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.
Well, May 2022 was a doozy, for many practicing building sites with a White Hat approach and avoiding targetted link building this update was pretty much a slap in the face with many losing between 25%-75% of their traffic and some extremes losing up to 90% of their organic traffic.
I took quite a beating across my sites though some were somehow untouched while being built in the exact same manner.
While some may see this and become disenfranchised and may want out but I can’t speak enough about holding the course and continuing to build and learn these hiccups will always happen.
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 May 2022 Income Report!
May 2022 At a Glance
I was on track to hit record after record for visits and income on my websites but this update really cranked me down losing about 35% of all my pageviews meaning I am slightly worried about next month as it heavily dented this month’s income.
As a promise I made to myself, I am not working on my sites for all of June, I am taking this time to go have some family time and a break from the grind that can be sites.
As with most of you, I do want this to be a thing I can take a break from occasionally to get that fresh air and a greater focus on the limited time you have on this planet and not to waste it all behind a computer screen.
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 – 5 posts
- Garden 1 – 0 posts
- Garden 2 – 2 posts
- Outdoor 1 – 1 post
- Outdoor 3 – 10 posts (P24 Method Case Study and YouTube Series)
- Outdoor 4 – 14 posts (Part of Emilia’s Project Icarus)
- Electronics 1 – 26 posts
- Backyard – 0 posts
- White Hat Blogging (This Site) – 1 post
- Travel – 0 posts
- Business – 3 posts
- Popcorn Site – Retired
- Finance – 0 posts
- WHB YouTube – 2 Videos
Total Posts for the month: 61
Monthly Income Breakdown
| Income Source | Income Amount |
|---|---|
| Ads (Ezoic) | 1270 |
| Ads (AdSense) | 33 |
| Amazon Affiliate | 425 |
| Avantlink | 48 |
| ButcherBox | 0 |
| Other Niche Affiliate Programs | 144 |
| Blogging Affiliate Programs - BigScoots | 0 |
| Blogging Affiliate Programs - Jasper.ai | 95 |
| Blogging Affiliate Programs - Cloudways | 5 |
| Blogging Affiliate Programs - Project 24 | 0 |
| Blogging Affiliate Programs - SurferSEO | 0 |
| Blogging Affiliate Programs - Ezoic | 134 |
| Blogging Affiliate Programs - Fiverr | 3 |
| Blogging Affiliate Programs - Passion Posts | 0 |
| Blogging Affiliate Programs - Amalinks Pro | 0 |
| Blogging Affiliate Programs - Frase | 3 |
Monthly Expense Breakdown
| Expense Source | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| Hosting - Cloudways | 26 |
| Amalinks Pro | 14 |
| Link Whisper | 10 |
| Outsourced Content | 450 |
| Ezoic Premium | 0 |
| Canva - Images | 10 |
| Project 24 Subscription | 10 |
| Frase.io | 115 |
| Jasper.ai | 100 |
| Trellis | 30 |
| Ahrefs | 99 |
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
One day I will find the will to write more and focus on this site but it is just hard to gain traction and sheer willpower so this will just continue to age. I love the domain name and the niche has amazing potential I just need to tap into that part of my mind again to grow it.
May Results In Images
Plan For Next Month
Nothing
Site – Garden 1
This site needs some real love, it has never really caught on like I expected but that’s more because it is one of my first sites and just wasn’t as well researched and targeted.
May Results In Images
Plan For Next Month
For now, nothing while focusing on building the income driving sites back from the Algorithm change, thanks to Google.
Site – Garden 2
I took a hit on this site but did just get back the content to push this over the 100 posts mark, unfortunately with the stupid algo update I lost about 25% so I am now just waiting to get a month of history to view old versus new and see where changes hit me hardest to look at where I need to start again.
The next point is to have 4 posts made through outsourcing to keep this site moving forward and growing hopefully to reach that 50k sessions mark hopefully before the end of the year but these little nicks on algorithms hurt when momentum looks to finally be on your side.
May Results In Images
Plan For Next Month
Comparing the pre-algorithm to the post-algorithm will allow me to find what has been lost massively in the SERPs and which keywords were lost that I maybe could target with a more specific post or what I need to evaluate to rewrite and lengthen as necessary.
Add more best content to get some more income back from the lost income and grow out some more consistency in the income of the site.
Site – Outdoor 1
This site I love but found it hard to get the cracks I thought I should win, I am continuing to produce content to get it to 200 posts but I think at that point if it doesn’t spark I may sell it and just move on as it isn’t performing up to what I want and at a point, you need to know when to fold up and move on.
May Results In Images
Plan For Next Month
Continue to build up posts to 200 and work to evaluate and build some additional gear pages to get the maximum return on the visits I do get on the site, simple plan as this site isn’t a key to long term victory any longer now its just preparing to maximize performance prior to sales.
Site – Outdoor 3
The Project 24 Case Study site is just doing exceptionally now that we are in season the growth continues to be 100%+ in organic search which will help get me traffic that could make purchases and increase that affiliate side much more.
The only limitation I have here is maintaining the timeline strictly means I am only adding 5 posts per month now through the end of the 24-month timeline, at this point maybe the gas pedal can be shoved into the floor to launch and sell off the site.
May Results In Images
Plan For Next Month
Adding the next five posts will be focused on longer-form 2000+ word content to maximize the limitation of five posts, look to continue adding one or two new monetized pages in the “best x for y” style as I prefer these to pure review content.
Site – Outdoor 4
This is a revolution on Outdoor 1, a site on a topic that I find amazingly fun and well worth the time to write exceptionally long and high-quality content. My perfect life would revolve around the freedom to do this hobby all day every day.
I continue to find and bring on new affiliates that are high-converting with clicks as they are very popular in the niche which allows me to avoid Amazon (only about 20% of the affiliate income).
May Results In Images
Plan For Next Month
Continuing to work hard on my personal bar of 8-12 long length high content value working on covering the main topic in super detail and providing a supreme value to my visitors, this work has already shown value with a lot of Facebook shares and Discover traffic consistently.
I have written a few reviews but they are on things I physically own and can take images of and adjust if anyone wants to get specific shots or understand something I can easily shoot and provide them a view that matches their needs.
Site – Electronics 1
This site was humming right along until the world ended on March 26th, I mean not really but the site was nearing 30k pageviews within the month when the hammer came down and hit for a hard 25-30% of the overall traffic putting me back now a solid two months.
I’m not worried though and pressing forward to build up more and work on the actual monetization, I didn’t lose much main keywords from SERProbot I lost tertiary terms so hoping after I get more data I can look over a longer period and find what was lost and write highly targeted content on them.
May Results In Images
Plan For Next Month
June is my month off, I have a load of real-life events which will stop me from getting much accomplished but since it is post-update it isn’t a bad thing to let this all idle and sit to gather useful data from GSC afterward.
Site – Backyard
This site is growing as it did last year in season, the only issue is it is short-lived which means I will maximize returns from now until about September which means in the next three months I will hit the end again of this site until 2023.
This one took SERP hits but it makes sense as it has been on so many YouTube videos that I don’t doubt there is a vast array of copycats being built but the joke is on them since it is so seasonal it is just a bad choice without finding a partner niche to fill in at least the rest of your year for income.
May Results In Images
Plan For Next Month
As with above, I am busy and out of town a load of June so I don’t have any real goal here.
Site – WHB
This site is a place to log my growth and results making this move forward as a real single-person shop that doesn’t own a content creation business or the ability to churn real-world work money into sites so growth is all from reinvestment in site income or sweat.
May Results In Images
Plan For Next Month
As with above, I am busy and out of town a load of June so I don’t have any real goal here.
Site – Travel
This site is continuing to perform well with limited content as there aren’t even 30 posts live, this site I want my wife to take over but for now, she still doesn’t buy into this whole “make money online” strategy so I will now work to bring this site to 100 posts and it has a top out at probably 1000s of posts so I should be able to keep working it for a while to come.
May Results In Images
Plan For Next Month
As with above, I am busy and out of town a load of June so I don’t have any real goal here.
Site – Business
This site is more a test of a niche where I didn’t see many ways to monetize short of ads, I feel like I may have found a few affiliates so I may attempt to target those in a few posts to see what conversion looks like but other than that I need to keep building and learn more on lead sales.
May Results In Images
Plan For Next Month
As with above, I am busy and out of town a load of June so I don’t have any real goal here.
Site – Finance
This site is more fun and I have lazily posted as they are more work to research and win and currently the site makes zero dollars which means it gets nearly zero percent of my attention.
May Results In Images
Plan For Next Month
As with above, I am busy and out of town a load of June so I don’t have any real goal here.
Overall Lessons from May
As usual Google algorithms make for fun dips and you just need to learn to not quit at the roughest times, like on the trail you never quit on the worst day as it will lead to constantly quitting and not success.
So I have just continued with the plan I’ve had in place which is to continue to grow my sites and reach that 200-250 posts mark for my primary sites and 100 posts on anything I am incubating to test and evaluate for long-term growth.
Did I Meet my May Goals?
I was able to create my 2 videos and continue to advance my sites forward with 26 posts being added to the electronics site, unfortunately, the update made them look worse for wear but I hope as they rank in I will start moving back in the right direction with user input.
What Are my Goals for June?
Unlike other previous months, in June I have decided to take fully off from building content and site work and instead focus on choosing to have family time and summer vacation over more digital time.
I want to get a month post algorithm update anyway before evaluating to have good data to get myself moving forward after the fake gurus chime in on AI, or whatever buzzword they will eventually use to blame the boogeyman.
| Posts | PVs Per Post | Posts to Reach 100k |
|---|---|---|
| 30 | 3334 | (Near Impossible) |
| 50 | 2000 | (10 Year Vet With Luck) |
| 100 | 1000 | (Amazingly Skilled Content Selection) |
| 200 | 500 | (Quality Blog Keyword Selection) |
| 250 | 400 | (Above Average Keyword Performance) |
| 300 | 333 | (About Average Keyword Selection) *Normal Performance* |
| 500 | 200 | (Keywords Target To Small of Audience) |
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 make magical and informative content.
- Frase.io – I use this to build out my outlines for posts and then once done writing to 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 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.
- 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.
