In this Ezoic and affiliate earnings report, I’ll share the income from each of my niche sites, and why I can’t sell a few sites I want to sell….yet. Have you ever felt like your sites just weren’t taking off?
In this video, I’ll show you why I can’t sell 3 of my sites yet for different reasons, ranging from content not taking off to Facebook blocking me from posting!
Watch the video or read the transcript below for more inspiration!
Today, I’ll share my Ezoic and affiliate revenue for July with you so you can follow along with my hits and misses.
Recurring revenue from niche blogs is probably the best thing there is . But why then did I sell some sites last month?
AND more importantly… why haven’t i sold all of the sites I want to sell….YET
I, am faced with a challenge and to show you, let’s take a look at my revenue first.
Now, as bad as it looks, I fully expected my revenue to go down because I sold a couple of sites.
So, let’s take a look at that.
I sold all of these smaller sites because I wanted to focus on the larger ones, like bitemybun.com.
Let’s take these sites out of the equation for both months so I can show you how my revenue really developed.
That’s maarnatuurlijk, the urbansurvivalkit, mightygoodman, goedkoopsteallesin1pakket, excelweb, opticsvilla.com, tabletforkids.
And that’s a grand total of $833.55.
And I’ve sold these together for $40,047:
| Sold sites | Revenue |
|---|---|
| excelweb.nl | $93.22 |
| goedkoopsteallesin1pakket.nl | $12.93 |
| maarnatuurlijk.be | $378.66 |
| mightygoodman.nl | $176.61 |
| onlinebestellen-achterafbetalen.nl | $79.74 |
| opticsvilla.com | $37.51 |
| tabletforkids.co.za | $44.51 |
| theurbansurvivalkit.com | $10.37 |
| Grand total | $833.55 |
| Sold for | $40,047.00 |
The largest one I sold was maarnatuurlijk, as you can see, I sold quite a few of my dutch sites, not all of them but my focus is getting more on the English language sites because they grow much faster
Now there still was some revenue for a few of these sites last month because I sold them in June and then with the transfer period and everything I still had some affiliate and display ad revenue coming in
So let’s take these out of the equation as well.
Now my mission is to become the authority with these larger sites but all of these smaller sites were taking up my budget, and my brain space
So in order to grow these largest sites into authorities in their niches, I decide to sell a few.
Now I still have a couple more sites that I wanted to sell and I’ve redirected a few sites to other domains like videobewerken.nl to stopmotionhero.com, redirected schilderpret.nl to toolsdoctor.com.
And now, we can make a nice comparison between both months without the sites that I sold:
But there are still a few sites that I want to sell, but I can’t yet and I’ll show you why.
This is the graph for my site kattennamen.net, about cat names:
Don’t ask me why I have a site like that…please don’t :)
Cats are cute and everyone’s favorite, so I shouldn’t have a problem selling a site like this. But, this graph isn’t what buyers want to see, they want to see an upwards trajectory that this site just doesn’t have.
And it’s because of my 9 months of traveling through Asia….but not in the way you might think through a lack of commitment to my darling sites.
No….It’s way more sinister than that. It’s because Facebook blocked me from posting to my cat page.
Apparantly you need to have location settings on for your phone so they can track where you are and who you say you are and that your current city is the one you’re living in but I didn’t really have a current city so I finally just kept changing my city every time we packed up and moved.
It was all very very exhausting…
Buyers really want to see a steady line so they can feel confident of the traffic and revenue:
Now my site’s doing great again, but I think I have to give it at least 6 months to show steady income from the site before I’m ready to sell it.
Two other sites I’ve started fairly recently are not showing the hockeystick growth yet, have you ever felt like there was absolutely no progress with your site you worked so hard on?
Like this site, It is picking up just now, but I still need to give the content some time to settle in the SERPs:
It is a site I started when I thought I was going to do a lot of skimboarding on the beaches of Asia.
It already has a lot of niche skimboarding content on there so I’m going to give it some time to take off.
I wrote all of these articles myself with the help of an ai writer and they’re already gaining some traction, but writing with an ai assistant isn’t fully automated mind you.
It still takes research to make sure every word is accurate on not nonsense, and I wanted to make sure I got the answer target just right.
I wanted to test out how to use the ai writing assistant best in our team, so I wrote about 50 1,000 word articles myself before I nailed the perfect process.
The secret here is using a great jasper.ai recipe. My writers still need to write the text themselves, but the Ai writer helps generate topic ideas and the perfect blog outline.
The investment I’m making in my authority sites takes a bit of time to gear up. Writing really cool blog posts now will probably result in more traffic 6 months from now, so blogging really is a waiting game.
That’s why blogging isn’t for everyone I guess.
But, I’m a firm believer that Google needs to trust you with smaller keywords, and then larger and larger as your site delivers great content for those queries time and again.
I’ve seen it with my own eyes on my site bitemybun.com where I’m really growing that authority from the ground up. It leads to suddenly being rewarded with much more searched terms:
My biggest goal right now is to get to a million pageviews per month, which I’m farther away from now with the sale of my sites than I was. but all in the effort to write more content for my larger sites for more rapid growth.
But when I do get there, I’m allowed to buy myself a new watch. That’s the reward I set for myself for achieving my goal.
In the meantime, I’ll focus on diversifying more from affiliate to Ezoic Display ads, which is at 50/50 currently.
And diversifying even more between affiliate partners and amazon storefronts. But more on that in next month’s earnings report.
Joost Nusselder is The Content Decoder, a content marketer, dad and loves trying out new tools en tactics. He's been working on a portfolio of niche sites since 2010. Now since 2016 he creates in-depth blog articles together with his team to help loyal readers earn from their own succesful sites.
