This outdoor authority site earned $3,644 in June 2021 and $3,208 in July 2021. In the previous update here, the site was placed into the “maintenance phase” of the website flip lifecycle.
I cover the following in this month’s write-up:
- Website metrics from June and July 2021
- Profit and loss breakdown
- Link detox (disavow) service results
- Revenue results of adding Ezoic vs Newor Media
- Tracking high-traffic pages to perform CRO with a Google Sheet
- Next steps
For the previous update in April and May, check out this post, or check out all the posts here.
📈 Site Recap
- Purchased in April 2020 for $23,000 from Flippa auctions. The site was earning $300/mo.
- Last-6-month revenue (L6M) average is $4,075/mo
- 70,000-90,000 pageviews per month on average depending on time of year
- AHREFs DR of 51 with backlinks from NY Times, Wikihow, Wikipedia, NY Post, Marketwatch, and 2,000 other niche relevant referring domains
- Website has been active since 2010
- 863 articles published, 849,778 words total
- 12 different revenue streams including Amazon Associates, private brand partnerships, affiliate networks, and display ads
- Email campaign with 32 emails that get sent to new subscribers
- Two dedicated writers who are niche experts
📈 Highlights
- 31 published articles in June and 27 in July. Total of 58 new articles
- Added Ezoic in late June
- Traffic is stable
📉 Setbacks
- No internal linking was performed
- No keyword research
- Minimal time spent on the site myself
📊 June 2021 and July 2021 Website Metrics
Traffic Breakdown (June 2021):
Traffic Breakdown (July 2021):
The traffic is more or less stable across June and July:
AHREFs Metrics
Revenue Breakdown
Here is the breakdown of P&L for June 2021:
- Revenue: $3,644
- Costs: $926
- Profit: $2,717
Here is the breakdown of P&L for July 2021:
- Revenue: $3,208
- Costs: $652.52
- Profit: $2,555
Cost Breakdown
Of the costs, $450 was for a third-party link detox service, which I will cover in detail below. About $840 was for new content written by my two main writers at $30 and $40 per article each.
My VA did a good amount of formatting and CRO work which equated to $254.
👉 Major Updates
Link Detox Service Results
On June 28, I submitted a link disavow file with 1,661 domains to Google’s Disavow tool.
I purchased a link detox service from Rick Lomas, since it was being recommended by Matt Diggity and others. Due to the amount of referring domains my site had, the cost was $450 instead of $299.
This was the process:
- Made the order
- Rick requested access into Google Search Console
- Rick used the tool called Link Research Tools to perform the audit
- Rick sends over his thoughts, a spreadsheet, and a disavow file to upload
- I reviewed everything and then uploaded the disavow file
My expectations were low as Google has said they ignore spammy links. So this was just an experiment to see what the service was like and maybe if I am lucky, it works out well.
Here is the traffic graph after submitting the disavow file:
As you can see, no significant change in traffic over the last 45 or so days.
Ezoic is generating $15/day
I added Ezoic display ads to the site in late June. This was in an attempt to generate more revenue from the traffic I already had.
In a previous case study, I shared how I implemented Newor Media advertisement network. Here are the results:
- Newor Media: $5 per day average, ECPM of $2.74
- Ezoic: $15 per day, EPMV of $7
With Ezoic and disabled above-the-fold ad placeholders to ensure my visitors don’t see a bunch of ads pushing the content down. I also purposefully removed any ad placeholders next to my comparison tables. The primary revenue driver is affiliate marketing with this site, not display ads.
With Newor, they had a limited of 5 ads per page so that was a limiting factor for this site.
CRO on High-Traffic Pages Using a Google Sheet
When you have a site with 644 articles, it can be difficult to know which pages to perform CRO on. I hired a Google Sheets developer from Upwork to create a report that takes the Google Analytics data, flags any pages that get above 50 pageviews the last 30 days, and gives me the URLs.
See the report below:
The process is as follows:
- Daily the Google Analytics Behavior -> All Pages (Organic Traffic) is analyzed by the Google Sheet
- Any page above a threshold (can be changed by me, set to 50 pageviews) is flagged
- If the page has already been CROed by me, it’s ignored
- Any page that meets the threshold is placed in a master sheet with how many pageviews it gets
- I copy the list of pages over to Trello to assign to my VA to perform CRO on (add tables, add affiliate links, etc)
- Once done, I tick mark the “Fixed?” box and it is automatically remove from that list
This process is repeated daily.
👉 Plans for August 2021
The site will remain in maintenance mode until there is an uptick in traffic. During this mode, the following will take place
- Writers will produce 3-5 articles per month to keep the site active
- Affiliate links and CRO will be done on articles that reach more than 50 visitors over last 30 days
My goal was to keep costs down to $500 per month or less. However, June was $926 and July was $652. Hopefully can keep the costs down in August and going forward.
That’s it for this update. Stay tuned for next month’s update.
