November 2021 Content Site Income Report

It has probably been the most hectic month we’ve had since we started, now that we run so many sites concurrently alongside the mania that accompanies Black Friday — and the resulting deals that need to be constantly updated.

Franticness is good in moderation however; it keeps the mind sharp. And our reward was by far our highest ever revenue for the month.

Niche Content SEO Site Income Report: How Much We Made In October 2021

In November 2021 we earned: $36,547.18.

That’s a big gain compared to last month (93%!), and more than double just a few months ago. We’re super happy with the success the sites have reached, especially our second largest site which earned a whopping $6,291, despite the site only turning a year old that month.

Colorful chart version:

These figures and progression updates don’t include any client work, and the affiliate consulting work we do for another client. We currently manage and are in the early stages of growing four sites for that client, with a revenue and sale price split deal. We hope to hire 3-4 writers to work on those sites in the next few weeks, and generally start moving forwards quicker.

Here’s how it went down:

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

✅ Black Friday

Black Friday is the main reason why earnings are up so significantly. Ad rates were through the roof for our sites ($57 ePMV average on Ezoic in Nov 2021, $41 RPM on Adthrive), and we earned a total of $8,901 From ads during the month, an increase of $2,907 over last month. 

This was expected, and Q4 is always when you’ll make the most money, before tumbling in the new year and gradually working its way back up throughout the year.

Black Friday also brings out the carnal capitalist in us all, so affiliate sales, as expected, were up. Affiliate earnings across every site totaled $22,784, an increase of $11,326 on the previous month.

To put this into perspective, we had 6,038 page views on our largest site on Black Friday, earning an ad income of $351.42 for a single day’s ads on that site. That’s $58.20 RPM. And then we earned $512 on Amazon that day. We earned $800+ on November 30th on Amazon in the USA alone.

We’re super happy, and hope to match that in December before naturally declining into January. We’re focusing all our efforts on short-term gains to drive page views and sales while revenues are relatively up, as the opportunity cost of building a long-term structure is so high.

This means that a lot of brand building, informational content writing, and other tasks that can build a successful, respected long-term brand, are being pushed over into January, in favor of reposting already ranking content and similarly short-term gain plays.

✅ Growing the team ?

We’ve also spent a number of days interviewing new potential writers for our sites, and setting test articles to see if they’ll be a good fit. If you want to write for us, and want to earn money while honing your writing, narrative, storytelling, and digital marketing skills, feel free to apply here.

We spoke to some great people, and we’re really grateful to everybody who applied, and hopefully some will work out. We want to hire a number of freelance writers across November and December to work on some of our sites, so we’ll update this again in our December 2021 report.

✅ So… our site kind of blew up ? (and not in traffic ?)

We’ve also paid a web developer to work on the technical backend parts of two of our sites this month. The work is ongoing, but one site we recently purchased has been particularly plagued by issues — it literally deleted itself, including WordPress, entirely — and has been de-indexed completely by Google. We hope that this work will fix the site so that it is no longer a problem, as well as get the content out of the outdated page builder and into Gutenberg’s native editor for faster content editing and updating.

When we bought the site it was earning around $200 per month, and despite the content not being very good, we liked the niche and so we were basically paying a $5,500 fee to skip the Google sandbox phase as the site already ranked — we’d have to rewrite the content anyway. However, it has since destroyed itself and gets 0 users per day now, and we need to get it re-indexed.

✅ Brand deals

Brand deals made up another big chunk of our income. In September we had one new brand deal for $900, in October we increased this to $1,500, but in November we were paid around $4825 after taking into account Paypal’s exorbitant transaction costs (originally $5K).

That was a nice bit of extra cash to start the month off with. $2,000 was to feature three of a brand’s products in one of our most popular articles for a year, and $3,000 was to publish some sponsored content and to host a banner ad on our largest site’s sidebar for some time in November and December. Not bad.

? Negotiations

We may also be buying another site, though this is very complicated and is unlikely to be completed soon. The figure quoted is around $70,000.

When you’re as busy as we are, the default answer to taking on more work should generally be a convinced no, and any opportunity should be extraordinary as to tip that balance towards yes. However, this could be an interesting opportunity — the site blends content, e-commerce, and it’s an intriguing possibility.

I know someone who has the exact expertise the site needs to become far, far bigger, so I will chat to him and see if he wants to be involved. If he does, that makes the deal a lot sweeter.

Site 1

This site had an absolutely huge month, and still makes up the bulk of our monthly revenue. Our largest site earned $28,037 in November. This is an increase of 95% on last month, and is broken down into:

• $4,825 in brand deals
• $6,260 ad revenue
• $16,952 affiliate earnings

According to thewebsiteflip, the average multiple for a website sold on Empire Flippers, one of the world’s largest sites for selling internet assets, is 42.67 (as of November 27th 2021).

Multiplying this site’s income by 42.67 gives it a value of $1.19m, which is pretty cool. The real value is lower than this, as this is inflated revenue during Black Friday (sites are typically priced on the mean of their last 6 months’ earnings), and sites like Empire Flippers take 15% commission on any sales anyway – and that doesn’t even factor in tax ?.

Upgrading site experience ?

We paid $2,800 to commission a custom product review block with a WordPress design company that is nearly completed, and we’re happy with how it looks so far.

Hopefully, this will improve our conversions of product reviews as well as rankings via the better user interface, and prove good value for our investment. With some tweaking, we should be able to use this custom block on all our other sites, too.

I’ll update this when we get some conversion data in and whether this is better than previously – the block isn’t live on any of our sites yet.

These 6 lines of CSS could make you thousands of dollars

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the figures, one very interesting experiment we ran involved changing the link color to red, and adding an underline on links in the body of our content. 

Literally, just change the link color in your theme’s settings, and then add the tiniest bit of CSS. The CSS is literally just:

body .entry-content a {
  text-decoration: underline;
}
body .entry-content a:hover {
  text-decoration: underline;
}

The results were huge for such an insignificant change:

• Bounce rate went down by 2.1%
• Session duration increased 5.5%

This was compared with the week before, and was over a sample of over 40,000 page views. So that’s a huge opportunity for anyone who has left their links fairly standard.

Driving big affiliate sales

Apart from the $4,825 in brand deals which we probably won’t beat out in a single month for a long time, and generally increased ad rates, other ways we managed such an increase in revenue is by increasing sales with some of our affiliate partners.

For example, one affiliate partner we work with, a company known for receiving investment on TV’s Shark Tank, sent us a product to review.

The review struck a chord with readers, and that affiliate program went from earning $334 in October, to earning $5,041 in November. Other affiliate partner earnings include:

1. $1,096 ($322 in October)
2. $1,373 ($530 in October)
3. $870 ($780 in October)

These are some nice general increases, though perhaps to be expected during Black Friday and the Christmas season.

We published an article highlighting every Black Friday deal in the site’s niche, and actually, it didn’t get much traction. We should have spent more time marketing it, such as by posting it on Reddit and other places, but that is a mistake we won’t make again.

General publishing and republishing

We published 9 new articles on the site in October, and updated and improved another 5 articles throughout the month – usually high-traffic and high-ranking articles we wanted to boost further, or those that had recently slipped. We plan to publish significantly more than that in December, and I spent a day last week combing Semrush and Ahrefs for keywords we previously missed in our research.

Overall, it’s been a fantastic month for the site, reaching 12.6% more users than in October, a solid upwards trend even if this can be partially explained by Black Friday. This is great news, especially as many sites have reported large traffic decreases resulting from the ongoing Google Core Update that has been rolling out throughout the month.

As long as we continue to add users throughout the next months, we’ll be well-placed to weather the downturn in the New Year, and have a strong core base to have an even better Black Friday and Christmas 2022.

Site 2

Site 2 turned a year old this month, and celebrated its first birthday by more than doubling in earnings. Whereas the site earned a very respectable $2,769 in October, it smashed this record in November by earning $6,291!

When I started the site, I didn’t expect such quick and strong growth, and I’m truly thrilled with the results. The site earns more in a month than I have spent on it in total, costing around $3,500 in content and a few hundred in general ongoing costs if you amortize the SEO and other software we use over each site.

By the way, we’re happy to make a post about all the software we use to run our agency/niche sites if that’s something you want to know.

The earnings breaks down into:

• $2,641 ad revenue
• $2,565 Amazon affiliate earnings
• $1,083 earnings from other affiliate programs

The site had around 34,000 unique users in November, an increase on the 23,414 users in October. This is really positive, and it’s great to see we’re on target to hit our 40,000 user goal in December.

Finally converting like it should ?

We signed up to a couple of new affiliate partners for this site this month, which earned $49.99 and $162 respectively, topping up the earnings. Another affiliate program we have been registered with for a while, but that had never delivered any earnings, suddenly drove $517 in November, which further boosted income. These sales came right at the tail end of the month, at around Black Friday time, so hopefully will be higher next month when they’ve had an entire month to convert.

Amazon earnings were $1,700 higher than the previous month, which is good but perhaps expected, and another affiliate program earned $300, a big increase on the $75 it earned in October.

All in all, we posted 7 new articles in November, and reposted 3 more. This is actually less than I would have liked: things were so frantic that I couldn’t focus more on my time on reposting some moderately popular content with huge potential — but we’ll get to this soon.

Site 3

We’re currently in the hiring process to find some new writers to write for the various niches this site covers. We purchased this site for $28,000 a few months back, and relative to the price it has been delivering well.

The site earned $2,182 in November, a small but decent increase on October’s $1,835. We barely spent any time on this site, but will invest heavily in both time and money over the coming months when we have onboarded our writing team. As a result however, I have very little to update you on as no content was posted or updated.

Site 4

This is one of the new sites we’re preparing. It has probably the highest ceiling of all our sites in terms of the largest niche market size, and it’s a fast-growing niche with even wider potential as it becomes more mainstream, which breeds both super tough competition, and potentially great rewards.

We have published around 45,000 words of content on the site so far, spending around $2,500, as well as much of our own time. The site still currently only gets a handful of users per day — just 89 this month. The site earned $38, a paltry sum especially compared with the investment (and opportunity cost) of creating this content, but this is a site that has enormous potential and I am keen to spend more time preparing it for massive growth in the new year.

What we’re focusing on in December

Hiring

Onboarding more writers is going to be a major part of the next few weeks. There’s a fair few factors in unearthing fantastic writers who are going to be a great addition to the team, and it’s a more complex process than you might think. We might publish an article on our strategy in the future if you want to read more.

We’re planning on spending more than ever on creating more, and better, content than we’ve ever created before. And to do that we need a larger team! If you want to work with us, feel free to drop us a message.

CRO

I have spent some time drawing up a complete list of tweakable factors and guidelines for improving conversion rate on our sites, leading to higher affiliate sales mostly. If people want to see this, I’ll post it in the future.

Time needs to be spent on each high-earning page optimizing for these factors, but this should eke out another 10-15%. 

Site 3

While site 3 earned over $2,000 in November, we’ve neglected it. In fact, since we purchased it back in August, we haven’t really done anything with it except hire a developer to improve the site speed. 

We haven’t treated the site well enough, and we’re focusing much more heavily on the site from December onwards. Our plan is to grow this site to earn £10,000 per month (~$13,300 currently) by the end of 2022 (we’ll post our full targets at the end of the year!), and with that goal in mind we’re currently onboarding a number of writers for the site.

Client sites

I can’t really speak too much on this topic as these aren’t our sites, but sites we are helping grow on behalf of clients. But, this month we’re placing a larger emphasis on four sites we are growing for a client. We hope to earn around $200,000 from this deal, and hope to have grown these sites to fruition by the end of September 2022.

Do you want to do the same? Or do you want to grow your company’s organic traffic?

Hey :). I’m Jamie :). We can help with that. We run our niche sites to test our latest theories on SEO and generally sharpen our content writing skills, but we’re also available for certain amounts of client work, as well as consulting agreements with those looking to venture into the SEO/niche site game for themselves. Just get in touch here.