About My Niche Sites Featured in Fat Stacks Income Reports

Puzzle pieces

My income reports break up revenue across 8 of my niche sites.  All 8 sites are in different niches and they earn in different methods.  They all vary with respect to traffic levels, income, content and amount of time/money I dedicate to them.

Instead of regurgitating the info in every monthly income report, I thought a dedicated page would help.

Why don’t I disclose my niche sites?

It’s simple. I face enough competition.  If I disclosed my sites, it’s likely some people would jump in the same niche, go after the same keywords and make things harder for me.

Why don’t I include fatstacksblog.com income in the income reports?

Again, it’s simple.  I think it’s weird for me to tell you how much a site makes that discusses how to go about online publishing.  The goal of my income reports isn’t to show how much I’m earning but instead to illustrate that niche sites and blogs can be a viable business.  In other words, going into real-world niches can be really good.  You don’t have to, nor should you jump into a “how to make money online blog” in order to establish a great online business.

Real-Life Niche Site Example

For years readers naturally have asked to see one or some of my niche sites.  I resisted until June 2020 when I created a new niche site that I built, monetize and will grow just as I do my other niche sites.

That site is Cyclebaron.com.

Cyclebaron.com will be the 8th niche site profiled in my income reports.

Site #1:  My flagship niche site

Site #1 is by far my highest traffic and highest-earning niche site.  It’s in a broad niche that actually encompasses many sub-niches.

  • Launch date: February 2014.
  • Traffic: Traffic is currently at 2,400,000 monthly visitors.  The lion’s share of traffic is via Google search, although Pinterest traffic and organic Facebook traffic is pretty good.
  • Revenue:  97% of revenue is earned from display ads.  Most affiliate revenue is via Amazon (and it’s not much).
  • Content types:
  • Additional connected web properties:  Pinterest boards, Instagram, YouTube, Podcast (launching very soon), Facebook page (pretty much worthless), Twitter (also worthless) and Flipboard (yes, you guessed it, worthless).
  • Email newsletter:  Yes, I’ve built up an email newsletter with subscribers over the years.  It earns practically nothing but it’s an okay way of sending readers back to the site.
  • Article publishing frequency:  1 to 2 new articles per day.
  • Content & keyword strategy:  Target low competition keywords, write long articles with quite a few images (it’s a visual niche).

Site #2: My oldest niche site – SOLD JAN. 2021

Amazingly, site #2 was the second niche blog I ever launched and it’s still going relatively strong.  It earns primarily via affiliate offers although in 2019 I started expanding the content topics and now monetize with display ads as well.

  • Launch date:  2010 (or thereabouts).
  • Traffic:  It gets about 200 to 400 daily visitors (6,000 to 12,000 monthly visitors).  The audience is very niche.  Most traffic is via Google search.
  • Revenue:  98% is from affiliate promotions.  However, ad revenue is climbing.
  • Additional connected web properties: None worth noting.
  • Email newsletter:  Yes.  This email newsletter is very lucrative.  I use an automated sequence to generate new sales monthly.
  • Article publishing frequency:  Very sporadic.  Some months I’ll publish 6 to 10 articles.  Some months I do nothing.
  • Content & keyword strategy:  Long tail keyword content mostly.

Site 3: Niche Site I Purchased

I bought this site around 2015.  It was a well-established site with loads of good content, thousands of inbound natural links but earned almost nothing. In fact, the revenue barely covered server costs.  I thought I could improve ad revenue, but I couldn’t. It’s in a poorly performing niche.

In 2021 I resumed working on this site returning to the site’s original niche.  A few years ago I expanded it into multiple niches and while that worked for a while, eventually it stopped working. I broke off all the different niches into separate sites and sold all of them except for one (site 9 in income reports).  Now the content is in line with topics already published when I bought it. It’s slowly growing.  The best thing this site has going for it is the domain authority so I’m hopeful I can grow it.  The downside is it earns little per 1,000 visitors so I need a lot of traffic to make decent revenue.

  • Purchase date:  Around 2015.  At that time it was 8 years old.
  • Traffic:  85,000 monthly visitors (mostly organic search).
  • Revenue: 99% of revenue is earned from display ads.  The rest via affiliate offers.
  • Email newsletter: No.
  • Article publishing frequency:  15 to 30 articles per month.
  • Content & keyword strategy:  Target fairly easy to rank topics… fortunately there are a ton of these in the niche.

Site 4: Niche site I started a few years ago – SOLD DEC. 2020

This site has great promise. I’ve kicked it along over the years.  It’s in a niche with plenty of traffic potential.  I continue to work on it and while it’s not a big earner yet, I believe it will one day be a big earner.

  • Launch date:  2017 or so.
  • Traffic:  60,000 visitors per month (mostly organic search).
  • Revenue: 95% display ads and 5% affiliate (Amazon).  I’m working on increasing Amazon commissions.  I’ve recently started buying products in the niche and am reviewing them.  Boring work, but potentially lucrative.
  • Additional connected web properties:  Pinterest (it’s a visual niche) and Instagram.
  • Email newsletter: Not yet, but will get one going one day.
  • Article publishing frequency:  2 to 10 articles per month.
  • Content & keyword strategy:  Historically focused on low competition keywords but am moving toward more competitive keywords with buyer intent (i.e. affiliate content).

Site 5: Local lead generation site turned niche site – SOLD DEC. 2020

This niche site has a long and varied history. I launched and built this originally as a lead gen site for a local business industry.  It made very good money for a handful of years until the industry was destroyed by government legislation.  There it sat.  After a few years I transitioned it to a niche site within the industry.  It’s never done much and I’m not sure if this site has much of a future.  It’s kind of served its purpose but I hang onto it for a rainy day… who knows, maybe I’ll come up with a brilliant idea for it one day.

  • Launch date: 2014
  • Traffic:  2,000 to 3,000 visitors per month (mostly organic search).
  • Revenue: 100% display ads.  It used to earn thousands per month as a local lead gen gen site.
  • Additional connected web properties: None.
  • Email newsletter: No.
  • Article publishing frequency:  Very infrequent.
  • Content & keyword strategy:  No strategy really.  I’m not sure how much potential this site has even if I throw everything at it.  The only thing I can think of is reviewing some online services that are akin to the services I used to promote.  This could work, but it’s still pretty much a one product site.

Site 6: Niche site I started 2 years ago – MERGED WITH NICHE SITE 9.

In late 2020 I moved a good chunk of content from this site to site 9.

In 2021 I started slowly adding more content to this site.  It now has some established authority but it will be a very slow build… it’s more of a cooker site for now.

  • Launch date: 2017
  • Traffic: 3,000 visitors per month (mostly organic search).
  • Revenue:  100% display ads
  • Email newsletter: No.
  • Article publishing frequency: 4 to 15 per month.
  • Content & keyword strategy:  A mix of low competition long tail info articles and tutorials.

Site 7: Niche site I launched in 2018 – SOLD DEC. 2020

I don’t really know why I launched this.  It flounders.  It has about 30 articles on it so it’s aged and ready to grow if ever I figure out what to do with it (and get time/money for it).

  • Launch: 2018
  • Traffic:  3,000 visitors per month.
  • Revenue:  100% from display ads.
  • Additional connected web properties: None.
  • Email newsletter: No.
  • Article publishing frequency:  Very infrequent.
  • Content & keyword strategy:  No plan in place.  It sits.

Site 8: Cyclebaron.com

Niche site #8 is Cyclebaron.com.  I decided to finally create a niche site that I’ll share publicly with Fat Stacks readers given the requests over the years to see examples of my niche sites.

  • Launch: June 2020
  • Traffic:  None
  • Revenue:  Likely a mix of display ad and affiliate revenue
  • Additional connected web properties: None.
  • Email newsletter: Maybe
  • Article publishing frequency:  Weekly
  • Content & keyword strategy:  I’ll target low competition KWs but will also write articles based on my participation as a cyclist (mountain biking) and of course all the gear/accessories I buy.

Cyclebaron.com is built just like my other niche sites – pretty much the same plugins, theme and uses much the same content approach.

Site 9: Info site in a broad niche (outreach link building experiment)

This was a site I started with some content on Site 3. I then broke it off into it’s own domain in June 2020.  It’s grown very fast and is a good earner.  85% revenue is from ads.  The rest affiliate promos.

I merged Site 6 content into Site 9 since there’s plenty of overlap.

I never included site 9 in income reports until the Nov. 2020 report.

Site 9 is shaping up into an outstanding niche site. I’m devoting a good chunk of time and money into it.  It’s growing relatively fast.  It also has some okay affiliate revenue potential.

  • Launch: June 2020
  • Link building: yeah… it’s the only site in my portfolio where I’ve hired a service to do some outreach link-building campaigns.  I do no link building for my other sites.
  • Traffic:  210,000 monthly visitors.
  • Revenue:  Ad and affiliate.
  • Email newsletter: No
  • Article publishing frequency:  30 to 40 new articles per month.
  • Content & keyword strategy:  I target low competition KWs that are informational, Q&A and some review stuff.

Site 10: Info site in a broad niche (joint venture experiment)

I’ve never discussed this site.  It’s a slow grower because it’s a fun investment I’m doing with a college buddy.  We thought it would be fun to team up on a site.  He finances content when he can and I manage/run the site.  We’re very profitable based on site value already so it’s turned out to be a good project.  More importantly, we have fun running it long distance.  We’ll continue adding a little content here and there and hope it keeps growing.

It’s monetized entirely with ads but it is in a niche where some affiliate promotions could work.

  • Launch: June 2020 but I moved content over from the original domain which was proving to be problematic as being a previous registration.
  • Traffic:  30,000 monthly visitors.
  • Revenue:  Ads.
  • Email newsletter: No
  • Article publishing frequency:  5 to 8 articles per month.
  • Content & keyword strategy:  I target low competition KWs that are informational and listicles.

Site 11: Aged Domain Site Build

I have big plans for this site.  This is my first attempt to build out a big site on an aged domain I got from Odys Global.  When I obtained it, it had 350 referring domains and an Ahrefs DR of 39.  It’s risky building a site on an aged domain just because the domain may have some issues from the past but if it has no problems, in theory, it should grow much faster than a newly registered domain.

I’m in the process of growing multiple sites these days and want to try different approaches.  This is one of those experiments.  I’ll be blogging about this project once it’s up and running.

  • Launch: April 2021
  • Traffic:  13,000 monthly visitors.
  • Revenue:  Ads.  Rev per 1,000 visitors is low but traffic volume potential is very high.
  • Email newsletter: No
  • Article publishing frequency:  4 to 5 articles per week (16 to 20 per month).
  • Content & keyword strategy:  I target low competition KWs that are informational and listicles.

Site 12: Content Blitz Build Experiment

This is a lower quality, higher content volume experiment where I’m attempting to publish 3,000 articles in the first 6 to 9 months (as fast as possible).  The cost per word is very low.  It’s in an very simple, but large niche.  Content is pretty easy to produce.  This entire thing could work out great or be a bust.

  • Launch: Sept 2021
  • Traffic:  0 monthly visitors.
  • Revenue:  Ads (no ads on the site yet but it will earn solely from ads).
  • Email newsletter: No
  • Article publishing frequency:  300 articles per month. I hope to increase this to 500 articles per month.
  • Content & keyword strategy:  I target VERY low competition KWs that are informational.

Do I own other niche sites?

Yes, I own several other “rainy day” sites that I don’t include in the income reports… yet. They don’t make money. They have some content and are sitting around in case I get around to building them.

And I have Fatstacksblog.com which I do not include in my income reports.  FS takes up a big chunk of my time because my aim with niche sites is to deletate most of the work.

 

5 thoughts on “About My Niche Sites Featured in Fat Stacks Income Reports”

  1. Hi Jon. I just started reading Fat Stacks in the last fortnight and am loving the content.

    Are you able to share how many published articles you have for each niche site?

    I am most interested in the first niche site but would love to know the numbers for the others too (bar 7/8 as I can see that anyway).

    I am just curious to know how much content it takes to get a million page views a month. I suspect a boat load if you’re publishing 2-3 articles a day. I know this will be heavily niche dependent but I am still interested to know.

    Many thanks

    Oliver

    1. Hey Oliver, I have about 2,000 long form articles on my biggest niche site. I have a ton of other articles but they are published not for search but for social and readers.

  2. Sick update once again!

    Have you thought of any other income ways for the flagship site?
    I mean having 97% income from ads is great and all, but it only takes 1 Google update to ruin all of that traffic and ad revenue income.
    Hence my question, do you have a email list going on, subscription, amazon affiliate etc programs?

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