July 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.
July was a crazy month.
First, I had another record-breaking month with my niche sites, totaling $4,414.07 in Amazon income.
Second, the revenue I was able to generate from this site has been increasing as well. In July, the blog was responsible for an additional $3,805.21 of income. This was attributable mostly to my PBN Service and Custom Niche Sites, plug some nice affiliate sales.
So, combining the Amazon affiliate income with the revenue generated by the blog, and my total income for the month of July comes in at $8,219.28.
It's not all good news, however. Google rolled out its much-anticipated Panda update in the middle of the month, and it appears that my sites may have taken a bit of a hit.
More...
First, though, a screenshot from my Amazon account showing the combined income from my four niche sites for July.
So $4,414.07 in Amazon affiliate income for July!
This is my best non-Christmas month ever, and beats last month's previous high of $4,005.07 by more than $400.
July vs June: NS1 & NS2
Here's a top-level overview of a couple of basic metrics that I like to track with Niche Site 1 and Niche Site 2. (Since my other two sites do not earn nearly as much, I decided not to track their numbers here in these reports).
Click on each of the tabs to jump from one metric to the next.
- rEVENUE
- ORDERS
- AMZ visitors
- $ / AMZ VISITOR
Site | July 2015 | June 2015 | Difference | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Niche Site 1 | $0.41 | $0.44 | -$0.03 | |
Niche Site 2 | $1.08 | $1.09 | -$0.01 |
Niche Site 2 continues to grow, hitting nearly $1,700 in July. I've said a few times on this blog that I think NS2 could ultimately be my highest-earning site in my portfolio.
Niche Site 1
Another month, another ~$2,400 in revenue for Niche Site 1. This now marks five consecutive months of NS1 hitting this income level, with zero new backlinks being added on my end.
Income
June 2015 | May 2015 | Difference |
---|---|---|
$2,382.42 | $2,383.62 | -$1.20 |
In fact, looking at this site historically, over the past 15 months, NS1 has hit $1,300 or more 14 times, which is pretty remarkable.
Google Rankings
As you can see, one of the main keywords that I track for this site dropped two spots over the past month. Since I'm not building any fresh links to this site, and haven't done so in more than 8 months, this is to be expected.
My plan for links with NS1 is to wait out the next Penguin penalty refreshes. If this site (somehow) survives unscathed, then I will think about building new links. But for now, I'm more than happy to collect the $2,400 per month while putting zero time or effort into the site.
Traffic
We'll talk about the Panda update in a minute, but traffic for NS1 was pretty much on par with June, when it had 13,339 visitors.
So for July, you can see a slight increase to 13,652 visitors, which averages out to around 440 visitors per day.
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 13,652 people that visited NS1 in June, I was able to get 5,825 of them to click on over to Amazon from one of my affiliate links.
This gives us a click-through-rate of 43%, which is decent increase from the 40% CTR from June.
As for revenue per Amazon visitor: NS1 did $2,382.42 total revenue in July, with 5,825 visitors to Amazon. That gives us an average revenue per visitor of about $0.41 each.
Niche Site 2
Niche Site 2 continued its impressive growth in July, nearly hitting the $1,700 mark.
Income
May 2015 | April 2015 | Difference |
---|---|---|
$1,691.19 | $1,344.21 | $346.98 |
The growth projection for NS2 has been impressive, going from ~$600 in April, $750 in May, $1,350 in June, to now almost $1,700 in July.
Google Rankings
You may remember from last month's income report that I had (briefly) hit the #1 spot for one of my main keywords. Well, as you can see above, that milestone was short-lived, as I'm now hovering around the #3 spot.
Traffic
Here's what the traffic looks like via Clicky.
Nearly 3,400 visitors for July, which comes out to about 109 visitors per day, which is a decent improvement from the 100 per day average from last month.
Amazon Traffic and Revenue Per Visitor
Of the 3,387 people who visited NS2 in July, 1,566 of them clicked on over to Amazon, which amounts to a very impressive CTR of 46%.
In terms of revenue per Amazon visitor, of those 1,566 people who clicked one of my affiliate links, I was able to generate a revenue of $1,691.19, which gives us an average revenue per visitor of $1.08.
Panda Update?
For those of you who follow the Google algorithm news cycle, you may have read that Google finally unleashed its updated Panda algorithm on July 18, which is designed to detect "quality content" issues.
While it's not exactly easy to determine if your site has been hit by the penalty, what you can do is have a look at your traffic, and compare days of the week over time to see if your traffic has been significantly affected.
And when I do that with NS1 and NS2, it looks like both sites have indeed been affected.
Let me show you what I mean.
Here's a screen shot of NS1's traffic over the past 28 days. (Note: I grabbed this screen shot on Sunday morning, which is the last data point on the graph, showing traffic from Sunday in real-time; so ignore the last day on the graph, because it doesn't represent the entire day's traffic).
So you can see four data points that I've highlighted on the graph above. These are the traffic numbers to NS1 for each of the four past Saturdays. (It's important to compare specific days of the week against each other, e.g. Saturday vs Saturday, as opposed to Saturday vs Friday, as it will give you a more accurate snapshot).
The first two data points are traffic numbers before the Panda update. As you can see, on July 11 NS1 had 522 visitors, and on July 18 it had 504 visitors.
The last two data points are post-Panda update. For July 25, NS1 had 460 visitors, and for August 1, 432 visitors.
So obviously, there is a serious downward trend in traffic. Comparing July 11 vs August 1, this represents a 17% reduction in traffic!
Let's perform the same exercise with Niche Site 2.
The data is not as conclusive with NS2, at least not yet. The general trend line is definitely sloping downward, however. Some of this could simply be related to the main keyword bouncing around from #1 to #3, and some of it could be Panda; it's tough to tell.
Google did announce that this Panda update would be a "slow roll-out", so chances are I haven't experienced the full impact yet.
Bottom line at this point, however, is that I definitely expect my Amazon earnings to decrease in August, maybe upwards of 20%-25%. We will see.
Niche Site Azon
Income generated from the blog is really starting to pick up. What I'm most excited about is that the revenue streams are well-diversified, both between products and services I offer to my readers (PBN Service and Custom Sites) and affiliate sales to products that I personally use and recommend.
Income
July 2015 | June 2015 | Difference |
---|---|---|
$3,805.21 | $1,960.52 | $1,844.69 |
Thrive Themes ($463.50)
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. If you're going to invest a little money making sure your niche site looks well-designed, then Thrive is a great choice.
Several of of my readers were nice enough to use my affiliate link when they made their Thrive purchases, netting me $463.50 in affiliate sales. Thanks, guys!
The Hoth ($279.38)
The Hoth is my go-to link building service for when I'm just launching a new niche site. I use it to build tiered Web 2.0 properties that gives you a nice set of initial links that get my sites started out in the right direction.
I highly recommend the service for use on all kinds of niche sites.
You can read my full review of the The Hoth here.
AmaSuite 4 ($33.50)
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 ($150.75)
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.
PBN Lab ($35.40)
PBN Lab is the service I use to find all of my expired domains, which I use personally for my own PBN, and also for the PBN Service I offer to my readers.
PBN Service ($1,919.76)
July was the second month that I opened up my PBN Service to my readers, and I'm easily selling out the 12 spots per month that I made available for purchase.
I'll repeat this again here this month: the way I've set up the PBN Service is so that it's "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.
Again, I'm selling out the 12 spots per month pretty quickly. I just send one or two e-mails to my list per month, and that's more than enough to sell out the spots. So if you are interested in learning when new domains are added, I encourage you to sign up to the mailing list here. They sell out pretty quickly, so if you're thinking of buying links for one particular month, it's a good idea to act quickly to secure your spot.
And to read more details about the service, just check out the sales page.
One other change I made recently with the PBN Service is with the price. After a two-month "introductory offer" of $127 for 5 posts, I went ahead and increased the price to $167. With the semi-exclusivity of the network, and the fact that it's only a one-time payment (as opposed to a recurring fee), the honest truth is that $127 for 5 posts was just way too low of a price.
Custom Niche Sites ($922.92)
Last month I started experimenting with building out custom niche sites for my readers. In July, I built two. But I also had to turn three people down, due to lack of time on my end.
The truth is, offering a custom niche site service is extremely time-consuming. The amount of e-mails back and forth between me and my customers was a LOT more than expected. To be honest, it felt too much like work. So for now, I've decided to put the service on hold.
I'm looking into ways to streamline and standardize the service, to make things operate more smoothly. I'm also looking into partnering with a reader of mine who will build the sites for me, and we'll split the profits. So stay tuned for more updates on this.
Traffic
Here are the traffic numbers for the blog in June.
So 6,430 visitors in July, which averages out to 207 visitors per day, a nice increase from the 174 visitors per day from June.
Expenses
Content | Hosting & Domains | Niche Site Azon | Total |
---|---|---|---|
$22.25 | $107.88 | $679.44 | $809.57 |
Here is my expenses breakdown, both for my own niche sites, and for the services offered from the blog.
Content
I added a handful of articles to NS2 in July, to keep the site looking fresh in Google's eyes.
Hosting & Domains
This expense column is for my own personal PBN. My Go Daddy account re-upped in July for another year.
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. I also had to pay for content to be written for the three custom niche sites I sold.
Net Income
Month | Total Income | Total Expenses | Net Income |
---|---|---|---|
July 2015 | $8,219.28 | $809.57 | $7,409.71 |
So a total profit for the month of over $7,400, which I'm super excited about. Last month was just over $5,000 total profit, so this represents a sizable increase.
I'm obviously excited with the growth, but in the back of my mind I know this likely won't be sustainable for next month. For one, I have the Panda update(s) to deal with, which will significantly impact my Amazon earnings in August. Also, I'm not sure I'll be able to continue building custom niche sites the same way, so that revenue will be impacted as well.
So, August will definitely be an interesting month to follow, and I'm curious to see how much my revenue will drop.
Any questions, let me know in the comments below.