Hi
November was the best month since Google tried to end my business.
My niche sites made $72,556.
My expenses were $15,091.
That leaves a pre-tax profit of $57,465 for the month.
Woohoo! We’re back! 🎉
I’m not saying this to show off…
I’m just documenting what’s working well right now, because:
a) You might want to test some of these winning strategies with your own niche sites.
b) Selfish reasons. Writing these reports gives me the kick up the bum I need to do analysis and plan for the next month.
So, let’s dive into the income report…
As you may know, I have a bunch of sites in my portfolio.
My travel brand makes 95% of the income, so that’s gonna be the most interesting one to report on…
In November, the site had 628,627 sessions.
That’s a jump of 66% versus October.
So how did I do that?
Well, firstly, my Facebook VA went on holiday. 2 weeks vacation.
You may remember that last month, I said that my Facebook traffic had slowly declined from 200k per month to 58k per month.
I said that it was my own fault because I had pretty much ignored my VA for months and left her to handle it with no help.
So when she went away, I started working on Facebook myself.
I used analysis from Strevio to take a deep dive into what was working and what wasn’t.
And I overhauled the strategy.
At the same time, my suite of custom-made content creation tools, Niche Toolbox, was ready to use, so I started using that to create better content.
From the graph below, can you see the date I took over? 🙈
Wow! SO happy with these results.
Right now, Niche Toolbox is still in Beta.
Done is better than perfect, so the basic tools are there, and more are being developed.
I’m also working on tutorials that will show exactly how I’m using the tools, as well as a full Social-First Niche Site Roadmap that will go into a lot more detail than I can do in these emails.
If you’ve got access to Niche Toolbox already, THANK YOU, and I can’t wait to make things even easier for you. Please bear with me. Exciting things are coming with the tools.
It’s not just Facebook where things have been improving…
Organic search is up 38% versus last month.
Since the latest Google Update, things have been looking promising for organic search.
Lots of people have reported upticks lately, which is great.
However, when I zoom out the full 16 months in GSC, this is still not what I would call a recovery!
I have seen some nice things happening in Google Discover since late October, though.
I haven’t done anything different so I don’t know why that is, but I’ve started to get some traffic from it…
If you have any idea what causes this then please do let me know as I have no idea how Discover works!
The other channels are fairly flat.
I haven’t been running paid ads unless it’s a campaign where a brand is paying for the ads.
I do intend to turn these back on in the new year, once the shopping season is out of the way and CPMs are lower.
What about Vegan Wins?
Veganwins.co.uk is my public case study site that I launched in June with the help of Web Asset Builders who built it and created the content for me.
My VA was sharing the content to the Facebook page and the traffic was trickling in.
Then, I gave her access to Niche Toolbox and things really started to ramp up fast!
This is the traffic from Facebook to the site…
I just gave her a login to Niche Toolbox and no further instructions, so I’m thrilled with the initial results!
My long-term plans for this site.
Veganwins.co.uk is designed for a UK audience.
It’s currently only monetised with ads – but there are two BIG problems with that.
Firstly, the RPM for UK traffic is around a quarter of what it is for US traffic.
So I would need 4 UK visitors to make the same money as from 1 US visitor.
Oof.
Secondly, there are only 2.5 millions vegans in the UK.
That’s not a lot.
Instead of veganism, if my niche were ‘healthy eating’ and I targeted the US, my potential audience would be 186 million. (That’s how many reported wanted to eat healthier.)
Given the larger potential audience and the higher RPMs…
The potential to make money from ads in the ‘US healthy eating’ niche is 298 times higher than the ‘UK vegan’ niche.
Each piece of content would make approx 298X more money!
Did I pick a bad niche?
With SEO, we were always told to niche down.
A tight category meant Google would send you more traffic, in theory.
But that is NOT TRUE with social traffic.
You can have a niche as broad as ‘happiness’ or ‘pretty things’ that will appeal to pretty-much everyone, and do well on Facebook.
Something to think about when choosing a niche for a social-first site, right?
So is ‘British vegans’ a ‘bad’ niche?
I don’t think so.
It’s a challenge, sure. But I love a challenge!
The potential to earn from ads is limited, so that’s not what I’m going to do.
Instead, I want my main income stream to be affiliates.
Everyone is saying that affiliate sites are dead in 2024, and that may be so.
I’ll have to think outside the box to come up with ways to get affiliate links in front of the right audience.
I’m excited to try some new strategies that other people aren’t doing.
And of course, I’ll show you what works and what doesn’t.
So. you want to know more about that, then be sure to open my email next Tuesday.
– NSL
P.S. You can now access Niche Toolbox for just $59 per month. Get started here.
P.P.S. Everything else I use to run my business is listed here.