It’s time for my update website revival. A quieter month! 😀 Sorry but with that COVID thing, I got a bit preoccupied.
Traffic
Traffic dropped since February a little bit because the big boost in January finally ended. But it has held steady at just under 9K pgs for the month. I’ve not added much content in February, but finally finished adding pictures to every post, keywording everything and ensuring that RankMath scores ended up between 80~100 for each page.
Income
March’s income benefitted from the swoon that accompanied Amazon being offset by the income from Ezoic as it settled into place: $46.69. Plus Amazon: $19.54. No other income so that’s a grand tall of… $66.14! Up from February by the grand sum of about 30% ~ Well, we celebrate the small victories!
Content
I only added two new pages but I worked ferociously on the other pages, adding content, updating text, tidying things up, and republishing older content.
Thieves
I also finally began to get to grips with content thieves, so I’ve been collating a lot of information about several in particular who stole my content. One particular egregious site ripped off half a dozen pages. I’ll be launching about a few DMCAs to Google, and maybe to their hosting companies sometime in April.
Updates
I made a few other changes to the site, including nixing unnecessary plugins. I also swapped out my previous caching solution for WPRocket. So tweaking that has been a regular challenge, along with Ezoic and the CDN. I’m now debating: using Ezoic caching $20pm, upgrading the server to hosted WP $20pm, choosing RocketCache, or just bearing with the current setup. Don’t know. I’d still like to see superfast loading times… so I’m still working on removing over 1/2 my plugins.
Goals
Still aiming for 12K pvs and $100pm. In April, I’ll be adding 3 or 4 (maybe more) new pages of content which are already written up; getting the better of my content foes; and looking at Linkwhisper to make sure my pages are adequately linked up. I found six or seven pages with literally no incoming links. I think Linkwhisper could help sort out those.
April weirdly is looking better than March at this point in time, but the news from Ezoic (lower ad revenues in the industry) and Amazon’s slashing rates to between 1%~3% portend a dour May. We’ll see. But I figured in the end that it didn’t matter what Amazon did… If I had an audience, someone would be happy to pay to reach them. So it makes sense: build the audience/tribe/fans for your site. Don’t worry about the monetization too much at the moment.
Running an online business like this means wearing a lot of hats, and sometimes when you’re busy distracted, some of them can fall off! It’s not ideal. But what you gonna do!