Case Study Update – Month 11 Project “s²”

Month 11 featured image for dotficks.com project s2

Well, this site finally had its first step backward. Considering what happened to one of my other sites, and what I’ve been hearing about from others, it’s not too bad.

I’ve watched a few videos about previous major Google updates, like the Penguin and the Medic updates, and it kind of feels like June 2022 was along those lines…

Anyways, things aren’t catastrophic for this project in June, there’s just a slight drop in traffic and earnings.

Awesome…

In case you’re not aware, here’s the tl;dr on the site specs:

  • Cloudways Vultr hosting from the start
  • Ezoic ads from the start
  • GeneratePress Theme (basic setup)
  • Aged Domain (22 years ripe)

Let’s keep it simple and jump into the analytics and earnings.

Google Analytics Traffic

Ouch, all red…

I’ll just consider myself lucky this is the extent of things. It’s not necessarily all to do with the core update.

There’s a chance there’s a seasonality aspect…right?

Let’s Talk Money

For June, month 11 of this website, the Ezoic earnings were $509.79

Last month’s earnings were $634.68. That’s a 16.61% decrease. And since last month was the first decrease, it’s also a 27.36% decrease from April’s earnings, which were the highest month’s earnings to date.

While I was hoping it would be getting closer to the $1,000 mark, this isn’t terrible. Just need to be more patient…again.

So, What’s the Plan?

I’m doing one more 25k order from PassionPosts. I’m not unhappy with their quality, I just think my best move is to minimize all costs and get back to creating all the content myself. I’ll probably do this until the end of the year, and create some video content as well for this site.

But I’m also planning on taking a big chunk of time off in July. It’s much needed. I’ll be going up to a cottage with my family and intend on not bringing a computer. I’m not much of a phone person, so the intention is to mostly unplug.

And, of course, I plan to keep killin’ the game.