July 2022 Income Report – What A Way To End The Month 😭

If you don’t follow me on twitter you may not already know this, and I don’t want to drag out the clickbait title… so here is how July 2022 ended for me:

The good news is, I hit my target of $1000 in ads only (I actually never knew I hit it until just now!) 🎉🎉🎉

Highlights:

Ezoic Revenue

Last Month (July) vs. This Month (June):

All of my sites are monetized by Ezoic Ads

• The overall Portfolio EPMV is still quite low as the traffic increases at $14.27, but this is up from 14.15 last month.
• Previous EPMVs:( $14.86 in May) ( $17.94 in March) ($20.35 in February) ($22 in January)
• From Ezoic, I earned $1,001.27 from 70,773 Unique visits. That is an ad revenue increase of 18.35%
• Portfolio pageviews are up 18.86%, with 85,206 pageviews vs. 71,685 page views in June.
• From Amazon, I earned a combined total of $499.13 vs. $239.27 in June. That is an increase of 108.61%.
• From my own digital products, I earned $49.66 which is -$43.02 less than last month.
• From other affiliate programs (combination of ShareASale, Awin, etc., as well as niche-specific programs), I earned $663.62 which is +$214.28 more than last month.

Now then, let’s tally that all up:

Total earnings: $2,213

Was surprised to see my overall EPMV improve slightly, but it is still very low. An EPMV of just $20 would result in $1400 in ads alone with 70,000 unique visits. But as ever, the focus remains on the things I can control; adding more content and optimizing old content.

Site 2 (the only site impacted by the Google algorithm update) has suffered and was my main ad revenue earner, so I know next month, instead of hitting new highs, will likely be a lot lower – sad times.

Total spend: -$1,938

Total spend includes:

• Ezoic premium subscription,
• content,
• team of 3 virtual assistants
• Mailchimp, Canva, Hosting (Namecheap and Cloudways), and Jasper.

In the coming months, I will be looking to reduce my outgoings in all other categories except for content. I hope to retain 2 virtual assistants, one part time and one full-time, rather than three part-time.

Earnings Breakdown:

Ads:

Amazon:

Other Affiliate Programs

Digital Products

Site Portfolio

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What I Have Done This Month

This month I spent a lot of time improving Site 2, so it seems that work was in vain. However, I am hopeful that things will improve with time. I lost 3/4 of my traffic on that site, but I am confident that it has been built properly and has a good amount of EAT.

Again, I am very shocked that out of all my sites, that one was hit. By the looks of it, Google is going through some things, and many of us are being wrongfully impacted as a result.

In any case, I can only put my energy into things I can control and that likely means setting that site aside for now, at least until Google works through its issues. It isn’t like I don’t have other sites demanding my attention!

What I Am Doing Next Month

I have a few options, pivot completely and focus on my megasite or go back to building out “Site 7”. The worry is that “Site 7” is largely product focussed, and with its low EPMV, I would be looking at writing more product reviews.

If it gets hit by some sort of update, that would be on me as I already know the risks with that one. Conversely, my megasite is ready and waiting with 1000s of keywords and potential.

It could be 100% info, 50/50, or anything in between, and I really like the idea of building something Google-proof with a good amount of varied traffic sources and a solid email list for the long term.

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Some of my SOPs

Keywords

My favourite ways to find keywords are:

👉 Google Autosuggest
👉 Keywords Everywhere longtail finder
👉 Keywordtool.io
👉 Reddit/Quora reverse (you need Semrush or AHrefs to do this)

I still use the KGR method, but these days I don’t really need to check the calculation; if it seems KGR it probably is! The keyword goes in the title with some clickbaity additions, and then I build the post out as normal.

Example keyword (so sorry if this is your niche…):- how to get your pet cow to sleep at night

Example title with keyword and clickbaity addition: How To Get Your Pet Cow To Sleep At Night: 3 EASY Tricks!

When I find new keywords, they get clustered and then put on a master list, ready for a content brief and outsourcing to one of my Upwork writers. You can check out my video on free keyword clustering tools below:

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Content Outlines

As I’ve mentioned previously, I either use the Thruuu SERP analyzer (free) or Outranking to create a content brief for my writers (Outranking if I want the help of AI and to ensure the writer covers all of the key topics – I can always flesh it out myself later if need be).

When I give my writers outlines, I may also include a specific Youtube video on the topic or urge them to use Youtube and things like Quora and Reddit to help them form their article.

I do not expect the writers to be master SEOs – I include any additional LSI keywords I want to support my articles in the H2 outline. They usually end up repeating the phrase naturally in the paragraph.

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Formatting

This is where the magic happens.

I definitely like my posts to be aesthetically pleasing. Formatting was the first thing I outsourced to my VA! It was important to me but started to get very time-consuming as I ramped up content publishing.

I think formatting with spacers, bolded text, bullet points, headings, images, video and then alt text, internal linking, proper anchor text etc etc… are all signals to Google that the post was made with love and care… as well as being optimized for the reader!

It is a good way to get a balance between making Google happy with all the technical and semantic SEO and making the reader happy enough to hang about and see more ads!

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Repurposing Content

I am a big fan of repurposing content. Whether that be creating pins out of the key points in your blog, making audio from the blog that you can embed, or making videos to use on Youtube.

I’ve stopped with the Pinterest pins, although that had worked pretty well. Pinterest no longer seems like a wise investment of time. Instead, I have my VA use Pictory to create a video for each of my blog posts.

It allows her to select the key text she wants it to include and then it auto-selects stock videos related to that scene.

I love these videos as they:

• are clean, useful, and easy to make.
• provide value to the reader as they get the key information in your blog post in a more concise visual format.
• can be used for video ads
• can be repurposed for various social network platforms including Youtube

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