April brought in relatively similar revenue to the previous month, but we had a clear increase in EPMV and ad revenue on the outdoors affiliate site.
On the Entertainment site, revenue continued to fall, even though page views continued to rise. Most of the month’s work was done filtering existing content and planning new content, as well as making optimization plans.
Like other publishers, I continue to contemplate how to best utilize the possibilities provided by advancements in AI language models in a way that will set me apart from everyone generating thousands of words per second.
Read on for more details!
Outdoors Site
Monetization: Affiliate
Site Recap
Affiliate site, in the ‘Outdoors’ niche – established in June 2020. Approx 270k words of content over 200+ posts.
See full site history, content publishing breakdown, and traffic history here. Built with this approach.
April Summary
There is no further work being done on this site. I have maximized ads to get as much revenue as I can.
By maximizing ad revenue though I have been able to double EPMV and nearly triple ad revenue from previous months.
You can see from the below table the trend in ad revenue as a result of increasing placeholders:
May Activity
There will be no further work done on this site.
Entertainment Site
Site Recap
Ads site, in the ‘Entertainment’ niche – established in January 2021. Monetized with Ezoic advertising.
Approx 220k words of content over 230+ posts.
See full site history, content publishing breakdown, and traffic history here. Built with this approach.
April Statistics
Overall, traffic was slightly up, but EPMV was slightly down, for an overall negative effect on revenue. This furthers the same dynamic as the last month (increased page views/decreased EPMV).
I have worked through all existing content and deleted over 100 posts that were not getting any traffic. I’m my hypothesis is that Google may view my site more favorably if a higher percentage of site pages are receiving traffic and engagement.
In addition to the content deletion, I’m also preparing a list of content to optimize to further get more value from the existing content.
May Activity
The focus from here is to spend some time optimizing existing content further, whilst also doing some content experiments where content will be created with the assistance of AI tools.
I’m trying different tools and approaches and will start publishing some articles to see how they perform. Honestly, I am very surprised at the quality of content that can be produced with GPT, especially GPT-4. From the quality of the outlines to the overall quality of the articles, much better content is being produced than I could have researched and produced myself in many cases.
Of course, this means everyone can do the same thing, and can do it for my niche. So I’m always pondering how to something stand out, show an aspect of originality and uniqueness that will benefit the reader, and get my content ranked higher to receive more traffic.
I’m trying some specific apps, as well as tools that integrate directly with GPT, but currently held up whilst awaiting access to the GPT-4 API. I have applied for it, not awaiting acceptance. Once that approval comes through I will be able to experiment further with some approaches utilizing a Google Sheets connection to the Open AI API, and compare the cost and output of other apps that just receive the content instructions and talk to the Open AI API themselves.
While I wait I am architecting some content silos and clusters, preparing to bulk publish batches of content on similar topics and keywords simultaneously to see how it changes results and how soon the content gets traffic.
