Hello guys, it's been a long while, I know. But as I promised, I always come back, to update you on this fading journey, and on my slowly fading online journey in general
.
Having a few days with a bit more of time,
I checked all my online stats, and decided to update here as well, since this year I am not on a digital detox (though spending little time online in general). So here we go:
-
Raptive earnings, in 2025 so far. This is from my authority website, the only website I have with the network and 99.9% the only one I'll ever have there. As you can see,
the earnings hover around the $1K mark/month, though
there is a slow decline, both due to seasonality (summer isn't good for this niche), and the ever-growing prevalence of people using ChatGpt and similar, instead of search engines.
I kind of feel it will go like this, especially because I have no special motivation to work on this website anymore. When I update next year around this time, I guess I'll be writing about
$500/month, or maybe that
Raptive crashed and my website isn't monetized with ads anymore.
As strange as it may seems,
I even considered taking the ads off the website and seeing what it does to traffic. But then other my such experiments were not successful, the
only my websites that somehow survived the updates are website that never had ads on them, and not the ones that once had the ads on, and I later disabled them as an experiment. But maybe
in some time Raptive will be no more (at the end of the day it is also a part of this collapsing ecosystem of content-rich websites), and I prefer to enjoy these earnings at least as long as they last...
-
Traffic of my authority website, also slowly dwindling with more and more people using AI models, especially for informational queries. Notice that Google is a mere 5% of traffic now, whereas in the best days it was 95% and all other combined were the remaining 5%. But these days are gone, at least for this website.
I
still sell some digital products on the website (and on others I have in this niche), and while the conversion rates are not as good as they used to be, it is
still more about traffic than anything else. I just do not have traffic, especially to those eBooks that used to convert well. Cannot buy that traffic since Google ads sucks and with
information keywords it is hard to make it viable.
So the
sales hover at around 7-10 sales/month ($150-$220/month). As I said, more than anything else it is a question of traffic. This website once upon a time easily had 15-20 times more page views as it has now monthly, and so the decrease in number of sales is more-less the function of the decrease of traffic (when I simplify a bit, of course
).
What I try to say here is that
eBook still do sell, even for $20-$30 for an eBook on a purely informational topic, the tricky part now is getting that audience on the website, organically...
- This is
traffic for the website from my 2nd journey, and
the website I want to focus on mainly, within the limited time I still plan to devote to any online ventures in the near future (think next five years). This website never had ads on and though it didn't escape some of the Google updates, it also came back in some next ones, and
Google is its no. 1 traffic source at the moment.
The content that I publish here lately is pretty hard to replace with AI
(who knows in a few years though?), and also the website is built in a way that
it attracts repetitive visits, and
the brand name is search term no. 1 long term ( plus there's a good chunk of direct traffic as well, as you can see on the chart).
Good news is that
a couple of months ago I got accepted to one specific affiliate program I was previously rejected by two times (a chance personal connection helped here). And while
I haven't had time yet to implement the program properly, and in summer it doesn't work too well (I cannot specify more to not reveal too much), from the numbers I can see by now, I believe
the program has a potential of $100/month (once I implement it properly)
even with the relatively little traffic I have right now on this website... Also Amazon affiliate there is not too bad lately:
-
$44 in 30 days may seem like not much, but we should not forget that
I have just a handful of articles monetized with Amazon affiliate. For the other program I got accepted to,
I can implement that one to roughly 100 articles presently on the website (and write many more to implement it into later).
Of course, we can only speculate what could have become of this site should I start it in another time (few years earlier), but I still kind of feel, that even in this "online climate", that it is
a kind of website that can live and thrive to some extent. And that cannot be said about websites from my main niche (the one of my authority website). Maybe some exception proves the rule though:
- This is
the only website from my main niche that continues unaffected by Google updates. It never had ads on, and I kind of run it a bit of under the radar, away from other sites. Monetized by some digital products, and with few pages of content, Google seems to like this website, in a strange way it seems to like some strange small sites nowadays. More like a lottery than anything else to be honest.
This is the website I did an experiment with last winter
, posting 4 new pages on. By now,
2 rank no.1, outranking even the heavy-weighs of the internet as we know it today (think Reddit and such), plus everybody else that used to rank high back in the day. The other 2 pages are not indexed at all. o and figure out.. Traffic charts for the 2 pages in question:
- These charts reminds me the good old days, when it worked like this with all new good posts
, but
funny enough on this small website it still does, for some posts.
So
I want to put together some eBook to at least one of them, even though the traffic limits seem to be around 600-800 PV/month for each of these pages. In any case, it is
90% US traffic, and I know it can convert.
The problem is that
I have very little motivation to write this book, but then winter is long, and I will have time then. Maybe I will even
try to write it with AI first (you see, things change
), and just when I see there is potential and people buy at least 3-5 copies/month (and likely ask for refund too, since it ill be AI book), I will write the eBook myself.
- Other than these 3 websites,
there's not much interesting going on in my online business. I checked some stats for the new website I put together in my main niche as a last-chance experiment, but it is
total ghost town so far, even though it is already almost half year old. None magical revivals with other my smaller sites either
.
So that's it from my side, online.
Offline everything is well, I'm a married man now, and enjoying the life I live, earning my living offline, but still being my own boss and outside of any corporate hassle/stress.
Of course, once
upon a while I reminiscence about the old days, like the summer of 2021 when I went traveling for like 40 days and when I came back I had $15K more on my back account, including all travel expenses, not touching my websites network or doing any other work... Bu
t nothing last forever, and I would not change my present life for that one (it is a useless speculation anyway
).
And what you've been all to?
Anyone got the job (hopefully not in McDonald's
)? Anyone still building websites, and making solid money with it? Anyone seen some magical recovery?
Let me know, I will be around for a few days (ready to answer questions too--if BHW hasn't turned to a complete bot-farm), and then focusing fully on my offline life again, planning to come back to IM partially during winter one more time...
Take care all,
Kikerinka
