After selling on our main site, I took some time to consider what we wanted to do next. It was life changing money in that I realized that I had created an asset that could then be sold for multiple 5 figures.
And I’m pretty use I sold it at the bottom of the hockey stick so whoever bought it got a nice bump on the following few months.
But it’s been a couple of years since my last post so I need to give an update on what I’ve been up to and what I’m itching to do next.
Niche Site #1
I’ll call it that since it was the next site I started working on after selling. It’s a rather small site, but one that I was doing with a friend. She owns the item that the site is based on and I wanted to show her how to build a site up.
She wrote on blog post and quietly bowed out. Since I don’t have first hand knowledge of the item I had two options:
- Bow out of the project and be out the domain name
- Hire writers and build up the site.
With some funds in the bank, I chose option two and went on Upwork to find some writers. The first writer started out strong, then I happened to run his writing through CopyScape and found out that he was completely plagiarizing pretty much the whole thing.
A second writer did really well and ended up writing the bulk of the articles in the span of a couple months. After is sat for a bit, it started to do well in rankings and when it hit 10,000 visitors a month I applied to Ezoic for ad revenue.
In February 2019, the site started earning ad revenue. $70.11 for the first month, $181 in March and it continued to make a nice increase month over month, until…
A Google update in September brought the site traffic down a bit. Then in November 2019 the traffic really hit low and I haven’t been able to bring it back up again.
During that time, I noticed that the site got a lot of icky backlinks and I’ve tried disavowing them and a few other things. You can see a bit of an uptick over the summer ’20, but I think it’s just sitting where it’s going to sit.
Overall, between ads and Amazon Associates, the site has earned around $8,200 overall and continues to earn between $100 – $350/month depending on the season. After an initial $2,300 cost in outsourcing the writing, it’s cash positive every month.
Still, it’s difficult for me to have these little sites and not give energy to them. I usually want to sell them because otherwise I feel like I should be doing something with them.
I tried selling this one a couple months back and got a run around with a newly formed broker company. First they said they’d buy it for $8,300, then they changed it to selling on their marketplace for a range of $9,500-12,000 and then they stopped responding.
I’m not sure if the traffic drop concerned them and their valuator made a mistake on offering to buy or what. For now I’ll just figure out how to be ok with having an asset that I’m not growing, just maintaining and keeping the monthly revenue as long as it comes in.
Niche Site #2
While working on niche site 1, I decided to get niche site #2 going. It’s another smallish site that I didn’t know much about the topic, but it sounded interesting.
I outsourced a lot of the writing for this one as well. This was $1,974 in articles and has earned $1,144 in affiliate earnings over it’s lifetime and averages $49-140/month. It’s never gotten high enough in traffic to put ads on it.
It also turned out to be a topic that I really don’t want to build up or do anything with. Maybe you’re starting to see a trend here.
Don’t build a site on something that you have no interest in. I think there are people who can build sites that they don’t know and don’t care about the topic. I’m learning that I have to at least have a little interest in it to make me feel ok about doing it.
Niche Site #3
That brings us to the current niche that we’re actively working on. We have at least a little interest in the topic and we do projects for it monthly, if not weekly.
We started this half heartedly in August of 2018 and then have really ramped up the content in the last 4 months.
And it shows.
The site started getting enough traffic for Ezoic, then it got enough to apply for Mediavine and it got approved in June. This was with their older 30,000 sessions requirement.
So far, the site has earned $5,473 since we started and it’s starting to earn $1,200/month consistently.
We’ve ordered articles for $9,095 so it’s still in the negative, but it’s working out really well to be a bigger site for us.
We order articles and we also create articles for the site. These are larger project oriented articles that can’t easily be outsourced.
With this site, I also have a YouTube channel growing. We’re currently at 771 subscribers and 9.518 public watch time hours. In order to monetize your YouTube channel, you need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time.
So close.
We should hit the 1,000 subscribers mark by the new year and I estimate that it will bring in a few hundred a month just from that. But I also want to use YouTube to grow our affiliate revenue as well.
What’s Next
I’d like to get better at systematizing the site that we’re focusing the most on now. It works for us and it interesting enough that my wife enjoys working on it as well.
But I do have a huge interest in doing another site. One that focuses on sharing stories about other people and how they make a living online. I’m a lurker member of several online groups and I often see people ask if there are more women who do these things.
There are. Just like I lurk instead of participate, several other women are successful and making amazing things online, but we either don’t think our stories are worthy to share or we’re just going about our business.
I love reading how others are becoming successful. It motivates me and I’m sure there’s plenty of stories to tell to motivate others.
The problem is I have these sites and I still have my day job. Should I even worry about doing yet another site? Plus I’d like to continue to use this site to document it all.
So that’s where things are. Looking pretty good. Moving in the right direction and spinning plates to add more streams of income for us.
Got anything you’ve been working on that you’d like to share?
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