Niche Site Project #1 (Month 30 Update)

June 2022 Niche Site Summary

My family and I took off the final week of June and rented a house on a near-by island.

june vacation mike

It was nice to sign off of Twitter (sort of), and to step off of the content hamster-wheel for a bit.

But now that I’m back, I’m feeling refreshed and motivated.

Which is good, because there is a shit load going on with my site at the moment…

Site Operator

The site operator I hired to take over the day-to-day operations of my blog has been a major FLOP.

They S-T-I-N-K, with all due respect of course.

Here are some of my complaints, in no particular order…

  • I first engaged with them on May 6th. I didn’t get my first piece of DRAFT content until June 23rd.
  • I had to proactively reach out to them multiple times when I hadn’t heard back for weeks at a time.
  • I shared a breakdown of the topics my site covers and the respective RPMs for each. They came back with 10 article ideas all about the LOWEST earning topic.
  • I asked that a draft post be sent to me first so that I could give feedback ONCE, and then the team could incorporate it into all the remaining content. Instead this wasn’t communicated to the team and they started working on all 10 posts at once.
  • When I finally got the first draft piece of content it had ZERO links of any kind – internal or external.

They still haven’t published a single piece of content. It’s July 3rd! 62 days and NOTHING. What a joke.

That’s the bad news.

Here’s the good news.

The agency recognized how terrible their service has been these past few months and gave me a 70% refund (and they’re still delivering the 10 pieces of content we agreed to).

I’ll be firing them once I receive the 10th and final post, because the even better news is I found a replacement.

After sending out a tweet, complaining about how terrible this site operator is, I got a DM from a well known niche site creator (they will remain anonymous for now, per their request).

They said they were interested in getting into the agency side of things, and if I was open to it he/she would take me on as their first client – they would be leveraging their existing team and processes.

I immediately said yes. This was June 13th. Just a few days later and they had already finished solid keyword research for the first 10 posts.

Five days after that and the first article was published.

Their work is quality. They handle keyword research, article research, content creation, images, linking, even unique featured images using Canva.

All I have to do is click publish (by choice – I like to read everything before it goes live).

They’ve since written and published two more posts. Both great. Fingers crossed, but so far, so good.

Thanks Twitter.

Ad Partner Change

As of July 1st, my site is monetized with Ezoic.

ezoic logo


I went into quite a bit of detail on Twitter, so I won’t rehash all the details here, but long story short, I have an opportunity to make more money with them

AdThrive’s revenue share is 25%. I expect my site to make around $250,000 this year. That means my site would really “make” around $320,000, but AdThrive would take $80,000 (25%).

AdThrive deserves to get paid, but $80,000 just felt like TOO MUCH.

Ezoic on the other hand, only takes 10%.

They also made me the following guarantees:

  1. A guaranteed revenue floor based on my time with AdThrive (average of 8 months of AdThrive earnings, starting back in October last year) 
  2. A guarantee that I’ll make 15% more (and a sizable payout if I don’t)
  3. Access to their premium ads at zero additional cost
  4. A separate, additional financial incentive after 6 months, paid monthly so long as my traffic continues to grow month-over-month 
  5. Direct access to account management, support, direct brand sales etc.
  6. 30 day notice to cancel this contract at any time

Put simply – if Ezoic can do AS GOOD as AdThrive, I’ll make 15% more (since Ezoic only takes 10%, vs. AdThrive’s 25%).

I fully acknowledge the possibility that things won’t work out the way I intend with this move. But I’m out here taking shots!

I am not being paid to say anything about Ezoic. There are zero communications stipulations as part of this “deal”. I will continue to transparently share my niche site journey – good, bad, or ugly.

Traffic

From May (580,232) to June (586,005) the site had a 1% increase in pageviews.

Google Analytics – June 2022

  • Users: 458,006
  • Sessions: 528,817
  • Avg. Session Duration: 00:48
  • Pageviews: 586,005
  • Avg. Time on Page: 07:24
Mike-June-2022-GA

Google Search Console – June 2022

  • Total Clicks: 437,000
  • Total Impressions: 9.95MM
  • Avg. CTR: 4.4%
  • Average Position: 12.7
Mike-June-2022-Search-Console

Earnings

From May ($21,716) to June ($23,093) the site had a 6.34% increase in earnings.

AdThrive Display Ad Earnings – June 2022

My ad rates plummeted after doing some pre-work with Ezoic to get my site ready for launch. (I enabled the Cloudflare-Ezoic integration and it activated Ezoic’s ads.txt file on my site.) It took us several days to figure it out. Once we did Ezoic sent me $1,474.68 (lost revenue) that same day to cover the cost. As a result, AdThrive earnings, RPS and RPM are all inaccurate.

  • Total Ad Earnings: $21,158
  • RPS: $40.01 (previous $40.89)
  • RPM: $36.11 (previous $36.77)
niche-site-project-1-june-adthrive

Amazon Associate Affiliate Earnings – June 2022

  • Total Affiliate Earnings: $461.48 (previous $381.78)
  • Clicks: 4,000 (previous 3,806)
  • Conversion: 11.93% (previous 9.41%)

Historical Data


mike headshot

Go get after it this month, and
Always Be Publishing #ABP!

22 thoughts on “Niche Site Project #1 (Month 30 Update)”

  1. Amazing work!

    Would love to get a review on some of my articles and how you would approach your informational type posts and brand swapping for a personal finance niche

    Reply
  2. Hi Mike, it’s amazing journey you got here.
    Got inspired by your work, start my niche site last week using the brand swapping method.
    Do you have a template for writing article?
    New here and I want to ensure I am following the right process.
    Thanks, hope to see you reaching a million page views before the end of this year

    Reply
  3. Good job!

    If you had to write all content by your self, working full time, how many average words a day would you set as target to produce high quality articles? Thanks

    Reply
  4. Discovered you late. Not sure if you went through Mediavine in the past updates (can’t seem to find older updates), but is there any reason why you went with Adthrive and Ezoic? Did you begin with Adsense as well, or like your brother, kept the site ad-free for xx period?

    Reply
    • Hey Paulene! Ezoic offered a better deal so I moved from AdThrive. I never used Adsense. I’d wait to get 10-20k pageviews before monetizing with display ads.

      Reply
  5. Hi Mike, that’s cool to know, buddy. Keep up the good work! It’s really motivating to see results like these for every blogger and content creator.

    One question: Are you doing any email marketing on this website? Just curious how many subscribers one can convert at 400k-500k visitors per month.

    Thanks!
    Prit

    Reply
  6. Man, I would have definitely checked out Mediavine before Ezoic. But I guess the numbers will speak for themselves. Good luck.

    Reply
  7. My past experience with Ezoic wasn’t good, but we’re giving them another shot based on your post with some of my smaller sites.

    Thanks for taking the time to write this out and publish reports. -FPW

    Reply

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