September was a great month all around!
Yet another algorithm rolled out. It feels like there is a new one every month, and there basically has been this year. Sometimes two in a month.
I’ve been working a lot for an SEO agency as well as my day job, as well as working on my own sites. Progress is not as fast as I would like, but I do as much as I can within my other priorities and demands on my time.
The other work I have been doing is a good experience and I am learning a lot, but I have so much work to do on my own sites that it is frustrating not to spend as much time on them as I need to.
I’ve been doing a lot of work that should pay off in the longer term, but not expecting any rapid results.
Outdoors Site
Monetization: affiliate
Site Recap
Affiliate site, in ‘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.
September Statistics
Rankings for different money pages were up and down. I worked really hard on one particular money page and saw some instant improvement in the results, but then saw those improvements quickly fade away with the most recent product reviews update.
Impressions were the highest ever (463k), and page views were up by about 1000, to 14.6k.
The total income for this site came in at $630 which is down from last month but I’m not too concerned. Ads income was at its highest-ever level, and affiliate income dipped a little in response to a variety of factors. I got a few big commissions, but then some were refunded.
September Activity
The main focus is renovating all of my money pages, building out the silos, and then optimizing the content using Market Muse.
I’m about halfway through the 35 money pages now. They were previously done with a different WordPress plugin that I de-activated, so now many of the product boxes and comparison tables are being redone with the new plugin to make the pages display nicely.
It is a great chance to go back through the old content and see what needs upgrading, and make lists of things to improve. It is no surprise a lot of these pages were not ranking well, going back over them with fresh eyes revealed a lot of things that need to be fixed.
Entertainment Site
Site Recap
Ads site, in ‘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.
September Statistics
September was a positive month overall. We saw (modest) growth in all aspects of this site, amidst some significant changes.
Page views hit an ALL TIME HIGH of 8100 and income from the Ezoic ads exceeded its previous all-time high hitting $83.
Content publishing resumed at a modest rate, getting 8 articles published, for a total of just under 10k words.
There was no noticeable downside from the theme/UI upgrade that took place in the previous month.
EPMVs have continued to go in the right direction, at their highest level, going against the current industry trend. We are heading into Q4 which is typically the best time of year, given the festive season, so will be curious to see how high they can go.
One big step I took was to organize a site review with the Ezoic team to optimize my placeholders. They had some great suggestions that I have implemented that will boost my income ongoing.
September Activity
I am starting to research some high-volume traffic content ideas that I plan to create very high-quality content around. While my writer continues to work through a range of low-competition long-tail topics, I’m going to work on some more competitive, high-quality content myself.
I plan to combine some of my affiliate strategies, in terms of content silos, for high-value keywords to see if the same strategies perform well across the different strategies.
I got started with some interlinking using Link Whisper, but have a lot more to do. This will be an ongoing job for a few months until I have caught up. Amidst some content planning, interlinking, and content publishing – I will keep be busy for this month and many months to come.
