It’s time for my update website revival. A quieter month! 😀

Traffic

After reaching 10K pageviews in January, we fluctuated between 10K and 11K for the past 30 days. Of course, February is 2 days shorter, so we reached about 8.9K pageviews. Still up on 12 months ago by 250%!

Income

February’s income also dropped slightly, due to fewer days, and less people buying on Amazon. But I introduced Ezoic late in February, which boosted earnings a little. Amazon brought in $31.50 and Ezoic approx. $18.40 and Adsense about $1.60. It’s not stellar by any means on either count.

I tend to believe that converting users is something Google actually rewards. I just have to figure out how to get that into Analytics data. The good news is that the conversion rate is now approaching 12% on Amazon!

Content

I only added one new page in February, and will continue to improve this page throughout the month. I will follow this publishing schedule for the next 3 months as I let most of the recent changes get bedded in to the site.

Social Media

As I remarked earlier today, Pinterest is now one of my focuses for sharing all posts. I’m hoping that the images are shared more widely there. Todate, no traffic has been generated by Pinterest to my site. I may need to up my strategy there.

Updates

Installing Ezoic was perhaps the hardest project I’ve ever undertaken with an advertiser. There seemed to be no-end of niggles to fix, including the trailing ‘/’ which caused real problems.

However, the engineer on the other end really helped me fix things up. I’m now waiting for the optimization of ads to really kick in. Ezoic didn’t play well with Amazon scripts until they helped me wrap the codes somehow.

I also added BunnyCDN to help get the load time down under 2s for the homepage. It has definitely helped. I’m using a caching plugin that integrates well with BunnyCDN, but I’m wondering if WPRocket would give me any advantages. Not sure yet. Pingdom tells me it loads faster in the USA, but GTMetrix gives me garbage results. I seriously don’t know which is right. My own feel is that it loads fairly fast.

The trailing slash problem still exists, I’m not sure how to fix that, but it’s only a small problem except with legacy links when I used to have .html endings. So ideally I’d like the code to send *.html to */ without sending other endings to * (eg. *.jpg files get sent to *.jpg/… ). I aslo get lots of 404s from bots like Ahrefs and Bingbot!!!

Goals

I’m still aiming for 12K pvs in March still, we’ll have a 31 day month. So it’s possible I could hit my $100 a month target. I’m also considering switching to Ezoic servers or adding a proper managed WordPress solution or WPRocket installation for a bigger kick to get the side loading in 1s or less.

Traffic

The site reached 10K pageviews in January, which is just about 2000K off its all-time high. Other metrics don’t go back far enough, so I use that gauge to measure longer term success. Traffic to the site has grown y-on-y(200%) and m-on-m (17%)

Income

Total income in January came in at just 1c off $80.00, but I removed most of the Adsense from the site early on. I think the focusing of ads on Amazon, right now is the best thing because I want people to see coffee ads, not other junk ads. I certainly don’t want to see ads with a cpc of 1c.

Content

I keep updating content, rewriting paragraphs, searching for copied content and adding new photographs for the 50 articles. One of the TOP sites in the niche has about 250 articles. So there is plenty of topside for considerate growth, esp. if I focus on evergreen content and reviews.

I won’t be adding many content pages this month, but two are almost completely finished. There are still a six or seven pages that need tidied up properly. But that’s okay. I’m following the principle of edit and update at a frequent update cycle. I ALWAYS update the published date.

Social Media

I will have finished sharing all posts to FB, IG, Tw sometime in early February and Pinterest is next on the hit list because I’ll have good images for sharing, I hope! I’ve had a few new subscribers to the mailing list. AND I’ve had some interesting discussions about my niche with friends & followers! It’s been great.

I finally picked up a Google News link, too! And then one of the CEOs of one of the main companies I do review for hit me via my comments! That was awesome! I’m going to find good quotes from both and integrate them into my articles somewhere!

Stolen content

I have now purchased my old domain again, and will soon reupload the old content for the purposes of filing DMCAs and getting copied content removed from Google (and, would you believe it, Amazon?). But it’s not a priority right now unless I have more time.

Goals

Still aiming for 12K pvs in February, income has now reached 75% of the average from the site’s heyday of $102pm average. I’m still setting a goal of $100pm regular, and since much of the content has been updated regularly, there is less to do. So, I will have to start (re)publishing content. But I think I will only do one or two articles a month, while I finish the other tasks.

Feedback?

We’ll see… Thanks for sticking around. If you have any thoughts about my achievements, challenges & goals, I’d love to hear them!

December Update

Well, since the last update, much of the site has been finished updating. All short posts have either been consolidated into much longer articles, unpublished for revision, or removed. I only have 50 articles now but about 100K words in total. So the average lenght is much longer than before.

The massive changes in organization have also finished and are settling down: 4 silos, each with 10~20 articles of about 2000 words each (average). Each silo header page is quite long.

However, I’m not sure that my site structure is correctly understood by Google yet. Categories are settled now, but tags are still dynamic (but not indexed).

I’m still playing with some URLs to get a better feel, but the redirection plugin tracks the changes. I just have to be careful… I don’t end up with a series of redirects.

Results so far

Page views have jumped 30.38% since November, in my target market, though the page consolidation has made a mess of some stats. The content has been moved & redirected. Now that much of the consolidation is done, I’m hoping that more stability in rankings will return. Less flux, more stability. Google stats in webmaster are right now not encouraging.

Income

Income wise, well, I’m not expecting a lot but there is some upwards movement. I hit $42 in December despite a quieter Xmas & a very bad post Black Friday period (unlike most other people here). Somehow it balanced out.

Sharing

I’m still updating content on an almost daily basis, adding images, reorganizing, editing as ways to keep the content fresh. I’m now posting my pages to LinkedIn, Twitter & FB… just to get it out there. I’ll do Pinterest soon.

Stolen content

Current strategy is to weed out all the copycat content thieves who have stolen my content, there are still quite a few pages leeching my content. So I’m planning to get them removed from Google or wherever else soon. One or two pages are particularly affected. In some ‘light’ cases, I’ll just rewrite 50 words or so. It’s more effective.

Backlink Building

The mailing list is a complete disaster with dropping subscribers, and few sign ups right now. Backburner. I’m still figuring out ways to create links so I will do a bit of commenting, guest posting and link building through organic means… kind of floundering there.

Goals

So goals? Can I reach total 12K page views? That’s a goal! I came close but reaching it would surpass the site’s first go-around 7 years ago.
Can I consistently reach $100pm? Well, I’ve streamlined my amazon links, got rid of the dud links (there were quite a few), and am now experimenting with different formats for ads/products. Adsense only accounts for 25% of the income but the RPM is poor. Compared to my original placement (I use automated placements), this isn’t so hot. So I’m wondering if I should go back to placing ads myself.
Feedback?
We’ll see… Thanks for sticking around. If you have any thoughts about my achievements, challenges & goals, I’d love to hear them!