Site Revival Goes On: February 2020 Update

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.