It’s time for my update website revival. A quieter month! 😀 Sorry but with that COVID thing, I got a bit preoccupied.

Traffic

Traffic dropped since February a little bit because the big boost in January finally ended. But it has held steady at just under 9K pgs for the month. I’ve not added much content in February, but finally finished adding pictures to every post, keywording everything and ensuring that RankMath scores ended up between 80~100 for each page.

Income

March’s income benefitted from the swoon that accompanied Amazon being offset by the income from Ezoic as it settled into place: $46.69. Plus Amazon: $19.54. No other income so that’s a grand tall of… $66.14! Up from February by the grand sum of about 30% ~ Well, we celebrate the small victories!

Content

I only added two new pages but I worked ferociously on the other pages, adding content, updating text, tidying things up, and republishing older content.

Thieves

I also finally began to get to grips with content thieves, so I’ve been collating a lot of information about several in particular who stole my content. One particular egregious site ripped off half a dozen pages. I’ll be launching about a few DMCAs to Google, and maybe to their hosting companies sometime in April.

Updates

I made a few other changes to the site, including nixing unnecessary plugins. I also swapped out my previous caching solution for WPRocket. So tweaking that has been a regular challenge, along with Ezoic and the CDN. I’m now debating: using Ezoic caching $20pm, upgrading the server to hosted WP $20pm, choosing RocketCache, or just bearing with the current setup. Don’t know. I’d still like to see superfast loading times… so I’m still working on removing over 1/2 my plugins.

Goals

Still aiming for 12K pvs and $100pm. In April, I’ll be adding 3 or 4 (maybe more) new pages of content which are already written up; getting the better of my content foes; and looking at Linkwhisper to make sure my pages are adequately linked up. I found six or seven pages with literally no incoming links. I think Linkwhisper could help sort out those.

April weirdly is looking better than March at this point in time, but the news from Ezoic (lower ad revenues in the industry) and Amazon’s slashing rates to between 1%~3% portend a dour May. We’ll see. But I figured in the end that it didn’t matter what Amazon did… If I had an audience, someone would be happy to pay to reach them. So it makes sense: build the audience/tribe/fans for your site. Don’t worry about the monetization too much at the moment.

Running an online business like this means wearing a lot of hats, and sometimes when you’re busy distracted, some of them can fall off! It’s not ideal. But what you gonna do!

It’s time for my update website revival. A quieter month! 😀

Traffic

After reaching 10K pageviews in January, we fluctuated between 10K and 11K for the past 30 days. Of course, February is 2 days shorter, so we reached about 8.9K pageviews. Still up on 12 months ago by 250%!

Income

February’s income also dropped slightly, due to fewer days, and less people buying on Amazon. But I introduced Ezoic late in February, which boosted earnings a little. Amazon brought in $31.50 and Ezoic approx. $18.40 and Adsense about $1.60. It’s not stellar by any means on either count.

I tend to believe that converting users is something Google actually rewards. I just have to figure out how to get that into Analytics data. The good news is that the conversion rate is now approaching 12% on Amazon!

Content

I only added one new page in February, and will continue to improve this page throughout the month. I will follow this publishing schedule for the next 3 months as I let most of the recent changes get bedded in to the site.

Social Media

As I remarked earlier today, Pinterest is now one of my focuses for sharing all posts. I’m hoping that the images are shared more widely there. Todate, no traffic has been generated by Pinterest to my site. I may need to up my strategy there.

Updates

Installing Ezoic was perhaps the hardest project I’ve ever undertaken with an advertiser. There seemed to be no-end of niggles to fix, including the trailing ‘/’ which caused real problems.

However, the engineer on the other end really helped me fix things up. I’m now waiting for the optimization of ads to really kick in. Ezoic didn’t play well with Amazon scripts until they helped me wrap the codes somehow.

I also added BunnyCDN to help get the load time down under 2s for the homepage. It has definitely helped. I’m using a caching plugin that integrates well with BunnyCDN, but I’m wondering if WPRocket would give me any advantages. Not sure yet. Pingdom tells me it loads faster in the USA, but GTMetrix gives me garbage results. I seriously don’t know which is right. My own feel is that it loads fairly fast.

The trailing slash problem still exists, I’m not sure how to fix that, but it’s only a small problem except with legacy links when I used to have .html endings. So ideally I’d like the code to send *.html to */ without sending other endings to * (eg. *.jpg files get sent to *.jpg/… ). I aslo get lots of 404s from bots like Ahrefs and Bingbot!!!

Goals

I’m still aiming for 12K pvs in March still, we’ll have a 31 day month. So it’s possible I could hit my $100 a month target. I’m also considering switching to Ezoic servers or adding a proper managed WordPress solution or WPRocket installation for a bigger kick to get the side loading in 1s or less.

Traffic

The site reached 10K pageviews in January, which is just about 2000K off its all-time high. Other metrics don’t go back far enough, so I use that gauge to measure longer term success. Traffic to the site has grown y-on-y(200%) and m-on-m (17%)

Income

Total income in January came in at just 1c off $80.00, but I removed most of the Adsense from the site early on. I think the focusing of ads on Amazon, right now is the best thing because I want people to see coffee ads, not other junk ads. I certainly don’t want to see ads with a cpc of 1c.

Content

I keep updating content, rewriting paragraphs, searching for copied content and adding new photographs for the 50 articles. One of the TOP sites in the niche has about 250 articles. So there is plenty of topside for considerate growth, esp. if I focus on evergreen content and reviews.

I won’t be adding many content pages this month, but two are almost completely finished. There are still a six or seven pages that need tidied up properly. But that’s okay. I’m following the principle of edit and update at a frequent update cycle. I ALWAYS update the published date.

Social Media

I will have finished sharing all posts to FB, IG, Tw sometime in early February and Pinterest is next on the hit list because I’ll have good images for sharing, I hope! I’ve had a few new subscribers to the mailing list. AND I’ve had some interesting discussions about my niche with friends & followers! It’s been great.

I finally picked up a Google News link, too! And then one of the CEOs of one of the main companies I do review for hit me via my comments! That was awesome! I’m going to find good quotes from both and integrate them into my articles somewhere!

Stolen content

I have now purchased my old domain again, and will soon reupload the old content for the purposes of filing DMCAs and getting copied content removed from Google (and, would you believe it, Amazon?). But it’s not a priority right now unless I have more time.

Goals

Still aiming for 12K pvs in February, income has now reached 75% of the average from the site’s heyday of $102pm average. I’m still setting a goal of $100pm regular, and since much of the content has been updated regularly, there is less to do. So, I will have to start (re)publishing content. But I think I will only do one or two articles a month, while I finish the other tasks.

Feedback?

We’ll see… Thanks for sticking around. If you have any thoughts about my achievements, challenges & goals, I’d love to hear them!