Besides seeing my 2-year-old daughter dressed up for Halloween, nothing really exciting happened in October. I’m starting to lean toward stopping these monthly reports as nothing exciting has really happened for a while.
But perhaps that’s the whole point. That’s the reality of a lot of businesses, online included. It’s more of a marathon and not a race, especially for the level I’m at.
And, at the very least, things aren’t going drastically downhill, and there are a lot of variables with Google these days affecting the website.
But 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
Here we go…
Google Analytics Traffic
A 20% dip in traffic is a little worrisome, but I’m not panicked. There’s no way to know for sure why this is, but I suspect I’ve lost some rankings for earlier content. I’ve been slowly updating some older content, so we’ll see how that pans out.
There are still about sixty posts that are less than three months old, but considering I’ve primarily been targeting low-competition keywords this might not mean much.
Let’s Talk Money
For October, month 15 of this website, the Ezoic earnings were $452.25 (with a $10.82 EPMV)
Last month’s earnings were $605.61.
This is definitely not what I was expecting for Q4 earnings. However, after attending Ezoic’s Club22 event (click to watch WP Eagle’s video on it) a big take-home message was “this sh*t takes time”.
That’s one of the issues with these monthly or ongoing income reports. There’s a pressure and desire to continuously grow, but that isn’t how it always works.
Sure, some people nail it right out the gate or know how to grow a site big and fast, (or even get lucky, a variable no one likes talking about in business) but that’s not everyone’s experience. I’ve come to accept that this will be a long-term project, and that actually makes me more passionate about it overall.
So, What’s the Plan?
I’ve been slacking on the HARO replies, mostly because I didn’t see immediate and amazing results.
Constantly submitting responses to the HARO emails and not getting any links (let alone replies) gets tiresome quickly. I’d rather focus on some form of content.
I’m going to be starting a lot more video production for this site. I’m building a new garage at our house, and 1/3 of it will be a home office. This will be the first time (ever I think) that I’ll have my own 100% private space.
I can’t f*cking wait.
Once I’m all set up, I’ll be ready to kill the game on a whole new level.