April 2022 – Monthly Income Report

White Hat Blogging is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, in addition, I am an independent Jasper Affiliate, not an employee. I receive referral payments from Jasper and possibly other affiliates.

April was a good month, while it wasn’t a huge explosion from the previous month in any specific number I did make more money than I had for the previous month and this is helping me to accelerate content outsourcing to reach the goal of 100kx3 I am striving to reach.

I am working hard each month to build out more money pages and less purely informational content to begin growing affiliate income and to be less ad revenue based and it was my best month overall on Amazon and other affiliates than I have had with nearly $700 between the sites!

Goals For Income Breakdown By 2023:

• Ads: 50%
• Affiliate: 40%
• Info Product: 10%

I have been pushing to move all my sites to a minimum of 100 posts as I feel this is the best level to see what Google feels about your sites and gives them the best chance to grow towards the 50k sessions and to my bigger 100k pageviews mark and a push into event larger ad revenue.

With that being said, Welcome to my April 2022 Income Report!

April 2022 At a Glance

I continue to build the sites I feel will be 100k pageview sites and they are all moving forward as you would expect, the only site that continues to let me down is fitness but that can sit and age and I will one day vault it to become a serious income generator.

I continue to grow my electronics, garden 2, and the whole set of outdoor-related sites as they consistently show the most benefits to the effort. Other niches are a mix of lower than anticipated search or that they are highly seasonal and these I am focused on less as they provide only short bursts of income.

Why Create Income Reports?

I can say that I don’t necessarily “enjoy” making these as they take a solid chunk of the day to gather and align but they are very nice when I go look back historically and can see where I was along with my thoughts back at that point.

I started doing these income reports to show month-on-month growth and to provide some motivation to show that websites can be a solid income over time but that it isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme by any means.

Should you choose that you want to make websites for a living to earn the income you need to be realistic that the work you do now will have a CHANCE to pay off in a year or more.

That being said there is no other way to build an income that allows you the freedom with the time that a blogger can achieve, this is my why and it is the reason I work continually to improve my skills and my niche sites.

If you are an absolute beginner I would suggest joining the Income School Project 24, it can help you when you have no clue to get solid footing for a really good cost.

If you aren’t sold on them then you can look at another well-detailed affiliate marketing class and many others which are available from MoneyLab.co which I am a member of as there is high value in the users within.

Overall Content Generation Breakdown

Building content against a vast array of sites can be intimidating, I write what I can, I work with Jasper when it makes sense, and then I outsource whatever I can afford to help keep the gas pedal pressed down hard.

• Fitness – 2 posts
• Garden 1 – 1 post
• Garden 2 – 10 posts
• Outdoor 1 – 8 posts
• Outdoor 3 – 10 posts (P24 Method Case Study and YouTube Series)
• Outdoor 4 – 8 posts (Part of Emilia’s Project Icarus)
• Electronics 1 – 12 posts
• Backyard – 4 posts
• White Hat Blogging (This Site) – 1 post
• Hobby – 0 posts (Donated this site to get the TLC it deserves)
• Travel – 0 posts
• Business – 3 posts
• Popcorn Site – 0 posts
• Finance – 9 posts

• WHB YouTube – 2 Videos

Total Posts for the month: 68

Monthly Income Breakdown

Monthly Expense Breakdown

My Niche Site Updates

Let’s dive into the site stats and details to help lend so usefulness to an income report. I am always interested in adding more details should anyone be interested but this helps keep me motivated and growing.

The benefit to this is people get to see where I feel like I have gone right or totally wrong and hopefully help some people skip these from occurring to themselves.

Site – Fitness

I converted this to its own property last month so the numbers are still off but it’s still slowly shrinking, personally, I am sad as I think this can work out but I think I just need more time and money for links and to drop large volumes of content to catch stride.

I do think I can get it there but this one has really become a later niche, I want to get more from it but I am not finding the right way yet to do it, it had some sparks but they always ended back up at this like 3000 PV line, never going much higher nor much lower.

Monthly Traffic

SERP Rankings

Search Console

Plan For Next Month

For now, I will keep adding a couple posts a month and just let it age and hopefully, once the sites I have that are doing well can become nearly fully outsourced I can spend more time directly trying to pump out content and build this into a real brand.

Site – Garden 1

While it appears to have limited competition there also appears to be much less search volume on this than I had expected going in, even when ranking first they are at best misses for real volume giving like 100s a month.

Monthly Traffic

SERP Rankings

Search Console

Plan For Next Month

For now, I will add a couple posts as I see a time available but sometimes you also need to know when you don’t have the chops or will to just work on way less traffic and build and set up information products and memberships to gain real value.

Site – Garden 2

This site just broke through the 100 posts mark so for now I will let it sit and age in to see if there is a chance of real traffic popping, it is growing but the growth is very much slower than I anticipated reading into others in the SERP with Mediavine and AdThrive, they may have got in under the old rules of 10k and like 25k.

If this is the truth then there will be less monthly traffic here than I believed but for now, it is a good time to start building in the best and money posts to try and convert more readers into purchasers which can help maximize the traffic to the site.

Monthly Traffic

SERP Rankings

Search Console

Plan For Next Month

Start to build out best and other money pages to begin building up a significant affiliate income from this site, this will help later if I choose to sell it as every dollar brought in can be 30-40x’ed in a sale. Adding $100 a month in affiliates would be around $4,000 in sales value.

Site – Outdoor 1

This site is weird, I have like 3 huge hits and then lots of misses where there is much less ability to rank due to large competitors making it a hard site to keep publishing nearly into a black hole. I was pushing this until I realized how hard some keywords would be to break into just page one.

If you can’t break into page one then you get no traffic, so the focus of any sites I build from now on is truly about reaching the first page with any content I create as this is a monument to good content that can’t get links organically due to lack of page one results.

Growth here maybe needs even more digging but the current content where I can rank in the top 10 is bringing in very little traffic, the winners were more something tangentially linked to the niche and not the niche itself so not simple to just replicate.

Monthly Traffic

SERP Rankings

Search Console

Plan For Next Month

I am working to add on four posts each month from this point forward, my hope is to find a crack that does actually exist that isn’t covered by sites that have a load of reputation and links already on their side but for now, it brings in enough to pay for the 4 posts each month.

Site – Outdoor 3

This site continues to grow as I keep pushing content to match the public timeline, it is showing no hints of slowing down with the only real issue being a failure to think about the fact it is a very seasonal niche and could see some implications due to this.

That being said, performance has been pretty nice this month with a 100% growth, I am hoping this kind of speed continues and with another high-performing month like this the site would near 5000 PVs next month.

This does definitely put me behind the timeline but I do also feel the timeline was assembled with an evergreen niche which is why the growth they show is basically a straight line.

In addition, they built that timeline prior to the pandemic when loads of blogs started to be started which may have fundamentally changed the blogosphere also.

Monthly Traffic

SERP Rankings

Search Console

Plan For Next Month

Per their public timeline, I have another 10 posts this month to complete which will keep me fully in alignment with the P24 public timeline, I am working to make a few more monetization pages to help get some additional affiliate income in the in-season timeframe.

Site – Outdoor 4

This site I love and it’s something I do as frequently as I can get longer time off from work, if I decide to full time this down the road I will be heavily involved in this building the site along with the YouTube.

As for now, I am writing all this content myself, these are fully detailed posts meant to hammer home a win, they aren’t full of fluff but are meant to cover topics in great detail so the average word count is right around 2500 words.

My choice here is to target huge branches of keywords within a single post in great detail then as they age I can continue to add more value and update content on a yearly basis without issue as I hope to end at 200-300 posts, though it could go much further.

Monthly Traffic

SERP Rankings

Search Console

Plan For Next Month

My personal plan has always been to add 8-12 posts each month, aiming to create at least 2 posts per week or sometimes 3. Since there is no outsourcing this is about the top out point to finding good options for posts along with quality writing and research.

Site – Electronics 1

I am at a plateau here, I keep adding posts but they haven’t yielded much in terms of movement but I will continue to push this site up to 200 posts as this is the best chance to reach the 100k fastest once it gets unlocked.

I am highly starting to believe that Google builds an automatic ceiling because the sites ramp up to a specific level and then just flat line, then all of a sudden after the next Algorithm update they then skyrocket with the new content having added something of value in Google’s eyes.

My hope is this next update and reset to sites will help push this site into the 50k-100k if I can get enough content on it soon enough, whether this is true or not it really does feel like there is an artificial ceiling due to testing keywords.

Monthly Traffic

SERP Rankings

Search Console

Plan For Next Month

Continuing to volume produce content to get this site to 200+ posts, will continue to post and grow this site with outsourced content due to manually building the other outdoor 4 site being manually built.

Hoping to hit 20+ posts this month on the site, crushing it on the way to 100kx3!

Site – Backyard

Moving back into season for backyard entertainment is bringing this site back up again with a huge growth number it has already exceeded the peak of last year in season. Hopefully, this is a good sign to make some solid income again for this year but this time the income will be banked into real estate.

Monthly Traffic

SERP Rankings

Search Console

Plan For Next Month

Pushing about 3-6 posts per month, want to keep it growing but nothing will rank well before the season begins tailing off so the time to push out content has already lapsed which means now preparing for winter posts if I find them or build ideas to ramp into next season.

Site – WHB

This site is basically about the journey, I have a services page I haven’t published in some time as I don’t like selling time for money unless hard times call for it.

I may relaunch it at some point as I built a whole affiliate portal for referrals which will obviously have things get shared far more but the direct exchange is not good when trying to escape that exact problem.

I enjoy making these income reports and will continue for as long as time is available for me to make them as they show a real progression for a normie and not those people who can buy hundreds of posts to thousands of posts a month.

Monthly Traffic

SERP Rankings

Search Console

Plan For Next Month

I post the monthly income report and for now, other content is pushed to the side in favor of the actual niche sites as link building is a huge limiter for this site to grow big enough to be viable as an income driver.

Site – Hobby

This is the last report for the hobby site, it is growing and making decent money for the actual content each month but I have donated it to someone who will be able to take it to the next level and can explode into 2023 with a solid revenue-generating machine.

Monthly Traffic

SERP Rankings

Search Console

Plan For Next Month

Nothing, plan to watch someone make this into a super successful business

Site – Travel

This is the next site I will be pushing to get to 100 posts as it has been showing good growth even while getting very little attention from the first near 30 posts.

Nearly 50% growth without new content shows me I am onto something with this site and it needs more loving to really become a powerhouse for income generation.

Monthly Traffic

SERP Rankings

Search Console

Plan For Next Month

Start to grow site and push 10-20 posts each month to get the site moving as once it reaches 100 posts this could be a easy 50k pageviews site which with ads could be nearly $1000 a month.

This is a site where there will easily be 1000+ posts as there is just a wide open area to publish content and there are many things with very low competition so it is time to fill in these cracks and grow.

Site – Business

Continuing to grow this slowly through targeted posts that should bring in higher ad value helping to maximize returns on the cost to outsource as there is zero competition outside of forums, still unsure if this could be a boon or a boondoggle.

Sometimes you just have to feel it in your chest and take the shot to see what you can get from pushing into odd niches.

Monthly Traffic

SERP Rankings

Search Console

Plan For Next Month

Continuing to post 3-6 posts each month while moving towards 100 posts to see where this may or may not go, currently nearly even on outsourcing costs to what it generates each month which is relaxing me more on outsourcing more content over time.

Site – Popcorn

Basically in a stall, for now, I don’t have the time to push anything here while I build out the 100kx3. Maybe next year will be this site’s year.

Monthly Traffic

Search Console

Plan For Next Month

Just hold and wait for age, and hopefully, push on in 2023.

Site – Finance

This is more for fun as I learn about a topic, seeing if there is a chance or crack to get any traffic as ads and affiliates can be worth a lot, so far things are not going anywhere fast but with low low low post volume no wonder nothing catches I am willing to take some flyers for a bit to see whats here.

Monthly Traffic

SERP Rankings

Search Console

Plan For Next Month

Add a few posts in the cracks I see and try to see and gauge the volume that exists.

Overall Lessons from April

Focus is helping drive the sites forward, allowing me to relax on trying to make each piece of content the most perfect thing ever has continued to allow me to post higher volumes of content and then plan to re-evaluate and clean up what performs over a year.

This was the first time after a content warrior that I haven’t massively regressed in what I could produce whereas before I would need a month of slower and more net relaxation after pushing 60k words of content out.

I am seeing good signs across all the sites I am hoping could be my drivers on the journey to my 100kx3 goal so I just need to maintain focus on that and push work without getting overly involved in silly things like themes, CWV, and other “nice to haves”.

Did I Meet my April Goals?

I did make my 60 posts goal which is perfect as it was busy but not exhausting, I think I will maintain this as my goal through this month and see if it is viable to maintain month after month through a whole year.

What Are my Goals for May?

Building out sites to get myself to that 50k mark on the electronics site while continuing to grind on the P24 case study and my outdoor 4 projects.

Other than this working to make some more videos and try to make sure I publish at least 2 videos on my WHB channel, one is simple as it is the monthly P24 case study but finding what is useful to make is always hard for me without input.

My Recommended Tools For Results

From there, here’s a quick recap on some of the most valuable resources and things I recommend you check out. They’ve helped me in my journey and I think they’ll be valuable in yours.

• Jasper.AI – This is your personal writing assistant, offering you more information and helping prompt you in writing to make magical and informative content.
• Frase.io – I use this to build out my outlines for posts and then once done writing check how my content aligns to the Top10 and Top20 SERP results to make sure I cover all the key terms other sites do.
• Project 24 – A welcome change from the competition, focused on all with a purely content-first approach, hands-down an awesome course for building a niche site or an online business that focuses on content.
• Ezoic – Once you’ve got your website and some content, think about these guys. They’re doing some amazing things – and have helped me earn several thousand dollars (in ad revenue) that I’d not have earned otherwise.
• LinkWhisper – Honestly without this plugin managing links within my content would be incredibly difficult, honestly one of the easiest things to re-up each year, and highly suggest it.
• Cloudways – As hosting goes choosing Cloudways with a VULTR HF server is the fastest you will ever see a backend run, no more waiting for the new post to load it is as close to desktop speeds as you can probably find.

Josh Koop

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