Thanks to the Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotions I saw big spikes in both revenue and traffic.
Overall though they don’t represent any significant changes in rankings or traffic or revenue, unfortunately, but I’ll take the extra $.
Otherwise, I mostly spent the month directing site and content quality and making changes to improve.
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.
November Statistics
Rankings: No major ups or downs. Relatively stable since the last product update. A few pieces of content got way more traffic than usual due to a particular Black Friday promotion a certain brand did. But it looks like I had not inserted my affiliate links into the content correctly, so I messed up with that!
Traffic was slightly up, but only by a few hundred sessions and I will attribute that primarily to the promotional traffic from BF/CM sales.
Total income for this month almost doubled – to $675 between commissions and ads. I expect this to drop in the following month though and this was primarily due to the sales weekend and ensuing week.
I could pump ads by adding them to my higher-performing sales pages but don’t want to jeopardize conversions.
December Activity
Im looking to remove a few money pages that are extremely thin and where I have zero supporting content. Otherwise, it is just the continual process of optimizing content and optimizing the content silos.
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.
November Statistics
This site has slowly been recovering from a pretty decent Google slap. We managed to publish a stack of articles that had been building up so it is good to get the word count increasing again.
Page views were significantly down to 6540, which is as expected as we had the first full month since the most recent update, and income from the Ezoic ads dropped accordingly. However we had our biggest month ever with Amazon, mostly thanks to Black Friday promotions, so income was actually at an all-time record – a very modest $105.
Q4 ad rats are slightly up, but very minimally if anything. Seems like the economic conditions are leading to lower bids or less advertising budget in general.
It is increasingly apparent to me that both my keyword research and content creation need to go to the next level if I want to see significant progress with this site.
Given the whole project is largely outsourced it will take some time to adapt the processes and then train the staff.
I have got the writer publishing the post directly to WordPress now which has removed a step of the process and freed me up for other things.
December Activity
Overall, I need to keep working away at interlinking, finding better content keywords, and optimizing the content creation SOPs to try and increase the standard of output.
It looks like another Google content update is rolling out as we type this, so hopefully, there is a positive response to that, at a minimum, not a negative response…
