June 2021 – Monthly Income Report

By Josh Koop •  Updated: 07/01/21 •  20 min read

Well as everyone knows June was the month of continual Google updates, I think there was 4 total that occurred making this one of the most volatile months in working on sites I have had to deal with.

Google Updates For Those Who Wonder:

Whats funny is there is yet another core algo update coming this month, so instead of worrying about rankings and miscellaneous data I have just decided it is better to put my head down and post as much as I can and just keep building.

Welcome to June, 2021!

June 2021 At a Glance

This month I spent a lot of time working on the P24 Case Study site for the new P24 search analysis and blogging course, this is a 24 month project staying aligned to the P24 timeline to see whether hitting the goals at the times listed is still viable in 2021 and into 2023.

I knew with the updates coming this month wasn’t going to be necessarily pretty so I am working on doubling down efforts on the sites that are paying the bills and the ones that are underperforming will just stay idle and add a couple posts a month.

I knew fitness would be hard and it shows signs but my will to push to 200 and post has died out on the way, now I will wait a bit for aging and divert attention into the backyard site and into other projects that are already performing better in 6 months than fitness has in 12 months.

This is just logical to help grow income and stop spending into a website that hasn’t shown it will make a valid return on that investment, it may just need a spark I just will have to wait and see a bit.

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 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.

Overall Content Generation Breakdown

This month was messy compared to my normal months as there was a lot of family commitments and bad weather paired with work on transitioning my sold site to the new owner and getting all that work completed.

Due to this publishing slowed a little more than I would prefer but anytime I can manage to move the bar forward is a good month, forget about short term goals, this is about 24 months plus boys and girls.

Total Posts for the month: 48

Monthly Income Breakdown

Income SourceIncome Amount
Ads (Ezoic)Income - $559.06
EPMV - $22.11
Adjusted Income (After Premium) - $449.06
Adjusted EPMV (After Premium) - $17.76
Amazon Affiliate$172.62
Other Niche Affiliate ProgramsButcherBox - $35.00
Avantlink - $77.71
Blogging Affiliate ProgramsConversion.AI - $148.50
Income School - $18.00
Amalinks Pro - $0.00
Frase - $26.39
Cloudways - $4.32
Ezoic - $53.52
Fiverr - $21.30
Total Income$1116.90

Monthly Expense Breakdown

Expense SourceMonthly Cost
HostingCloudways - $26 / Month
WPX - $25 Month
Bluehost - $1.33 Month
Amalinks Pro$14 - Month
LinkWhisper$10 - Month
Outsource Writing - Fiverr
Outsource Writing - The Content Authority
$220 - Month
$600 - Month
Ezoic Premium$110 - Month
WP Rocket (Non Ezoic Sites)$7.50 - Month
Carbonate Theme$3 - Month
Canva - Pinterest and Better Imaging$9.99 - Month
Dreamstime Images$25 - Month
Project 24 Subscription$10 - Month
Piotnet Forms$6.50 - Month
Frase.io$114.99 - Month (Unlimited Docs)
Conversion.ai$99.99 - Month (Unlimited Words)

My Niche Site Updates

This month saw me step back and really look at what is performing and to start to draw a line in the sand on projects I want to work and projects that are already working, my decision is to let my sites idle if they aren’t performing and focus on the performers.

This means the sites that aren’t bringing in the money they cost are going to sit and the sites that haven’t gotten all the love and attention they deserve but are having a high yield will now get the majority of my focus.

Fitness Niche Site

The fitness site started as a push to learn more on healthy living, from exercise to diet and more. I always knew ranking and growing this would be a fight and take lots of effort but after nearly 200 posts I am willing to let it just sit and rest while I build income generating niches instead.

This could be springboarded by adding a YouTube channel which may be the next step on growing the content but for now with my limited time I will instead hope that this continues to move up the rankings while diverting the efforts into other sites generating revenue.

Monthly Traffic

The beginning of the month is deceptive as I had the damn tracking code added twice and found and removed the issue but it messed with the last month and this months stats which is depressing cause it skewed overall traffic numbers.

SERP Rankings

The 172 posts are still somewhat growing though I feel that while the posts above them aren’t the same quality they appear to have many backlinks and the fight is real, beneficially the ranking continues to grow month over month and this site really just hit the 12 month mark in June which means it is underwhelming to me but moving all the same.

Search Console

The clicks and performance as a whole suffered through this whole month with updates, I am relaxing on forcing content to gain traction as maybe after July and the rest of this core update I will see some loving from my old friend Google.

Plan For Next Month

Sit it

Garden 1 Niche Site

This site has never really gotten any legs under it, this is a very old site with writing I outsourced to crappy services like iWriter and I didn’t know how to request content. I really think when looking at the aged competition it is a solid site to continue pushing on I just need to demolish the old hitlist and remake it for a glorious rebuild.

Monthly Traffic

The site shows some signs of traffic gains in analytics, if this keeps up I will begin outsourcing 4 posts to start the growth trend moving again, ,this site spent months doing nothing and this is the first true signs of life over the last 2 months with massive interlinking done through ahrefs webmaster tools and LinkWhisper.

SERP Rankings

To be expected when you don’t generate any content for nearly a year, though the lower content that never ranked appears to be trying to move up which would be nice!

Search Console

Only one day with 0 clicks per search console is about the best 30 day average this site has ever had! Hoping next month this is a 0!

Plan For Next Month

I plain think the content is what may be limiting this website, I am looking at maybe building on this content myself through Jasper and powering through another 30 posts to see if I can get a full on spark going, the domain and age should help at this point if the content is assembled well.

Garden 2 Niche Site

This is a site I plan to now ramp up from the current 30ish posts up to 100, I don’t want to move much past this level of posts and instead will be focusing on making them the strongest and most relevant versions of their content to grab shorter tailed keywords as 100-150 posts is manageable each year to review and update.

This is feel is the drawback to pushing sites with 500 posts, you just have to keep finding new bottom of the barrel keywords and cross your fingers that those posts turn into real visitors. Instead this site will have longer content covering a short tailed keyword instead to grow in traffic but not into an insane volume of posts.

Monthly Traffic

This site grew by 25% without any real new content, it continues to grow after the initial 30 posts with strong month over month performance which makes sense as I saw a few sites on AdThrive prior to jumping in which means there is at least 200k worth of search traffic that I can blend in on.

SERP Rankings

The algo updates knocked some of my keywords down but they have been recovering since the initial hit, I think this more has to do with the lack of backlinks versus the competition at this point.

Search Console

I always like when the end of 30 days average clicks has grown versus the start of the month, when it also involves clicks it means I am doing things right on this site.

Plan For Next Month

While my primary focus is on the P24 case study I am now working on finding those keywords I want to target and I will begin outsourcing longer content, focusing on around 2000-3500 word posts to start gaining some relevance in these bigger keywords and link my shorter content to the longer to support them.

Outdoor 1 Niche Site

This site is a passion for me and while it has exceedingly irritated me the posts are 90% written by me and I have started building a YouTube channel to bring in a second form of people visiting my site. The channel should start having content next month and this will be interesting to see if it helps change the performance on the site.

Monthly Traffic

This site took some hits in the Google Algo assassination but I have continued to write and there is a lot of content that is nowhere near ranking time, so I’m hoping this is only a limited time slip.

In addition I am tired of changing things to perfectly hit the CWV speeds and I think that the change in theme and setup led to the impacts I see now, so I will be changing nothing on the theme front for the rest of the year and will continue to write when I can.

SERP Rankings

Like with traffic, the Google algo update appeared to hate me, I am hoping for the July to come back and give me some love back as I was moving and looking at getting to that 10k mark but now a little deflated but patient.

Search Console

As you can see below it is a flat line so losing the ranking above didn’t hamper the overall clicks on the content which is a nice sign.

Plan For Next Month

I am hoping for a large boost on the next update but this is why my focus is shifting from time in blogging to time in videos for this site. My focus is going to shift from jamming more content on here to focusing on video content instead for a bit to diversify and build up myself and hope to influence the site.

Outdoor 2 Niche Site

I am actually in progress of selling this site on Motion Invest, it has the potential to be gigantic and I just don’t have the time and ability to push out the work this needs to be what it can be. Instead I can cash out and use this to better focus on my other sites.

Monthly Traffic

Again Google seems to have impacted this site with the quad pack of updates that hit our sites in June, it just helped me make my decision to move on.

SERP Rankings

No issues in ranking overall as growth happened in many ways throughout the site.

Search Console

Console shows slow downward spiral, overall clicks and search is down and I’m ready to move on.

Plan For Next Month

Newer content has been added to the site which may help boost it down the road but at this point I think compressing down on performing sites is a better path forward. This site should be transitioned out soon and this will be the last update on this site.

Outdoor 3 Niche Site

This is a brand new site built with only the P24 new course that was launched this month over on Income School’s Project 24. This uses their new search methodology and puts it to the test, the hope for me is that it helps find lower competition, yet higher search volume content.

Monthly Traffic

While this looks gigantic the actual organic pageviews I believe is 6, somehow I continually get counted even when logged into the site so give this no heed.

SERP Rankings

In the first 60 days that anything has ranking is a miracle and more probably Google testing the content and I hope satisfying the visitors to send out some solid good signals to Google.

Search Console

Getting some impressions but as expected very low average position so something to keep watching, per the timeline this won’t change much for at least 4 more months unless I find a super non-competition keyword.

Plan For Next Month

I have about 300 posts keywords already found and I continue to dig and add on and evaluate ideas to find things marked as high priority where I feel I should be able to win without backlinks and without any huge advantage other than quality content.

Electronics Niche Site

This site was the one I changed from a exact match domain into a more brandable open ended domain, this allowed me the chance to really open up content generation when I had hit a roadblock on the old site. I added a bunch of content but then wanted to let it rest and see what happened and if it would gain traction.

As you can see a boost in 50% on pageviews has given me some more information as to what posts people are interested in and I can now start writing more content knowing it will perform.

As a side note this site has no ads at this time and is running on Cloudflare APO making the load time incredibly fast.

Monthly Traffic

xxxxx

SERP Rankings

Everything has rebounded from the change and has regained the positions lost in the initial cutover and the new posts are already gaining fast!

Search Console

I am very happy as the site is already closing in on 100 clicks from Google each day and the updates didn’t appear to impact this site at all.

Plan For Next Month

Building more information based content and begin building some best x for y will help this site gain more income and to continue adding visitor numbers, hope to add at least 2 posts per week on the site through July and see if they all rank as fast.

Backyard Niche Site

This site is going to be very seasonal but it is currently bringing in visitors and managing a nearly $40EPMV so I am focusing on bringing it up from 50 posts to 100 to start building it up as it has shown the ability to bring in consistent solid income when in season.

Monthly Traffic

This growth is crazy, I am beyond happy with a nearly 50% growth versus the last month, If this keeps up this site will get to around 10,000 pageviews next month!

SERP Rankings

Everything is growing on this site in the rankings without any slips even through 4 Google updates, this has given me the faith to stop twiddling around on it and focus on driving double the content and maybe bigger.

Search Console

This site has had a pretty solid growth over the last couple months, this took far more than 8 months and was actually about 13 months before achieving a way nice growth curve. I am hoping that this will enable my newer content to rank faster than 8+ months.

Plan For Next Month

Continue publishing aiming for 8-10 posts a month to allow me to reach 100 posts before the end of the year, if time allows ramping up to add 20 per month would be favorable.

White Hat Blogging Site

This site I continue to write on when I have time and find something that is viably helpful to readers and not beat to death by other bloggers, this space is rough and views can be hard to come by but I love writing on it.

Monthly Traffic

some weird bot strike made the graph look super poor but the traffic isn’t down when you remove that crappy spike I am about the same and a little up.

SERP Rankings

At least I know how to target topics I can win, I don’t add any of these income reports in tracking so these are more to do with actual blog content ranking and not just income reports flying up.

Search Console

Welcome to the blogging space, really aiming for a month with no zero click days, otherwise it is a very jagged line and shows how hit or miss blogging on blogging can be.

Plan For Next Month

Finding content to blog on but continue moving the YouTube channel forward, I have reached over 1000 subscribers but have only about 2000 watch hours so there is some time to go before reaching monetization.

Hobby Niche Site

This site is more of a test as the space is full of blogs but none of them are necessarily outstanding in my opinion, I have some aging to to before I write more this is just going to stew.

Monthly Traffic

Nothing being added but numbers are up is a good sign on a site thats pretty fresh.

SERP Rankings

Numbers moving up is a good sign

Search Console

Lots of zero days, hoping to see those shrink over time.

Plan For Next Month

Sit on it and just watch it age over time.

Travel Niche Site

This site I am very excited for as it is the one I want to grow since travel is still highly dead getting my foot in the door and being there when travel kicks into full gear could lead to a fast explosive phase of growth. The original set of posts was to gauge overall interest but these results show me that it is worth the time.

Monthly Traffic

142% growth!!!!! Definitely need to keep working on this site and build up into a power.

SERP Rankings

I am choosing highly rankable topics that are also providing traffic so I am excited at this time.

Search Console

NO ZERO DAYS!!!!! Now the push to build this site to 100 posts begins in earnest as it is showing that it has huge potential.

Plan For Next Month

Focus on building more content that is easy to rank for, current goal for this site is to get 4-8 posts per month with the slow up on the other sites this should lead to some ability to make a push on this site.

Business Niche Site

This is more of a flier as there is no real niche sites so there may not be the traffic necessary to support a site or it is really untapped and could be a gold nugget.

Monthly Traffic

While this shows traffic I think most is still me visiting and working on the site, I think organic visitors is 6 for the month.

SERP Rankings

When a site is 2 months old and you see jumping into the top 10 that isn’t always a good sign, it does mean very low competition but could also signal no value to this traffic..

Search Console

A couple heart beats from Google is always nice to see in month 2.

Plan For Next Month

I have about 12 more posts to reach my initial 30 that I had planned out to check and see what this will be and whether it will be worth dropping more time and effort into.

Overall Lessons from June

I think for the first time honestly I was able to look at my sites and see that some were performing amazing that I was providing almost no love to while the sites not showing me an ounce of love were getting my full attention.

This was painful as I am in a small chunk of change to the fitness site but for now I need to really just let that site idle and grow in age, then I can re-evaluate after I see some signs of vitality from Google.

My focus now will be on sites where I see the ability to tremendously grow and dominate that are also evergreen and will be able to pull in solid revenue for years to come without constantly updating the content.

Did I Meet my June Goals?

I was able to hit my subscriber mark for YouTube and have moved up to 1170 from 993 in the last 30 days, this is a cool mark and one when I started I never really expected to reach! Unfortunately I don’t want to just make spam content to add a video a week so I am more random than other channels.

As to my other goal I have made the new P24 case study catch up to the timeline after a slow start due to their launch partway into the month, this makes me 2 for 2 on my goals from May!

What Are my Goals for July?

I have simple goals this month with it being summer, to keep building content on all my sites but with a focus on the new P24 case study site and the new YouTube site along with the push to 4000 watch hours on my White Hat Blogging YouTube channel.

After this the push is to grow the gardening 2, backyard, travel, and electronic sites to 100 posts which is about doubling each of their content over the next 6 months, this will set me up for some big growth that I am currently lacking due to trying to force a high competition niche site.

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.

Josh Koop