December 2021 Content Site Income Report

It’s now 2022, and I know most people are glad to see the end of 2021. The lockdowns, the pandemic, the stops-and-starts. Which is sad, given that it’s a year we’ll yearn to return to when we’re old and nostalgic – but for now, if feels like we’re living life with our thumb pressed firmly on the fast-forward button.

December is always a good month for affiliate marketers as it follows on from Black Friday’s consumerist ritual, and leads into the rampant capitalist encore: Christmas.

Not only are sales up as the world rushes to buy their children, partners and co-workers presents, but ad rates rocket in November and December particularly – for us, we’ve found they stabilise at around 1.5x as high as January (our AdThrive rates were $35.46 in December vs $26.81 in January, and our Ezoic ePMV was $47.69 vs $31.55 in January).

So, here’s our rundown of the last month, and of 2022 generally. I start with the general lessons we learned and observations and big changes, as well as going over major developments on each site, and which sites earned more money, and which declined.

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

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

Despite the season to be (affiliate-wise) jolly, we earned less than we did in November. Whereas we made over $36,000 in revenue across our sites in November 2021, in December we earned: $29,609.

Why the decrease? And is it a systemic problem? Is the house of cards crumbling down?

Well, firstly, there are two ways of perceiving an output. You can either be process- or results-oriented. I’d rather be process-oriented.

We expected to see a drop in earnings in December, mostly because November was such an inflated month that far surpassed expectations, so the drop represents a regression to the mean, rather than a symptom of freefall.

We earned almost $5,000 in brand deals in November which we do not build into our expectations, and an affiliate partner we also had low expectations for suddenly earned us another $5,100 from a product review we wrote that took off.

Looking closer, therefore, a drop of $7,000 was to be expected, with last month’s highs built on inconsistent and difficult-to-replicate foundations. We are working very hard however on making bigger and better foundations that will elevate our sites to new highs – we want to, and believe we can, go way higher.

You can either optimise for the result, or the process. And I maintain that the process is far more important than the result. Our sites are in a much stronger position than they were in November: we’ve worked generally on EAT and promoting our writers’ expertise, we have hired another 7 writers to work on our sites and increase our output, refined our guidelines and other internal documents to be more scalable for the future (for writer onboarding, submissions, etc), and improved a lot of content from good to great.

All these factors make me feel confident that if we continue to act boldly, to search for areas to improve and learn more, and act with integrity, grit, and work effectively, we can grow our sites to new heights in 2022, deliver extraordinary content that adds to people’s lives…and make a ton of money.

December 2021 General Rundown

Hiring ?

Much of December was spent dealing with the fallout of something we did: putting a job ad out for niche site writers.

It was quite the fallout; combing through the portfolios of so many talented writer applicants to arrange calls and test articles was a real undertaking, and it always feels rough to have to say no to anyone or anything – never mind talented, motivated people that we could help develop so they could achieve their goals in life.

But business is business, and regrettably, you can’t work with everyone. We narrowed down the hundreds of applicants to just below twenty, and of those twenty initial interviewees, we offered freelance writing contracts to 8. 

We’re super happy with the great writers we found. 

I used talented two paragraphs ago to describe the applicants, though, and I already regret it. Talent is overrated, and a reason to either not try because you have “it” and you’re special, or give up because you don’t.

Our hiring process is always character-focused – who are you, what do you want to achieve, how motivated are you to achieve it, and how can we align our goals with yours to create a mutually beneficial partnership. Talent is a factor, yes, and IQ plays a non-zero role. We’ve got writers who have that X factor, they’re gifted perhaps – who knows. Or maybe it’s that they take their work seriously, are always seeking to find areas to improve, and force themselves to be cognisant of every factor at play in the construction of excellent content. To someone uninterested in peering deeper, it’s easy to dismiss this organised, determined workflow as “talent” – but it’s far more nuanced than that.

The only thing I would change about our hiring process – and that I have learned for the future – is that we perhaps went too general. We hired a number of niche experts who are also great writers, and so the result appears fantastic. But that would be results-oriented, rather than process. But our process of posting on more general job sites could be improved.

In future, I will seek to hire directly from the communities for niches we are writing content around, rather than post a general writing ad that lists areas of expertise we are looking for. We filled around half the vacancies we had, but didn’t fill any of the really tricky ones that would have been a huge result if we’d managed to find. So this month we continue to try and find those niche writers, and we’ll be hitting Facebook groups, subreddits and other niche-specific community areas to find the perfect writers.

In case you care, our writing hiring process is:

1. Post job
2. Receive applications, sort well-suited candidates to chat more with
3. Set up 20-30 min video interview with character-based questions
4. Set a fully-paid test article of around 2,000 words
5. Hire

Adapting to Google Product Review Update ?

We don’t subscribe to the do-the-bare-minimum-to-rank-and-make-money philosophy, and I’ve previously gone back-and-forth with people arguing for a value-focused way of writing, editing and outsourcing content to a team. So I was surprised when our second largest site, which earned over $6,000 in November 2021, was hit hard in the search results around the time that Google’s Product Review update came around.

On around the 1st of December, the site fell from 1,800 users per day, to 800. Things eventually recovered very slightly, to 900-1000, but this is still a marked decline from November’s highs.

The Google update, designed to improve the quality of affiliate-focused articles, targets lower-quality reviews, for example that clearly haven’t tested any of the products, have not notably differentiated their reviews from Amazon product descriptions, and that don’t include multiple different places to buy the product from (e.g. only including a high-paying affiliate program site to try and force the user to make a sale there).

At the time I thought we were solid in that area, as we focused so heavily on content, over link-building and other areas. Nevertheless, we were hit.

Going through our popular, affected pages I actually came to agree with Google’s decision: some of our content wasn’t good enough. In fact, a closer assessment found a few pieces of content that really didn’t have very good content at all, and I’m surprised the content ever performed as well as it did.

One product review article, which prior to the update received around 2,000 page views per week (now down to 300-400 per week), was genuinely dreadful, and I don’t know how it passed our editing process. I take full accountability for that, and have since changed our briefing process and beefed up our writer guidelines to prevent this from happening in the future.

We’ve countered the update by adding evidence of really using the products we have tested, added a higher level of information, linked out to resources that further show the products in use, and tried to better inform readers on which products are for them, vs products that wouldn’t work for them – based on various aspects like budget, experience, certain niche uses, and more. 

As of 19th Jan 2021, almost a month and a half later, however, this hasn’t had much effect, and the site still languishes on around 1,000 users per day, so we will further investigate how we can improve the content, or improve in another area to grow to new heights.

CRO, Republishing and Schema ?

December is the time where your time is the most valuable, and also when making any changes that take your site offline, or running risky experiments to find out conversion data, should be shelved and moved to January when earnings are low.

Time is dynamic, and you should make big, volatile changes when your time is cheap in Q1-Q3, and just gun it out to make the big bucks in Q4.

Our time being so valuable in December, we focused on short-term value generators, republishing existing, successful content to convert better, rank better in the very short-term, and earn more. 

We did this by assessing competing content that outranked us as we normally did, as well as adding extra sections to the buyer’s guide parts, and FAQs with the relevant schema to try and snipe those extra spots. I didn’t focus enough on these non-affiliate areas of buyer’s guides before, and our new brief writing system now focuses much more on these, as well as FAQs for long-tail question keywords, which is another area we tried to optimise for this month. 

The actual content is only one form of CRO however, and we also spent $3,400 (~£2,500) on a custom-designed affiliate product review block from a specialist WordPress web design agency. The block replaces the sidebar we had, with a list of all the products we recommend on that page, with a list of our affiliate partners where they can purchase the product. The idea is that this will convert better, as well as improve our standing with Google as we clearly display multiple different vendors to make their purchase, and Google is hot on multiple purchase options.

It also just generally looks good and high quality, and we will monitor the conversion data there and see how that investment pays off.

Site 1

Site 1, our largest site, earned $21,856 in December 2021, down from $28,037 in November.

$5,000 of November’s earnings was for sponsored content and display ads from a partner of ours, for services mostly performed in December, whereas we didn’t have any brand deals for December. 

Ad earnings were also slightly down, though very high, as December’s Christmas rush seemed not to exceed November’s Black Friday calamity – down to $5,522 from $6,260. This will probably drop to $3-4,000 in January 2022, so the worst is yet to come.

Earnings from Amazon were up around $200 however, to around $6,300. The site seemed to generally convert slightly better than last month, with three affiliate partners going up particularly:

However, others declined in earnings, with the huge $5,000 earnings from one particular affiliate program in November declining steeply to $2,100 in December (and probably going to under $1,000 in January), as well as one other program’s earnings declining from $1,373 in November, to $872 in December.

We plan to move the site from the current slower theme to Generatepress Premium in January where ad rates are lower, to account for any changes we need to make with AdThrive for the new layout. Generatepress is great – and we love Generateblocks here at Neutron Star Digital – as the site currently fails Core Web Vitals on mobile and scores in the 50-60 zone, which we want to get up into the 90s. 

Generatepress’ Elements are so great for designing custom content layouts, footers, author blocks, and more. I’ll probably create some YouTube guides on how to use these if anyone’s interested in adopting these on their own affiliate sites, but basically Generatepress and Blocks are super fast and light, can be customised, are a more accessible way of creating things live, and saves you from writing custom CSS (you can still do this for more custom parts like box-shadow, animations, etc). 

We’re using Generatepress elements for custom content layouts with dynamic author meta that links to the author’s page (for more pages per session, and to boost EAT), changing the published date to the last updated date (for freshness), and for automatically implementing an author block at the end of articles with the author’s description, which we hope will emphasise the author’s expertise, add to Google’s EAT metric, and makes people fans of our sites.

We’re continuing our republishing through the next month, with the updates on results on that next month – we may even give away our republishing tactics.

I can’t emphasise enough how important republishing is to your content – when you publish something, dont consider your work finished; your work has only just started. Your content is a living, breathing, dynamic mini-business in competition with all the other mini-businesses that inhabit the top 10 places on the search rankings for that keyword. Just as businesses change their strategies all the time, your content should adjust and optimise in the same way. It’s the easiest way to earn more money when your content is already ranking decently, too.

The first living and breathing album I know of that changed was Kanye’s TLOP. Songs were remastered and tweaked over time, and if it is the first album of this type, it will go down in music history as the first dynamic album release. Your articles are the songs on your site’s album – they can be remastered and remixed, with parts added and chopped off, the chords and melodies malleable to maximise the effect on your readers/listeners.

Site 2

Site 2’s earnings fell from $6,291 in November 2021, to $5,378 in December. Considering traffic fell 40%, the actual revenue per user was markedly up, and we’re still far from fully optimised here regarding affiliate partners – and ads – which is a good sign and we’re not the finished article yet.

Ad earnings were down, from $2,641 in November to $1,717 in December – around the same earnings per page view, but with notably less traffic.

Amazon earnings actually increased, from $2,566 in November to $2,765 in December, which is very encouraging. However, this can happen in December when some of Black Friday’s purchases are only registered the next month, and the post-Christmas returning of unwanted gifts, etc.

Our existing affiliate partners generally saw lower earnings over the month, though we joined two new affiliate partners, earning $254 from one in December, and $68 from the other. Existing partner earnings looked like this:

We’ve already gone into a fair amount of detail on Site 2’s exploits, with a 40% traffic decline from Google’s product review update of December. Most of our efforts, therefore, were focused on improving the affected content and rethinking our strategy to prevent any low-quality content making it onto the site in future.

We also moved this site over to Generatepress, changed the author meta and added better custom author blocks, and changed from published to last updated dates, in order to improve EAT and content freshness (though we didn’t have a freshness problem anyway, it was just a general improvement).

The site still narrowly fails Core Web Vitals, mainly due to how much performance is affected by Ezoic ads, but we can still make more improvements. We’re safely in the green for FID, but narrowly fail CLS with around 0.13, and have around 2.8s LCP which we need to shave a bit off of. Mobile is a bigger problem than desktop, but we aim to tackle that in January.

Site 3

Site 3, the site we purchased for $28,000 in August 2021, is the only site that saw revenues increase from November to December. And this was despite the site going down for 3 days in mid-December, owing to a malfunctioning plugin (more on this further down). Revenues perhaps could have hit $2,500-2,600 if the site had been online all month – but thankfully we weren’t deindexed from the search results from this.

But, we can’t exactly take credit for that, as we haven’t made any major changes to the site, content or otherwise, since purchasing it. 

Total site earnings were $2,340, up from $2,182 in November, and $1,835 in October. This just the Christmas buzz, and will likely see a decrease to $1,900-$2,000 in January.

We hired 3 freelance writers for this site this month, and will start spending around $2,000 on content per month, to reach our target of £10,000 (~$13,600) monthly revenue by the end of 2022.

We currently don’t run ads on this site, as the site receives less than 30,000 page views per month, and the speed increases are currently worth more than the extra $400-500 we’d earn on the site with ads. Our largest site is currently with AdThrive, requiring 100,000 monthly page views, but once you’re with them, adding secondary sites becomes easier, requiring just 30,000 page views, so we’ll look to integrate this site once this has been reached – hopefully within 3-4 months.

We paid a web developer £600 this month to spend a day improving the site’s security and to remove excess plugins with duplicate functions. When we bought the site it had over 50 plugins, many of which served no purpose, and the site’s previous owner was surprised the site was hacked twice in the last year ?.

There’s now less than 15, and we want to remove even more. Hopefully this, along with some speed improvements, will put the right structure in place to grow the site over the coming months.

Overall, this was another high-earning month, and we’ve doubled revenues as compared with just a few months ago.

However, we’ll see a sharp decline in January, but the new year brings opportunities to further grow these sites, which we have 2022 revenue targets for, as well as considerations around selling a couple by the end of the year, for ideally a price in the $1-1.5 million range. With a million in cash, we’ll be able to expand the operation so much wider, and it’ll make for much more interesting monthly updates with all the things we’ll be able to do.