October 2021 Content Site Income Report

Hi everyone, thanks for tuning in.

I’m Jamie, Founder of Neutron Star Digital, and I’ve been running content sites for around 3.5 years now.

For this month onwards, I figured I’d publicly publish those site’s figures (but I can’t tell you the domains or niches, sorry ?) as well as explain the strategies, thought processes, and insights behind what drove the results — or lack of them.

PSA: Neutron Star Digital is an SEO and content agency, but we also run these content sites that monetize via organic search.

Income Report: How Much We Made In October 2021

In October our sites earned a combined revenue of: $18,856.

**As of 11th Nov 2021, revenue is actually $19,023. One affiliate program underreported income by around $150.

All but two of these sites were started by us from scratch, and the two we recently purchased, Site 3 and Site 5, only contributed $1,835 and $20 of that monthly total respectively — around 10%.

Here’s the site-by-site breakdown:

Or if you prefer colorful column charts:

This was distributed into:

• $6,014 from ads
• $1,500 in brand deals
• $11,342 from affiliates

This is our best ever month so far, and I believe is down to a number of factors:

• We’re leading into Q4, and the pre-Black Friday hype has already notably increased ad rates above mid-year levels.
• Our second largest site has been consistently increasing monthly income by around $400 per month and is becoming more of an authority now (it is 11 months old).
• A newly-purchased site is now delivering an additional $1,835 in revenue.
• We took on our first full-time employee this month — though this will likely impact future months, rather than this month immediately.

But that doesn’t tell the full story — let’s get into the nitty-gritty:

Site 1

Our largest site, which earned $14,209 revenue in the last month, is fairly settled and seen as an authority in its product-based niche at this point.

That doesn’t mean we should take our foot off the gas — quite the opposite. We should be jamming the throttle harder than ever now we sit in our privileged position of quick indexing and deluge of affiliate partners.

And that’s what I’ve been trying to do.

✅ Brand deals

We signed $1,500 worth of brand deals for the site in the month — to feature a brand on our of our most popular articles for the next year. Amortized over the 12-month deal it’s $125/m, but I prefer to account for earnings in the month they appear in the company bank account.

We also agreed to a $1,900 deal with another client in the month for similar services, but will not receive payment until November, so this has not been accounted for in the revenue (and trust me, I would love to say we cracked $20,000 revenue this month ?).

These deals take less than half a day’s work to implement, but hey, you’re not paying for the time it takes, you’re paying for the 3.5 years it took to get here. ?

✅ New affiliate partners & increased ad rates

Like many, we were impacted by the halving, Amazon’s halving (or more) of their affiliate rates, back in March 2020. Decrying our lack of independent revenue streams, I resolved to never become so overreliant on one company that one decision could create so much uncertainty.

This prompted experimentation with many other affiliate partners — some fruitful, some less so — as well as putting more work into a steadier income from ads.

Now 18 months on I’m pleased with how this strategy has fared. While this is less scalable as 10+ affiliate programs require more individual work, more fixing links (I’m looking into automating this), and more points of contact within more companies, it has given us a stronger position of reliable income — and I am confident this will transcend into a higher sale multiplier.

New-ish affiliate partners accounted for revenues in October 2021 of:

• $835.17
• $529.71 (down $100+ from last month though ?)
• $789.21
• $674.77 (down from $1,400 last month ?)
• $476.20

And while we earned over $4,000 from Amazon Associates in October 2021, I’m comfortable that we are now sufficiently diversified. The site earned $4,100 from ads, which is also a nice bonus.

This breaks down into around:

• $1,500 brand deals
• $4,100 ads
• $8,600 in affiliate earnings

Our costs were around $2,000 in content, my time, and a full-time employee’s salary which I will roughly distribute over each website, but weighted more heavily falling on this site. That still leaves a healthy profit, but I cannot disclose all those figures as salary data is kinda sensitive ?.

We’re also looking for new niche expert writers. You can apply here.

? Plans for next month

✅ E-A-T

I’ve been doing a deeper dive into Google’s E-A-T factors, which, while not hugely relevant to the site’s niche (it’s not visibly YMYL, or hypercompetitive), has thrown up a few actionable takeaways. Mostly this means narrowing my writer contributors to those with strong expertise credibility, and beefing up author bios and social links.

✅ Big design project

I’m also discussing a complete site facelift, but it has been hard to find a WordPress designer who can do all of this to the standard I require. Beady-eyed readers will see that this blog post is written in WordPress using Generatepress and Generateblocks, and I am a big fan of keeping things simple and having as little custom code and elements as possible — it inevitably breaks.

But, finding a WordPress — and specifically Generateblocks — designer who can create such complex custom blocks is a challenge, and the quote I have received is an eye-wateringly expensive $6,000-$10,000. But it will look really cool, and hopefully mean we can earn even more in future.

Give us a shout if you’re an exceptionally talented Generateblocks designer, or know someone who is.

✅ Hitting more “vs” keywords

While we’ve been hugely successful in hitting “best XYZ product” keywords, there is a lot of spare capacity to write high-quality comparison content in this niche.

Having become an expert and having had hands-on time with so many of the industry’s products, we’re really well-placed to take command of the “vs” keyword sub-niche — yet we haven’t as of yet.

This will be an area we focus on going forwards.

? Targets for next month

Last month we reached $14,209 in revenue, and this actually exceeded our targets. Rather than raise them, I’ll keep our original target, of:

• $15,000 revenue
• 100,000 unique users
• -1% bounce rate on last month

Site 2

Our second largest site has steadily increased by around $400 additional revenue each month, and now earns over $2,700. The site was only created in November 2020, so reaching this level of revenue is something I am really happy with.

Our total spend on content throughout this site’s entire lifespan is less than $4,000 — I wrote some of the content, which reduced costs — and while we are spending a lot on content now, the site is still profitable.

I actually wish it wasn’t! ? I want to spend more on it!

But it’s quite a technical niche, and finding writers who know enough to reach my desired level of quality is difficult. So, sometimes it’s best to publish content slower, but have that content be best-in-show.

We published:

• 15 pieces of new content (around 2,000 words per article).
• Republished 2 pieces of cornerstore content, adding significant amounts of new traffic.

✅ Very strong ad rates

While adding ads to the site hit site speed, we’ve seen incredible results. The site has surpassed our largest site in RPM earnings on ads, at times hitting as high as $65RPM!

Ads now make up around 2/3 of earnings, at around $1,800 per month, and as we plan the site to grow by around 15-20% per month for the next 3-4 months, we hope that ad earnings will increase accordingly.

However, the gravy train does run out in the new year as ad rates fall off a cliff after Christmas. So we will be working to shore up affiliate earnings in the meantime, which I feel we should be doing better considering our traffic and the niche.

✅ Republishing is the way forward ?

While we only republished two pieces of content this month, both significantly gained in both rankings on the search engine and in traffic, adding several thousand extra page views this month.

This was even more apparent last month when we republished 4-5 other popular pieces of content, such as one “best X” ranking which skyrocketed from ~150 weekly page views to over 600. Not only does that mean more ad revenue, but those pages convert into serious sales. That post is now on the first page for a keyword with 33,100 monthly searches.

? Plans for next month

✅ Double down on republishing

Yup. More of the same. How creative.

✅ Publish 20 more articles

We’ve finished the month’s content calendar, and it’s going to be a busy month as we try and hit our end-of-2021 goal of reaching £3,000 in monthly income — around $4,022.

It’s an achievable goal, but means we have to grow 30-40% over the next two months.

Hopefully these 20 articles will rank and start bringing in the required traffic by then, but naturally with SEO there’s a time lag between publishing and your rankings being fully expressed. Hence why we’re going so big on the republishing game.

Most of the articles are very money-focused, mainly affiliate content based on products we know well. In the new year when ad rates and sales are down, we’ll focus on building a stronger structure of high-quality informative content to build our DR and strengthen our authority in the niche.

? Targets for next month

For this site I prefer to have targets for the end of 2021, which are:

• £3,000 ($4,022) revenue
• 40,000 monthly users
• -3% bounce rate from current level

Site 3

Site 3 is one we recently purchased and earned $1,835 this month. I actually believe the real figure when we get paid (we get paid on a net 60-day basis) will be higher, as 5 day’s sales were not tracked properly due to an internal tracking error from our largest affiliate partner.

So that’s unfortunate, and perhaps the real figure was $2,000+.

Either way, I’m happy given that we purchased the site for $28,000 — a multiple based on this month’s earnings of just 18x.

It’s also a really cool niche, so I’m very happy and see a fun route to take this site on a journey to $10,000+ monthly revenue.

✅ More, more, more content — it’s a bit dangerous ?

The site was bought based on an L6M (last 6 months) earning of $1,000/m — a 28x monthly multiplier. This was cheaper than most site purchases because the site is very reliant on one single post for the majority of its revenue.

This is naturally a cause for concern, and in November we plan to finish the entire site niche research within the first week, and then find niche experts to write new content to build up authority, and leave us less at risk in the event the post stops ranking.

✅ Grow the pie — nearby niches, we’re coming for you ?

The great thing about this site is that it’s less specialized to one specific niche. It’s more of a vague, umbrella of possible content clusters (our nerdy SEO name for sub-niches) — which typically I stay away from.

But, in this case it’s undoubtedly exciting. We can branch out into many different areas to write content on, and hire experts to create fantastic content that makes the site an important cultural tastemaker.

I’d say this site has the highest potential ceiling of any of our sites. It’s just up to us to deliver it to relevancy!

Frankly, I’m worried. Things are going too swimmingly, and I’m unhappy about it. It’s unnerving.

This is SEO and Google we’re talking about. If there isn’t a crisis on the horizon, or if everything isn’t on fire, then I have no idea how to react. One thing SEOs are not trained for is how to behave in peacetime. And this is despite the fact we’re 100% white hat only!

However, there are some potential issues:

Amazon is currently not paying us what I think we are actually delivering, due to a link tracking issue we noticed back from September 16th 2021 onwards. Link clicks are down ~40%, so I think we should be earning more, and it’s costing us a couple thousand dollars a month if this is also affecting sales.

Site 3 is so heavily dependant on one post. This could mean revenue drops around 10% (and around 95% for that site) if that post suddenly was de-indexed or fell off the first page. We’re working on this though.

Site 5 literally destroyed itself. I knew I was forgetting something — we did have a disaster this month! Site 5, which we purchased for $5,500 in August, has had problems since we bought it. We were planning on completely scorched earthing it, taking all the architecture out and re-doing the theme, plugins, etc, this month.

However, in that time, before we started getting to work, a malfunctioning plugin meant the site literally deleted itself. No joke. Bye $5,500. You couldn’t even access the WordPress backend — it was deleted completely. We had to restore the whole thing, remove all the plugins (the site is now a garbled mess of shortcodes), and now the site is de-indexed of all its rankings. 0 visitors per day.

But we’ll fix that. Hopefully. I’ve never experienced anything like this before, thankfully.

Overall, it’s been a great month, and things are going unnervingly smoothly. We’ll be hard at work to further secure our position and grow our newer sites that we’ve started in the last few months, as well as grow four sites that we are managing for a client.

If you enjoyed reading this summary and want to learn more about SEO, running your own sites, affiliate marketing, or how to run your own digital business, I recommend you join our email list. We’ll send each income report to you, along with any other informative posts you may enjoy — and you can unsubscribe as soon as you start finding us boring ?.

If your company, or a company you work for, are looking for content or SEO services, feel free to get in touch. We take on limited new clients every year, but we’d love to have a chat if you have need of us.