Exciting news! Sorry, it’s not website related…
We’ve been having a garage built at our new house, something we really needed storage-wise to make it functional for us. We got the permit in February 2022, and it’s now November 2022, which should tell you what it’s like doing any sort of home renovation these days.
It was awful having people outside our house working all day, but enough complaining. One-third of the garage is a home office with high-speed internet, and I’m absolutely loving it. Ever since we had our first child in 2020, I’ve sort of been a recluse having to quietly work and unable to do much of anything that makes noise.
Now, I can even sneeze when I need to.
I’m really looking forward to 2023, I think this new space and freedom is going to offer a lot more opportunity for content creation and general workflow. Reflecting on my life before having a child, I shake my head at all the time I wasted. So if you’re reading this and child-free, get to work!
Regarding the website, nothing much changed, good or bad. 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
Google Analytics Traffic
It’s basically the same as last month, but I get to feel a little better that it’s back in the 40ks.
I definitely won’t be breaking the 100k PVs like I had hoped back in April. If I can do what I want with this site and brand, it’ll be a long-term project, potentially branching into a podcast or something more community focused like that.
Let’s Talk Money
For November, month 16 of this website, the Ezoic earnings were $442.80 (with a $10.41 EPMV)
Last month’s earnings were $452.25.
I’m definitely at a plateau with this site where I’m gaining and losing rankings that leave me “staying still” and not really progressing. I’ve made a few more Flickify videos and a few more playlists with the hope that the videos get a bit more engagement on the site, leading to more ad views.
However, I think it’s also time to start creating my own authentic videos, as I have a feeling this will help a lot more with engagement. Whether it’s just turning articles into a “tl;dr” or putting a bit more effort into some of them, I think this site will lend well to authentic videos
So, What’s the Plan?
I recently had an SEO consult with one of Ezoic’s SEO specialists. This is something that’s usually reserved for their higher-level members, but my account manager was able to set it up since I do some “influencer” and sponsored work with them.
It was very informative and motivating. I feel like I have an actual “game plan” for updating my old content and for new content. When I was really busy back in April, I was just outsourcing and putting up content as fast as I could for my websites, and I ended up skipping over a lot of on-page SEO strategies that I should have taken the time to implement.
While I’m not going to detail all the tips that were given to me, I highly recommend checking out the Semrush Blog article “The Anatomy of Top-Performing Organic Content in 2022” which uses a lot of data to breakdown why top-ranking articles are top-ranking.
It essentially goes back to “do better than the competition”, but gives some great specific details of what better means (no, it’s not just longer content).
For me and this website, I’m going to enjoy sprucing up some older posts with infographics and videos, because I’m passionate about the topic matter.
Oh, I’m also doing a couple of videos for Ezoic on Humix and Flickify and will be running a test to see how well a bunch of article-specific Flickify videos perform over 30 days. I think it’ll be an interesting case study, as I’ve barely utilized video for my outdoor and dog site, so stay tuned on the Youtube channel!
