February 2021 – 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.

This month my goal was to really focus on adding content across more sites instead of just hitting a couple with more and having sites with none.

I have built YouTube channels but am working on ways to approach them to build them as a part of these niche sites.

The footbagger site really has nothing, even after talking in a couple of the only Facebook groups over 500 people. So that site has gone to idle as there isn’t a viable future in it but it may revive as YouTube only with brochure site.

Instead of keeping this site built out I have started a replacement with much more ability to have content added, something where 200 posts is easily within grasp.

The one thing I caution people is that there was almost no competition for Footbagger, that should have been a clue as to a huge lack in overall search volume.

The May update is still on the horizon, with many focusing on optimizing what I believe are mostly vanity metrics with Core Web Vitals, I have cleaned up my sites but not deviating from content.

Ezoic has some awesome things coming after they finish off their CWV configuration for their Page Speed Tool (Site speed Optimizer, or as I say SSO) that will be gamechangers possibly for more income opportunities.

February 2021 At a Glance

Overall my ad income was about even from January despite the month being 3 days shorter, this was a nice change and this means my EPMV is increasing as pageviews are continuing to move forward.

The site that I love in the outdoors niche is continuing to move forward and has been building some momentum, I have tried to get it moving as it is the one I can write because it is fun for me personally.

I see a very promising chance for the new site to blossom into a strong performer as it is a pretty good balance of product cost versus age group who has disposable income.

As these sites grow my goal for this is to get into the solid $1k territory soon, this month is close to December in terms of overall income and that’s without Q4, Christmas, and hyper ads.

Why Do I Do Income Reports?

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 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 not another way to build an income that allows you the freedom with 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 good detailed affiliate marketing class and many others which are available from MoneyLab.co.

Content Generation Breakdown

In February I think I did pretty well on my plan to better distribute posts across my niche sites, though I posted less on this site and didn’t end up making any YouTube videos for PBI, eh its life and there is only so much time in the day..

• Site 1 – Fitness – 7 posts
• Site 2 – Diet – 0 posts
• Site 3 – Gardening 1 – 0 posts [ DOA? ]
• Site 4 – Gardening 2 – 2 posts
• Site 5 – Outdoor 1 – 13 posts
• Site 6 – Outdoor 2 – 14 posts
• Site 7 – Electronics 1 – 0 posts [ Fail ]
• Site 8 – Electronics 2 – 0 posts [ Super limited niche but found 6-8 more post ideas ]
• Site 9 – Public Niche Site – xxxxxxxxxx.com – Post Mortem To Come
• Site 10 – Backyard – 6 posts
• Site 11 – White Hat Blogging (This Site) – 1 post
• Site 12 – Online Business – 0 posts
• Site 13 – Hobby – 10 posts

TOTAL POSTS FOR JANUARY: 53

I only count income from the affiliate niche sites above, anything from this site and PBI I don’t include as it isn’t “affiliate” related to me, they both have active and passive income but they could skew overall tracking.

I am much happier with my distribution across the sites as I don’t want them to appear stagnant to users nor to Google, the exceptions being the ones where I may have been too tight in the niche.

Monthly Income Breakdown

February as everyone knows is shorter by 2-3 days than any other month I think the results were good as you can see the income being just under last month with 3 less days.

Monthly Expense Breakdown

Many of these are purchased for yearly licenses but I tried my best to break the costs down into monthly chunks to help make more sense of a overall monthly expenditure.

As you can see the overall monthly costs are more than I am actively making but thats the cost of building a business, investing time and money to build something that will pay off in the end.

My Project Updates

As I always state the way I build out niche sites is a little haphazard, much of this is due to my underlying ADHD and focus, if I tried to do only one I would have quit long ago from boredom.

For most the best way would be to build one or two sites and just keep grinding at them until they reach the 200 posts mark or so, then drizzle in content while beginning the next one.

Unlike the bigger “brands” love to push a singular “Authority” site I prefer to diversify, this leaves me growing slower but also more heavily defended against the algorithm hit to any one site.

Josh

The obvious benefit of growing one single authority site is that it would provide a greater chance of income faster than the approach of slow growth over years.

Site 1 – Fitness

I hoped to balance out my posting and I did a pretty decent job, I was able to grow this site by 9 posts which is over 2 per week.

I do hope to maintain building this site by using that same method to keep pushing out content as fitness is near unending in topics you can cover, the limit is more your ability yo not get bored.

Growth +13.1%

This site is still making an amazing amount based on the age and if that trend could continue while content gets more views and grows this could be incredibly lucrative.

Site 2 – Diet

I love the idea of this site but find it to be very difficult to have someone else write for it. I am trying to actively figure out if I can get writers by adding a banner to the top to get visitors attention.

It has begun picking up in traffic again though and is moving closer to the pre-Thanksgiving numbers around 6k pageviews so the motion is back in the right direction of growth again.

Shrink 11.45%

The Facebook group continues to grow and pull in people who visit the website, this will hopefully continue through the new year helping to pick up steam and gain more people to share my content.

Site 3 – Gardening 1

I used LinkWhisper to attack this site last month as it just wasn’t doing anything, it was basically DOA and I figured I would just use it to test building a strong internal link structure.

To be honest I definitely failed to interlink within my content in this site well at all, it is something I rectified in Garden 2 where each post has links built to it as soon as published.

I would say after a single month it doesn’t look to have helped it on the surface, though I will just continue to monitor this as it is far along in the journey without getting any love.

Shrink 7.54%

This site is monetized through Etsy primarily but does have some links to Amazon products also. It has made a few sales that technically pay for the hosting and domain for the year but nothing fabulous and really to this point a total letdown.

Site 4 – Gardening 2

This site was built with the new Google PageSpeed update coming in May, the thought being to have a site that is built focusing solely on a few links to Amazon and no ads or any delays, speed is consistently 99/99.

This site is very much in the ghost town and I don’t expect the traffic levels to increase dramatically until around the May update timeframe as that would be right around the six month mark.

This long road continues but it has been gaining ground in the SERPs and there have been a handful of visitors hitting the site with some consistency.

Growth +37.39%

My goal for this site is to skip running any ads and focus on growing this to 50 posts and a goal of maintaining peak pagespeeds so the site will be running lean and mean non-stop.

Site 5 – Outdoor 1

This is my favorite hobby and I continue to pump work into it, there is a lot of established sites so the wins are by finding those cracks in the super low search and getting huge results.

I know this will be a good website for affiliate and ad income due to competition sites but it is going to be in the 200-400 posts range before it can really take on the bigger search topics reliably.

Shrink 5.34%

I absolutely love this niche and continue to write about 95% of the content myself. As long as I don’t give up it can easily become a solid performer with ads along with having a vast trove of affiliate choices which means it can be incredibly diverse.

Site 6 – Outdoor 2

This site is one that could easily be 1000+ posts it is a long term project to grow out within multiple sub niches and the end goal being a site that pulls in 100-500k visits per month.

Unfortunately there is always a loser when trying to crank out content and this site was the unlucky one, this site needs to get moving and I am working on building out a large list of posts to begin outsourcing.

Growth +6.98%

I will be focusing on building this with more force this year as it is definitely able to be as strong a performer as the Fitness site, growing this site out would easily give a large income per month once aged.

Site 7 – Electronics 1

This was actually my second site I ever created but I wasn’t aware of what a “micro” niche was at the time, now I know what I built was a micro niche site and the growth is fairly limited by the subject matter.

The reason I keep it is that it is reliable for around $60-$100 each month and is incredibly reliable, I do updates to any new products as reviews and cover topics as they become viable.

I have found some more review posts I can write and some tertiary keywords that I can target to write posts on that will give me a little more traffic and hopefully increased income.

Shrink 9.67%

I actually like sites that are micro sized as they are easy to canvas but they are limited in what they can ever provide and I would rather have one $3k website than 3 $1k websites to manage long term.

Site 8 – Electronics 2

I am so lazy with this one that I still haven’t gotten to installing GA4 onto it, this one can get some good value but it is product oriented and in a tough place when competition is high and effort on my side is low.

This may be a site that is sold to someone who will give it ti TLC is deserves and start to build out the information it needs to become a strong powerful site, not the lame duck I allow it to be.

Site 9 – Public Niche Site – xxxxxxxxxxxx.com

I retired this as an idea for a blog this month, talking with many people online in FB groups and similar showed they almost entirely subsist on video content and this is why the web content it all super aged.

Instead this needs to become a YouTube channel to do well, starting with the basics and developing into a brochure site for specifics down the line.

Site 10 – Backyard

This site was more because of my new house and learning about the backyard and how to properly take care of it. This is more a labor of need than specifically one of a niche to make money, in fact this has not made a single sale on Amazon.

I have broached a few other niche topics to start preparing for next winter and am on course to reach 100 posts on the site this year, I have high hopes for this one as the ad EPMV continues to be high.

I would expect as weather grows for traffic to grow, since yard related with outside resources like Own the Yard data available I would expect it to grow through summer then tail off again in the transition to winter.

Shrink .33%

I am hoping to have this vault into the higher traffic volumes this year as it already has nearly double the content as last year through the season.

Site 11 – White Hat Blogging

This site itself, it is aimed at people looking to begin blogging but with a focus of not needing to get grey or black hat through building links and similar processes.

I will also be listing sites from my collection to sell on the front page once I know they are viable and if I won’t have the time to manage them myself.

I am also working on services to provide to help people build successful niche sites and these services will include parts people traditionally find difficult.

Site 12 – The New One

This I found by accident and it looks like it will easily have the ability to have 200+ posts with very little competition, so I figured with the death of the other niche site I had bandwidth to move.

One thing I have learned in this last year is that once you see that a niche is DOA don’t keep pouring into it as there is another that is available without the heartache.

The Garden 1 niche showed me sometimes you just can’t win, eventually you could if you keep pouring in the money and building content which is why I don’t delete it.

This niche has high quality product availability while also providing a much higher search ceiling so it can be built and monetized without much hassle.

Note here that this entire traffic spike is basically me, there isn’t anything organic to this site, long road to go but will be publishing and building non-stop starting this month moving forward!

Lessons Learned

I continue to work on content generation as it is truly what will move the needle and get results, there is always things like the Core Web Vitals and Page Speed Optimizations that could be done.

Instead for almost everyone you need to focus on building unique, truly helpful content, not just mindless re-paste jobs. This will help you build up a reliable business website that will stand the test of time!

I am continuing to push content, I aim for at least 30 per month as a goal until my income grows more, this allows me to know if I can get more than one out a day I am outperforming my goals!

I am on the edge of nearly 1 million words across my websites, my goal would be to double this and reach 2 million before the end of the year as a lofty publishing goal.

Did I Meet my Goals for February?

I focused hard on building out content and getting site content built up, I also was very close to the $500 range even while on the shortest month of the year.

My hope is that as these sites all move towards 12 months of age and content ages in that they will all begin reaching my next growth goal of 10k pageviews.

I started the three channels but have failed to get any movement on posting videos, I will need to focus on this goal for next month to not fall behind.

What Are my Goals for March?

My goal is to manage at least 4 posts per site so they all continue to grow, though some (marked DOA) are sitting idle to show some semblance of growth before I dump more time and resources into them.

If I finish those 4 per site, then I can begin to look at adding more content onto the sites to ensure I am moving them all forward.

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.

• Project 24 – A welcome change from the competition, focused for 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.

Josh Koop