June 2015 Income Report

Welcome to another Income Report here at Niche Site Azon. The purpose of publishing these reports is to document my successes and failures with my niche sites, and to hold myself accountable. 

In June, I had one of my best months ever. In fact, outside of December 2014 (i.e. Christmas season), it was my best month ever as an Amazon associate with $4,005.07 in income.

On top of that, my PBN Service has started to take off a bit, and combined with a few affiliate sales plus building a custom niche site for one of my readers (read more on this below), Niche Site Azon itself was able to generate an additional $1,960.52 in revenue for the month.

So, combining the Amazon affiliate income with the revenue generated by the blog, and my total income for the month comes in at $5,965.59.​

More...

First, a screenshot from my Amazon account showing the combined income from my four niche sites for June.

So $4,005.07 in Amazon affiliate income for the month! This is the only time I've been able to crack the $4,000 barrier besides last December, so it's a pretty big milestone for me personally.

What certainly helped was that for June, I was back at my 8% commission tier with Amazon, after falling to 7.5% last month. This alone accounted for about $200+ in extra commissions. 

June vs May

Here's a top-level overview of a couple of basic metrics that I like to track with each one of my sites.

Click on each of the tabs to jump from one metric to the next.​

So obviously, the first thing that jumps out is a huge gain for Niche Site 2. This was the direct result in a jump in the SERPs and a small tweak I made to the pricing tables.

Let's dig a bit deeper into Niche Site 1 (NS1) and (NS2), and we'll also take a look at the increased revenue this blog was able to generate.

Niche Site 1

Niche Site 1 just keeps cruising along. For the bulk of this month, it actually looked as though NS1 would only be earning around $2,000 or so, but over the final week of June it picked up a bit, and then hitting the 8% commission tier brought it back near its typical ~$2,400 per month figure that it's been earning for a while now.

Income​

Another $2,400 month, like clockwork. 

I still haven't added any new content or links to this site in several months. From the sounds of it, Google may be updating it's Panda (and then Penguin) algorithms sometime in the near future, so I may just wait until after that and see if this site is still left standing.

Yes, on some level I do feel that this site could get hit with a penalty, because it has been before. The reality is, if any of my sites were hit with a penalty, I would obviously be disappointed, but not totally unexpected.

As a niche site builder who uses gray-hat link building methods​, that's just part of the reality that you have to accept.

Google Rankings

A little jumping around in the SERPs but nothing major from last month. My ranks held steady, one month after seeing a few keywords drop.

Traffic

I finally got my Clicky account up and running for a full month for each one of my sites, so no more Google Analytics.

NS1 had 13,339 visitors for June, which is pretty much on par with how it's been performing over the past several months.

That averages out to around 445 visitors per day for June.​

Amazon Traffic and Revenue Per Visitor

In addition to traffic coming to your site, it's always a good idea to track the number of people that are actually clicking on over to Amazon.

Of the 13,339 people that visited NS1 in June, I was able to get 5,389 of them to click on over to Amazon from one of my affiliate links.

This gives us a click-through-rate of 40%, which is exactly the same CTR as it was for May.

As for revenue per Amazon visitor: NS1 did $2,383.62 total revenue in June, with 5,389 visitors to Amazon. That gives us an average revenue per visitor of ​about $0.44 each. 

Niche Site 2

So the biggest news for me this month is the gains I saw with Niche Site 2.

Over the past five months, NS2 has been a solid earner, averaging around $600 per month or so. But this month, it took a big jump.​​

Income

An 80% jump in revenue over just one month!

I've written a few times before about how I think this site has at least $1,500 per month potential, and truly has the possibility of my top-overall grossing site.​

How was I able to nearly double the revenue in just one month? Well, let's have a look at the SERPs.​

Google Rankings

Yes, if you check the "week" and "month" columns for that first keyword, you can see that I did hit #1 for that keyword in June! 

So that keyword has been bouncing around between #1 and #2 for the past month or so. This has contributed to the majority of the traffic (and consequently, revenue) increase for NS2.

Traffic

Here's what the traffic looks like via Clicky.

Just over 3,000 visitors for June, which comes out to about 100 per day.

Only two months ago, my traffic for NS2 was just over 50 visitors per day. So the increase in the SERPs over two months has lead to nearly double the amount of traffic.​

Amazon Traffic and Revenue Per Visitor

Last month, I expressed a little concern over the CTR for NS2, which was only 20%. There were a couple of caveats that led to this, which you can read about in May's income report.

How did we fare in June? Well, this month, I sent 1,238 unique visitors over to Amazon, out of the 3,006 visitors.

This makes for a click-through-rate of about 41%! More than double improvement from May.

What led to such a big jump in CTR? The primary reason has to do with the positioning of my pricing tables.

For previous months, I had placed my pricing tables a little further down the pages. A visitor would have to read several paragraphs of text before even seeing the pricing table. 

For June, I switched things up. Basically, I followed my own advice, and placed the pricing tables ​above the fold, after only a short bit of text, like I have in my sample shower head site.

This makes a significant difference in click-through rate.

The idea behind it is this: when a reader hops on your page, if you are targeting the right "buyer's" keywords, then they should already be in buying mode.

They know generally that they are looking to make a purchase; they just want to see some validation of their purchase decision by looking at some reviews.​

So when they see a couple of items on your pricing table right when they land on your page, it makes it extremely easy for them to simply click ​on over to Amazon.

Anyway ... with an increase in CTR, it's only natural to see a bit of a drop in revenue per Amazon visitor, as you're going to have people clicking over to Amazon who aren't quite ready to buy yet.

For June, the revenue per Amazon visitor figure for NS2 was $1.09, which is still excellent.

Niche Site Azon

For only having the blog up and running for just over two months, I'm pretty happy with the income it's been able to generate for me in such a short period of time.

Income

I had a couple of affiliate sales, but most of the income was from offering products and services to my e-mail list subscribers.

Thrive Themes ($160.50)

Regular readers of the blog know that I'm a huge fan of Thrive, both with their Thrive Themes and their amazing Thrive Content Builder.

A few of of my readers were nice enough to use my affiliate link when they made their Thrive purchases, netting me $160.50 in affiliate sales. Thanks, guys!

AmaSuite 4 ($148.50)

AmaSuite 4 is the software I use to identify best-selling and highly-profitable product categories on Amazon.

You can read my full review of the software here.

Elf Links ($50.25)

Elf Links is a plugin I use with all my affiliate sites, as it truly and fully hides your affiliate links from Google. Yes, it actually hides the links, it doesn't just "cloak" them like most other plugins.

I wrote about Elf Links as part of this post here.​

Both of these affiliates are managed through my JVZoo account, pictured above.

PBN Service ($1,204.27)

June was the first month that I opened up my PBN Service to my readers, and I'm happy with how things have been working out so far.

The way I've set up the network is so that it is "semi-exclusive". In order to keep outbound link footprints low, I'm limiting the number of people that I allow on each site to just six people per site.

This means that for every 10 domains I set up in my network, there are only 12 spots available for purchase. This also inherently limits the amount of income that I'm able to generate per domain.​ Each site I build effectively has a cap on how much it can earn.

Right now, I'm not having any trouble selling out the 12 spots per month. I just send one e-mail per month to my list when I've added new domains, and I also keep a link to the sales page in my navigation bar. This has been more than enough to sell out the spots.

I do wish that I could offer more than 12 spots per month. I may try adding 15 new domains (instead of just 10) next go around, which would mean 18 orders up for sale. 

The main obstacle for me is time. As I've said a few times on the site, I do have a full-time day job, and so my niche sites, this blog, and any services related to the blog are really just side ventures. 

And the truth is, it takes a lot of time to run a PBN with even just 10 new domains per month. I have to find all of the domains, set them up on hosting and with WordPress, and then add an initial set of articles to each site.​

Then, I have all the work involved with completing each order with a customer.

This includes the initial e-mail communication back and forth, ordering the articles with my writers, reading the articles, scheduling the articles on WordPress with all the formatting, ​links, and images, keeping track of all of this information in a spreadsheet, and then communicating the posting schedule with each customer, and then answering any questions afterwards.

I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining, but just to explain why I'm hesitant on trying to expand the network much further. The truth is, I probably priced the service too low ($127 for 5 posts) considering the value provided and the time and work involved on my end, and I will probably be tweaking the price point soon.

Anyway, that's a bit of a peek behind the curtain of operating my PBN Service. If you're interested in ordering a package, be sure to check out the Sales Page for a lot more information.​

Custom Niche Sites ($397)

A few weeks ago, one of my e-mail subscribers reached out and asked if I would build him a niche site from scratch.

We agreed on a price point (you'll see that $397 transaction in my PayPal screenshot above), and then I got to work with my writer on the content.

I did some research on a good niche and some nice keywords, and then built out all of the content, pages, and reviews. And within a week, the site was complete and I transferred over the domain to my reader.

I know there is a market for building custom niche sites, and so this is a space that I'm considering getting into. 

I haven't figured out all the details, but it would involve me doing all the niche and keyword research, building out the site with 6,000-7,000 words of highly-targeted content/reviews, structuring the site to maximize click-through rate and conversions, and even throwing in some goodies such as a Thrive Theme and the Thrive Content Builder, and a few free links from my PBN.​

As for price point, since this reader of mine was my very first customer, I cut him a bit of a deal, but going forward I think I will be pricing at $497.

Again, I haven't quite ironed out all of the details. ​I plan on sending a note to my e-mail list once I've got everything figured out. If you're not already on my list and want to find out more info when I've got it, you can sign up on this page.

And since time is of course a consideration for me, I think I'll be limiting these to just 4 new sites per month.​

To give you an idea of what a typical site would look like, have a look at my shower head site (which, by the way, is still not completed; keep that in mind).​

Traffic

Here are the traffic numbers for the blog in June.

So 5,219 visitors in June, which averages out to 174 visitors per day. This is an increase in nearly 50 visitors per day compared to May.

Once again, the average time per visit and bounce rate are pretty good. I'm glad to be writing content that people are interested in and engaged with.

Expenses

With my PBN Service taking off a bit, I incurred a lot of expenses in June.

Content

I added some longer-form articles for NS2, to keep the site looking fresh in Google's eyes.

Hosting & Domains

This expense column is for my own personal PBN. I had some yearly hosting accounts re-up last month, plus on-going fees for maintaining the network.

Niche Site Azon

Expenses related to the blog and services come mostly from my PBN Service, from registering and hosting the domains, and paying for the content.

Other expenses include the content for the custom niche site for one of my reader's, and I also upgraded to an "agency" license for my Thrive Membership, so that I can include the Content Builder as an add-on with my custom niche site offerings. 

Net Income

To hit over $5,000 in profit from a single month is something I'm really excited about.

A couple of things came together at the right time to make this happen: the huge jump in revenue for NS2, and my PBN Service selling out during its first month being open.

I doubt that I'll be able to consistently hit $5,000 month after month, but it's a goal I'm going to set for myself going forward.​

Any questions, let me know in the comments below.​