Greetings anon,
Apologies for the nearly 2.5 month delay. Things have been busy in both the work and side hustle world. We have had an extremely volatile 2023 so far. We continue to get hit with “penalties” that tank traffic for several weeks only to bounce to new highs a few weeks later. We believe (and are hoping) this was due to a technical issue on our end which we have now addressed. Without further ado, let’s get into it!
Traffic & SEO Update
Schema Improvements
Revenue Update
Costs Update
Link building
Social Media Experiments
Wrapping up March
Traffic & SEO Update
Since November we have seen traffic tumble 50%+ three times now. Each of these times we had set up a staging site 1-2 weeks prior. We believe we have narrowed it down to the Google site kit plugin. Our working theory is that the site kit plugin shows Google the staging site, which causes Google to perceive two distinct websites with the same content. We have removed site kit from the site, and we have committed to only work in production late at night from now on.
Despite these hiccups we have continued publishing content that ranks (when this issue is not going on). We currently have 277 posts published and have rewritten an additional 9 that already existed but were thin or low quality. We saw rankings improvements for these posts in between the penalties.
Schema Improvements
As we shared above our traffic tanks every time we set up a staging website. The most recent staging site was meant to radically improve the schema on our review posts. This would have included adding the price, UPC, name, image link, author credentials, reviewer credentials, brand, and amazon rating into the schema of every single product on the site. We are almost at 200 products now so the data collection was not a light undertaking. We will need a VA to manually check prices once a quarter to keep the schema “fresh”. The hope is that providing Google with all this additional info in a structured format will increase Google’s trust in our commercial posts, and in turn positively boost their rankings
Revenue Update
Despite traffic issues revenue has remained somewhat consistent and even with these traffic issues the site still makes ~$100/day. When traffic is “normal” we make around ~$150. We still believe there is a ton of revenue growth potential but sadly we have not been able to see the consistency we want. We made $4,287 in February (short month) and $3,433 (partial penalty).
We have several other verticals we believe we can tackle with the site. However, traffic must be stabilized before we get into other sub niches.
We have 4-5 additional product review posts that should go live sometime in May. Assuming traffic comes back and these posts rank we should be close to $5k in monthly revenue after the dust settles.
Costs Update
The costs right now are pretty much just content, email, and the occasional yearly subscription to a plugin we are already using. On top of this we have a doctor medically reviewing content which was not cheap ~$100/article. This includes a quote, medical citation to back up the quote, and allowing us to use them as a “medical reviewer” on the page. Not sure how much this will move the needle (and nearly impossible to tell with recent traffic fluctuations) but we did this on a few high rev posts that made it worth the gamble.
Going forward the primary costs will continue to be content and links. There is an extremely clear path to get to $5k/month. The key is keeping that consistent for 4-6 months so we can get an exit that reflects that kind of valuation (~$180k).
Link Building
We’ve built a total of 6 links so far this year. All through guest posting on sites in our niche. Haven’t really seen this move the needle, but I expect to do more impactful link building in the next two months or so now that we have posts medical doctors have reviewed.
Social Media Experiment & Running Ads
Last month we began posting infographics on Instagram. One of our affiliate partners agreed to run ads on the post if we put them as the “best choice” on the post and removed the Amazon link so they are forced to buy on the retailer’s website. Within about a week the ads got shut down by Meta and we still have no idea why. We have a ticket open trying to get this resolved as we speak.
As the last few months have shown Google traffic can vanish in the blink of an eye. Getting up and running on other social channels helps diversify traffic, revenue, and makes other affiliates more interested in working with us.
We have briefly paused social as we work through the ad issues but will come back to it shortly.
We also tried several auto follow tools, to try boosting engagement on posts and followers, but it mainly ended up getting follows from other “influencer” accounts doing the same kind of thing and yielded no “real value”.
Wrapping Up March
Needless to say we are hoping traffic comes back in the next 2-3 weeks. We should hopefully have a “mostly normal” May and then throw some serious gasoline on the fire this summer. This substack could have easily been 4x as long but wanted to keep this brief as we get back into it. Expect another recap in the first week of May.
Thanks!
BowTiedWookie
Are you not paying for seo tools?