September 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.

The abuse from Google with updates has been pretty insane for the last three months, but I continue to trudge ahead.

Having lost a solid chunk of pageviews overall is pretty challenging to absorb, but you have one of two things you can do when it does.

Quit or Double Down

So I am working more lately on adding less content volume to the hit sites and to work on cleaning up and running a content audit on them to see why I lost placements and how I can get them back again.

This means the overall content output will slow for Q4, but it should yield better results over time.

Since not much new content could rank within Q4 anyway, revamping and resubmitting may yield better results with much more speed.

That being said, let’s dive into my earnings numbers and show the path is more of a roller coaster with ups and downs than many anticipate, and definitely not get rich quick…. more like at a snail’s pace.

Goals For Income Breakdown By 2023:

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

I had been focused on pushing all my sites to a minimum of 100 posts, which for the most part, I have now hit with a majority of them. Now with audits, my focus will be on clean-up and then look with inexpensive tools like Lowfruits and Keyword Chef to find hidden gems.

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

September 2022 At a Glance

The Google beatings have continued, and morale has not improved. I did have a glimmer that electronics were coming out of the full-on beating it had been getting since May 2022 but as quick as it was nice, it dropped like a rock again.

My stance has to change to manage my will and to ensure I don’t decide to just backburner the whole thing, which means taking more time at home and more vacation time hiking and getting away from the world as it is where I do the best thinking anyway.

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 look back historically and can see where I was along with my thoughts 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 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 suggest joining the course from Income School called Project 24. It can help you when you have no clue to get solid footing for an excellent cost.

If you want a far more technically based learning experience, you can look at another well-detailed affiliate marketing class from Affiliate Lab and Matt Diggity.

Overall Content Generation Breakdown

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

• Fitness – 0 posts
• Garden 1 – 0 posts
• Garden 2 – 0 posts
• Outdoor 1 – 0 posts
• Outdoor 3 – 5 posts (P24 Method Case Study and YouTube Series)
• Outdoor 4 – 21 posts (Part of Emilia’s Project Icarus)
• Electronics 1 – xx posts
• Backyard – 0 posts
• White Hat Blogging (This Site) – 1 post
• Travel – 0 posts
• Business – 0 posts
• Backyard 2 – 20 posts

• WHB YouTube – 1 Video

Total Posts for the month: 47

Monthly Income Breakdown

Monthly Expense Breakdown

My Niche Site Updates

Let’s dive into the site stats and details to help lend such 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

Same as last month but I did split off the dietary content to see if it will rank as it never moved to the top 100 on this site, this is more a test to see if the domain itself has some invisible issue that limits reach of the content.

Monthly Traffic

Plan For Next Month

Nothing site is on bed rest

Site – Garden 1

Believe there was more traffic here than there truly is; without massive expertise, the issue will still be limited growth. This is the last month this will be listed as I shelve it and focus on sites with true growth potential in their place.

Monthly Traffic

Plan For Next Month

Nothing site is on bed rest and removed from reporting moving forward.

Site – Garden 2

I got to 100 posts and took a beating from the Google algo’s, so instead of adding more I am working to clean up the content that is there and look for whats maybe dragging the site down or what I can add to each post to increase value.

Monthly Traffic

Plan For Next Month

Continue revisions and updates to all posts, ad more links to longer content that covers topics in great depth.

Site – Outdoor 1

Much like outdoor 4, getting through the layers of big business on this site has proven harder than expected but have a few newer ideas from taking time to look for the ultimate beginner questions and problems.

Monthly Traffic

Plan For Next Month

Work on updating content as much is over a year old and freshen up while vetting ideas I have on plausibly very open topics.

Site – Outdoor 3

As expected, the season came to an end and in a close match to Google Trends, the graph started to go down.

I am continuing to add content and much like year one much will be done without knowing if it will pay off until the season hits again next year.

Monthly Traffic

Plan For Next Month

Continue to post five more posts to manage the timeline and keep this growing through next season and what will be month 24, where we hope to beat $4000 in a month.

Site – Outdoor 4

I love this site and will continue to create content for as long as I live. Unfortunately, a large part of the traffic comes from Google Discover, so it can be like a roller coaster with highs and lows based on uncontrollable traffic.

As you can see, at the end of the month Discover died off after peaking in early September, which shows more about what the actual organic traffic is at this point.

My focus is to continue growing content volume but I will begin to reach out to others I know in the space about working together on projects or guest posting to help them and myself grow.

Monthly Traffic

Plan For Next Month

I continue to post 8-12 posts on my site each month. Each is written by me without outsourcing as this subject is far more subject-sensitive, and editing would be burdensome.

Site – Electronics 1

Electronics is such a pain in the rear, I was hit a while back and it took me down to the traffic you see but then after this update chain happened traffic was “turned on” again.

I do hope this traffic keeps up and I don’t get punted back down as it was hard to go from over 1000 visits a day to sub-200 but with nothing changes I got all back again towards the end of the month.

Monthly Traffic

Plan For Next Month

Just watching it, for now, to see what the reaction is on the site and whether it grows, stalls, or, worst case, declines yet again back to where it was.

If it declines, I will be going into a complex review through the next couple of months as 200 posts take some serious time to edit when still working to grow other sites.

Site – Backyard

This site is going down as usual at the end of the season; this has happened every year I have run it, but the additional sadness is how much traffic was boosted due to the pandemic for the previous years.

Monthly Traffic

Plan For Next Month

Will be working on updating content and looking for new cracks that can be good to pay off during the season the site is popular. Adding more content now will help for the new season next year.

Site – WHB

This is used solely to track performance on my sites and to serve others looking at the journey.

Monthly Traffic

Plan For Next Month

N/A

Site – Travel

This is the next site to start the journey to 100 posts to get itself moving and growing hopefully to become a solid income earner.

Monthly Traffic

Plan For Next Month

Starting in more on keywords and then will begin outsourcing content creation to get to at least 5 posts each month growing and as income grows use it to add more content.

Site – Business

I have been back to publishing content I had backlogged on for a few months, hoping this will start kicking the growth back into overdrive and push this site towards that 100 post mark to see what it can pay out.

Monthly Traffic

Plan For Next Month

Continue catching up with the backlog of content I had done months back that never was published, this is the issue with too many sites for one person and losing focus on what you have in what places.

Site – Backyard 2

This site I think can be a solid performer in both ads and affiliates and as it grows, it should be able to be a strong income generator. I do think that since yard-related, it will have some seasonality to it but I feel this is worth the test since it could pay out so well.

Monthly Traffic

Plan For Next Month

Continue publishing at around 5 posts per month to push towards the 100 post mark and then change to another category to publish the next 100 posts, truly believe this site could easily have 1000 posts and that they don’t all have to be 2000+ word behemoths.

Overall Lessons from September

Regardless of following a “white hat” style site building, Google will target and hit your site regardless which makes building and saving some income vital to long-term success.

This also showcases why this is not some get-rich-quick process and many sites take a long time to mature and that growing a site is much like a child with tons of care and attention being needed over years and years.

Did I Meet my September Goals?

My email lists keep growing but I need to put more time into building email sequences to get quality value from them.

I was able to hit the 60k word goal and was closer to 75k by the end of the month and so I hope this will help spur sites faster forward, especially into Q4.

I built two best content but need to focus more on this for Q4 to maximize returns.

What Are my Goals for October?

My focus is more on clean-up and maximizing the return on the created content, there may be a few buyer guides and other similar content, but overall, I find the push of volume just leads to less and less performance in general.

I am continuing to work on a few targeted best xx for yy pages for Black Friday and to gather more affiliate sales, not trying to make my whole site this but to provide visitors the chance to make a purchase through me has yielded this strong performing month.

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.

Josh Koop

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