There’s bad news, and then there is some more bad news, kind of. Nothing much has improved with my earnings from this site, but, I did sell two of my other sites. It’s “bad” because they sold for significantly less than I could have sold them for this time last year (first-world problems I guess).
But such is the case with business and opportunity I suppose.
I’m not actually upset because our garage went a little over budget, and since I don’t work on these sites anymore (or care about them) they helped pay some bills off quickly. I’m just irritated when I think about other times I could have sold those two sites. But at the time they were doing their best, and I was assuming they would keep doing better.
So, if you have sites that you are considering selling, SELL THEM NOW! Just joking, who knows when the best time is for you. But I’ll break down a bit more of what selling them looked like using MotionInvest.com (I’ll be making a YouTube video once everything is final detailing the process. Short story, MotionInvest is great and it involved almost zero effort on my end).
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
My attention and work on this site has been pretty minimal the past few months, and this is for various reasons. So, in that in regard, I’m happy to see it still has some “decent” traffic, and when I put some more focus back on it I think I can bring “zap” some more life back to it.
Let’s Talk Money
For February 2023, month 19 of this website, the Ezoic earnings were $116.30 (with a $6.22 EPMV)
Last month’s earnings were $197.31.
So the EPMV went down by over a dollar. To be expected in Q1 I suppose, and with the site making a minimal amount of money, I’m not too bothered.
One of the things I did in February was drastically reduce the number of ads on my site. I got rid of everything above the fold and the sidebar sticky ad.
If you’re using Ezoic and want to test this out with the click of a button, Check out Josh Koops’ video on a “hidden” Ezoic Leap setting that makes this easy.
Since my long-term goals with this site is more around personal branding and utilizing myself in videos for both YouTube and Humix. I’m excited to see how videos with myself in them that are captivating perform on Humix, since a lot of the videos on there are A.I. generated or generic, so it’s a way to “stand out”.
But I figured now was the time to take that hit in revenue, since it’s so low anyways.
I’m not saying this is the play for everyone, but I am, incredibly slowly, moving towards building an email list for this site. I even set up a “test site” on my Cloudways hosting to start playing around with the Carbonate 2.0 theme, since I think that theme will lend well to the site.
But I just didn’t feel “comfortable” anymore having my readers bombarded with ads from every direction. I don’t care about that on my other two sites (which are in the process of being sold) since they weren’t my passion or “me” as the brand.
But if I’m going to be building an email list, I want to make the user experience as pleasant as possible, and that starts with reducing ads (which will, of course, reduce revenue).
So, What’s the Plan?
Since I’ve reduced the ads it’s time to prioritize building an email list. I’ve been putting this off for so long and I think it’s because of my perceived up-front investment. I want to create a valuable mental health workbook that people can download when they sign up, then I have to set up all the steps with the Convert Kit.
It’s a bunch of work and time with no guarantee, but like with most things SEO related, once it’s done, it’s a process/machine that runs on its own, so I gotta get on it!
