this site in April.

Summary for site #4: Added some new posts and traffic increased.

New Expenses for March 2021

If you want to know about any recurring expenses or previous expenses, then refer to February 2020’s report in this section.

Here’s new expenses for the sites for March 2021:

Site #2

• $6.50 Vultr server at Cloudways (two sites on this server, so I split out the cost for just this site)
• $60.55 in content from Word Agents

Site #3

• $22.45 hosting with BigScoots (this account is split with another site)
• $440.00 for articles via Word Agents

Site #4

• $6.50 Vultr server at Cloudways (two sites on this server, so I split out the cost for just this site)

Final Thoughts & Summary

Unfortunately, I didn’t get as much done on these sites as I would have liked due to working on other sites.

That being said, it’s always nice to see things chugging along just fine without you.

Anyways, here’s a quick glance at revenue and expenses for these sites.

Month summary:

And remember, these four sites are only a portion of my portfolio 🙂  I also want to remind you that sites #2 and #3 were existing sites that have been earning and ranking before starting this whole thing.

Got any questions? Requests for other data in future updates? Let me know.

Shawna Newman

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.