This is the November 2020 update for the Investor-Operator partnership on the website in the Wellness niche. Details of the partnership structure and intro to the website were covered in the update here, the previous month’s update can be read here, and archives here.
Let’s get to it!
📈 Highlights
- Overall traffic is up ~38%!
- Revenue was $943.63 (compared to $610 in August)
- New articles were posted, 1 article rewritten on site
- On-page SEO done for 19 articles
- Added Pinterest Pins and Video Pins for all new posts and pages
- Optimized seasonal articles to target the Holiday season
📉 Setbacks
- Content output was slower than expected
📊 Traffic Stats for November
Here is a comparison between October and November 2020:
Here are the last 12 months of traffic:
Here is the social traffic over the last 12-months:
Overall, social traffic is down from earlier this year. There has been a lot of chatter around Pinterest algorithm changes. This is the impact of that.
Here are the AHREF results:
💰 P&L in November
- Revenue: $943.10
- Costs: $436.23
- Profit: $691.87
For costs, we paid $250 for content to the agency that we use. Each article’s cost was about $40 and we ordered 6 articles total. The rest of the costs were paid to our main writer for the site. She wrote 6 articles with 13,000 words in total.
Monthly Breakdown
Here is the P&L so far to date:
Profit to date:
- August: $338.35
- September: $209.63
- October: $454.66
- November: $691.87
- Total: $1,695.10
This acquisition is paying off especially during the holiday season. December will also be a great month since some of our articles are seasonal that peak for Christmas.
🚪Exit Plans
This experimental between an Investor <-> Operator partnership was not meant to be a long-term hold. We plan to sell the site early next year.
I like to call these partnerships Micro Exits. The thought process is as follows:
- Find a good operator that is incentivized with significant equity (50%) and profit share (50%)
- Find under-monetized sites
- Grow for 6-9 months using various tactics
- Sell the site
- Re-invest in more deals with the same operator
This allows the investors to minimize risk with quick exits and allows for snowballing of funds into bigger deals over time with the same operator.
Takeaway: Finding the right operator is key. There is plenty of dealflow out there. The team is the most crucial part here.
📅 November Recap
✅ Ezoic Display Ads (Update)
Here is a snapshot of the site from the Ezoic dashboard:
Our EPMV for Ezoic has hovered around the $21 mark with peaks at the end of November (due to Black Friday) at around $40. The overall revenue has been $277.96 for all of November.
Note: If you do not like Display ads for whatever reason, adding them in Q4 of each year is still a good strategy. The ad RPMs during this last part of the year are extremely lucrative. You can then remove them at other times throughout the year if you want.
Amazon Associates Earnings (Update)
This website is heavily monetized with Amazon affiliate. Here is the November screenshot:
The conversion rate is 20%. The average conversion rate is usually 5-8% on most sites.
The operator made significant changes to increase conversions. These are the typical easy wins that were applied:
- Add comparison tables after the introduction section
- Add product boxes after each product review
- Add links within the content to Amazon
Doing this on the high-traffic pages lead to an increase in revenue. When acquiring a site, I always look for under-monetized pages as that leads to exponential growth.
If you want more strategies like this, make sure to check out EasyWins.io, my battle-tested database of 100+ strategies to 10X growth.👉 What Can Be Improved in December 2020?
The Operator is working actively to do the following:
- Continue posting new content
- Optimizing for CRO on high-traffic pages
- Add Google Adsense Link units in conjunction with Ezoic
- On-page optimization on articles published a few months ago
- Add Table of Contents to articles (this increases SERP visibility)
