Month 5 Update
(I need some help with Ad Manager/Ezoic, read further down)
Hey guys! The website is now 5 months old and growing every day. So, what has happened since the last update? Well, I've been pretty busy lately, and we're planning a trip to Albania in a few weeks so my mind is focused on that most of the time. However, I did manage to order 30 new articles in March, bringing the total to 165. Unfortunately, I'm still waiting for 7 articles as the TAT is getting worse every month, so I really need to find another content agency or start looking to hire my own writer.
I did also try Google Ads but it didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. During the two weeks I ran the campaign I only got 32 clicks for $20, averaging $0.625 per click. Almost all visitors clicked the Amazon link as well, but no conversions sadly. Will try more later on, as now I only want to focus on getting started with Ezoic and seeing some motivational $$ signs.
As I mentioned in the last update, I created my own WordPress theme. I'm really happy with it, and it looks amazingly professional. It's a simple design, with no sidebar, and soft colors. Changing from GeneratePress didn't seem to impact the performance at all, probably since it's built very lightweight.
Another little side project I've been busy with lately: Last year I bought a starter site, it brings in about $10/month from Adsense, but the domain is so specific that I just can't grow it anymore. Been thinking about rebranding the website for a while but since the website was just sitting there I kind of forgot about it. In the past month, it's grown 100% in traffic and I feel I have to work on it at least a little bit. So last week, I bought a new domain and did the transfer. Fingers crossed it doesn't crash and burn now. My main focus will still be on the first website covered in this journey, just might throw a few articles per month on this one as well.
Traffic
In the last update, I predicted that the site would stabilize at around 50 visits per day with a few days of around 70 to 80 visits. I also said that we probably can't hope for a 100% increase in traffic.
I was wrong on both. The traffic stabilized between 55-60 visits per day, and for 4 days I reached 90+ with the highest day being 95 visits. My prediction that the website probably won't reach 100% growth and 2000 pageviews was not entirely wrong, but I did reach 1975 pageviews, an increase of 98.8%!
March was so close to reaching 100 visits per day. But as you saw in my quick update a few days ago I have reached 100 daily visits and that seems to be stable throughout the first week of April at least. I have a feeling that the next update will have some amazing numbers in terms of traffic.
Search Console the past 3 months:
View attachment 249782
Google Analytics (Compared to last period):
View attachment 249780
SERProbot rankings as of April 1st:
View attachment 249779
My rankings have improved A LOT since the last update. Before I had only 4 keywords ranked #1, today I have 12. I really feel that I've chosen good keywords, and I hope the traffic will reflect that when more and more long-tails start to rank higher.
What I will do in April
As I mentioned already, we are planning a trip to Albania and I'm super excited. This winter has been a lot colder than usual and lots of very extreme snow storms (northern Europe). It's also my birthday next week, so I will spend the weekend with friends and family.
In terms of content, I want to reach 200+ articles. My goal for April was to reach 250 articles but I am not complaining, you should always count on some setbacks and deviations from the initial plan. There are still 8 months to go until 2024, I am confident that I will catch back up.
Get set up with Ezoic
Last week I joined Ezoic, just have to set everything up but not sure how. I am accepted in Adsense but for some reason, I got rejected by Google Ad Manager. Apparently, I already had a publisher account, closed it down, and now whenever I try to login to the ad manager I get thrown in a loop, sent back to the homepage with the login button. If I try to join again I get an error message on a blank page saying I'm not authorized and I have no idea what to do. I have contacted Ezoic with the issue and waiting for a response. Everything else seems fine and there should be no problems at all with the site or the content (I'm running Adsense just fine).
So the next update I want to be able to present a bit more income. I'm also going to update some more articles and insert Amazon links, hopefully bringing the Amazon revenue up a few $ as well.
Predictions for the next update
I can already see the traffic is here to stay, those 90+ peaks in March were not just random spikes, the traffic stays consistent. In April I want to see the traffic grow just a little bit more, stabilizing somewhere around 110-120 visits per day with a few days reaching as high as 150. Hopefully, the trend will stay strong and I will reach close to a 100% increase in traffic again. This would mean closer to 4000 pageviews and that's a good mark to start display ads in my opinion.
The revenue is still pretty much non-existent. I really need to get ads up and running to see where my RPM will be. But I'm not stressing, I don't care if I have to invest $10k in content before I make my money back, I'm in it for the long run and I can definitely see the potential in this website.
Stats
Articles: 165 (+30, still have not received 7 of the ones I ordered)
Page views February: 1975 (+98.8%)
Current Investments
Hosting: $250
Content: $3280
Misc: $100
Total: $3630
Earnings
Amazon: $0.60
But it's not something I focus too much.
