Happy New Year!
Thank you for taking the time to read my emails, I appreciate it.
My goal with these emails is to show what’s working well for me with my niche sites, in the hope that some of these tactics will work for you too.
I’ll continue to try my best to deliver that for you this year!
I’ve made over $2million with my niche sites over the past 4 years.
Each month I send an income report showing exactly how I make that money.
As it’s a new year, in this edition, I’ll show you the whole of 2024, and how my sites performed compared to previous years…
Let’s start with my travel blog…
I started this site in 2019 just for fun. Despite having worked in SEO since 2008, I had no idea I could make money with a blog!
Since travel was essentially banned in 2020 it made less than $5k that year,
But here’s how much money it made once it got going…
- 2021 – $82,068
- 2022 – $308,847
- 2023 – $703,485
- 2024 – $619,876
My income from the travel blog has dropped 12% since last year.
The site used to get almost all of its traffic from organic search.
Since Google changed its algorithm to not show blogs in the search results, the organic traffic has dropped 55% year-on-year.
Luckily, I’ve spent the past 18 months focusing on Facebook and my email newsletter, and I’m SO glad I did!
Here’s how much traffic my website attracted from Facebook each year…
- 2021 – 9,855 sessions
- 2022 – 60,738 sessions
- 2023 – 873,890 sessions
- 2024 – 1,970,588 sessions (+184,858 from Facebook ads)
And here’s the same for email…
- 2021 – 20,880 sessions
- 2022 – 117,114 sessions
- 2023 – 306,711 sessions
- 2024 – 822,246 sessions
As well as diversifying with new marketing channels, I’ve also been working hard to diversify with new income streams.
I’ve gone from around 90% of my income coming from display ads, to under 50% some months.
I’ve done this by working directly with brands who pay either as affiliates or sponsors for me to create promotional content on social media and in my email newsletter.
No website traffic required!
2025 travel blog goals
With this site, I want to continue to grow the Facebook page and the email list.
I’ll be analysing what works well for me and others, and doing more of that.
And I’ll be continuing to ignore SEO, haha.
I also want to travel a bit less.
That sounds like a weird goal, but I did 17 trips in 2024, and that’s a lot of content to create.
I’m kinda burnt out from it.
First world problems, I know.
My other sites
Like most of us, I have several niche websites that I no longer work on.
I’d like to tell you a little about what happened to those and why I abandoned them.
You see, not every niche site is suitable to be pivoted to Facebook and email.
For example…
My gaming site
I launched a gaming website in January 2021 and it grew fast.
The whole idea is that it answered the queries that people would search for in Google while they were actually playing the game.
If someone needed help with tactics or clarification of the rules, they would pick up their phone and come to my website.
Sites like this, that were designed purely to get traffic from Google, have fared the worst in Google’s updates.
At it’s peak, this site got 634,734 page views in a month when a new game launched in September 2022.
Now, the traffic has dropped as low as 30,000 per month.
95-99% of the income comes from display ads.
Here’s how much money the site has generated each year…
- 2021 – $11,561
- 2022 – $58,135
- 2023 – $35,294
- 2024 – $10,371
The site has fewer than 200 articles and it’s not been touched for a long time now.
It’s made over $100k in profit and continues to make $1k in a good month.
Would I start a new site like this one today? No way.
Am I happy I launched it in 2021? Absolutely.
Although it’s almost dead compared to where it was, it’s still a win.
However, some of my other sites didn’t fare so well…
My environment site
I launched this site in January 2022.
Again, it was designed to answer questions that people were Googling that there was no good answer for.
With my SEO background, I was very good at finding high search volume, low competition keywords.
The site grew quickly until it was hit by a triple whammy.
Firstly, it was affected by the HCU in Sep 2023 and lost most of it’s traffic.
Then, in March 2024, Google decided to dish out manual penalties to a bunch of ‘SEO influencers’ who talked too much, and the site was deindexed completely with a manual penalty.
And thirdly, all of these queries are now answered by AI overviews, so there would be no need for anyone to visist the site anyway.
The site still does okay in Bing, and here’s how much money it’s made…
- 2022 – $1,752
- 2023 – $10,528
- 2024 – $2,447
The problem is that I spent $12k on getting writers to write high-quality articles (before AI writers were a thing) and so it’s barely broken even.
Even thogh it’s making me a few hundred dollars each month 100% passively right now, I’d call this project a failure.
Vegan Wins
VeganWins.co.uk is my public case study site that I launched in June 2024.
I’m outsourcing everything and annoyingly, I’ve had hardly any time to work on it.
So far, the site has made only $579.
I’ve had some hurdles to overcome because the audience is very niche (and therefore small) and the RPM from display ads is very low (as the audience is in the UK).
However, I have a wonderful team working on it and I’m confident that in 2025 it will become profitable from affiliates and sponsorships, once I pull my finger out and get the processes in place!
For plant-based brands in ther UK that have marketing budget to spend, I’ll make sure that my site is the best place to spend it.
Niche Toolbox
I don’t include it in these income reports, but this year I’ll also be spending a lot of time working on Niche Toolbox.
This is a custom suite of tools that my assistants use to generate content for the social-first niche site model that I follow.
I opened it up so that anyone else can us it too for a monthly fee.
Step one was to get it live, and we managed that in November.
Next, we’ll be continuing to improve it and add more features.
Plus, I’m also about to start working on a roadmap that details exactly what you need to do to make money from Facebook and email, rather than SEO, in 2025.
When that’s ready, you’ll be the first to know, so if you’re interested in learning more, look out for it.
What’s next?
This income report was a long one, so thanks for sticking around until the end!
I send an email every Tuesday, so see you next week?
Best of luck with your sites!
– NSL
P.S. I did want to include my annual expenses in this report but I ran out of time.
My expenses in 2024 were $140,000.
Most of that goes on paying my team, but I do use some paid tools as well.
You can see all the paid and free tools I use here.