It has been an interesting month of data analysis, reflection, and AI experimentation to try and decide what direction to go with my web publishing business, and though I am not certain I know what to do, or what is likely to be more successful, I have a plan that I will execute, and then adjust based on the results.
I’ll discuss more regarding my plans for each site in the relevant sections.
Overall, the past month has been similar to previous months in terms of traffic and revenue. Did not seem to get any significant gain or loss from the most recent Google update, but never say never!
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.
March Statistics
Rankings: Rankings and traffic were about the same (circa 7k pageviews for around $300 income).
At a high level, I have made the hard decision to essentially stop working on this project in any way for the time being.
Given it is an affiliate-based site, and I have no desire to do the affiliate marketing in the way that Google is saying it would like to reward – I don’t want to waste my time and do a poor job when those hours could be directed elsewhere.
What I did do was maximize the revenue settings within Ezoic, so I plan to milk every dollar I can get out of it, in terms of affiliate and ads revenue, and will just let it slowly die. But hopefully, it doesn’t die too quickly.
You never know, after my AI experimentation I might get inspiration and ideas of what I could do with this site. But for the time being, I will neglect it.
I noticed an immediate increase in my EPMV after optimizing for ad revenue. EPMV has basically doubled, from around $7 to around $16. The changes have not been in effect for a month yet, so it could increase further. I fully admit this could have a negative effect on affiliate revenue though, so cannot be sure yet it was the smartest economic decision.
April Activity
Throughout April, there will be no effective 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.
March Statistics
Overall, traffic was slightly up, but EPMV was slightly down, for an overall negative effect on revenue.
I have heard across the board that ad rates were a lot lower, so this is just something everyone has to deal with. But I am glad that traffic did not get hit any harder, and it actually increased, following the most recent Google algorithm update.
Ezoic settings were unchanged as it was basically fully optimized for revenue.
I did a deep dive on analytics for this site’s performance at a page level to see which posts were bringing in the revenue in the previous 90 days and plan to cull a lot of pages that get very little, to zero traffic.
April Activity
April will see some significant changes to many things about this site.
From a content creation point of view, I have finally finished up with the site’s main writer who has been contributing for multiple years, and it will just be me from this point forward.
Though the writer was great, the results she was providing could be matched by any number of new AI content tools, for a fraction of a penny. Thus, I could not logically sustain it any further.
So from this point forward, it will just be me, working in conjunction with Ai to try and create useful content, that is genuinely unique and offers something different to searchers that I hope Google will reward.
I feel conflicted about writing ANY informational content, as I think there will be a day when all informational content will be served directly from the search engine, but I don’t know how long that will be. So I’ll do some for now, but try and find a unique edge, that offers some value that typical content cannot add.
In addition, I’ll also add content regarding products and goods, from a specific individual perspective. I’m emphasizing the personal perspective side of things to try and add some value, that a basic review cannot. I will analyze the data and adjust based on the results.
I will try to put out a higher amount of content than I have for some time, hoping to publish multiple pieces of content per day on average.
So that Google doesn’t punish me for a significant surge in content output I plan to delete a lot of underperforming content that is not getting any traffic, so Google maintains an overall high opinion of the pages of my site, rather than discrediting me for a huge amount of content that nobody reads.
On top of content creation, there will be some other site work to optimize the homepage to make certain categories stand out.
A very busy month ahead, will lots of new activities and new content styles to try. Staying on top of analytics will be critical going forward to ensure effort is being directed most appropriately.
I’ll keep you posted.
