How’s this for timely. I have this sucker published on Sept. 2. That’s a first for me. Slow week I guess.
Overall
August was a great month for my biz. Revenue was a’plenty while expenses were up merely a tad.
I eased back considerably on content for two reasons. First, I had a sizeable inventory built up. Second, I’m testing a new service. If the new service is good, I’ll open the floodgates with them. It’s still far too early to mention the service.
Affiliate revenue increase
Thanks to Convertbox (lifetime offer), which offers exit popup boxes I use to promote products with affiliate links, my affiliate revenue in August jumped nicely by a couple of thousand.
While affiliate revenue is still a very small percentage of overall revenue, I’m pleased with this development because the increase was achieved with no additional traffic. I spent a few hours setting Convertbox up to earn quite a bit more each month … hopefully for many months.
It’s fun squeezing more money from existing traffic.
Niche Site Cleanup
Somehow I was invited by AdThrive to get a free SEO audit for my biggest niche site about 1.5 months ago. I took them up on the offer.
Phase 2 (out of 3) came in last week. It was a super helpful audit. Primarily it set out a bunch of link problems (broken links and missing nofollow on affiliate links) on my site. Moreover, the audit suggested I use BlogFixer to clean it up. I did. It cost only $275 to clean up a fairly big mess.
Now I have no more broken links and all affiliate links are properly nofollow. The best part is the entire process took up about 10 minutes of my time thanks to BlogFixer. I cringe to think about all the time I would have spent cleaning up all the links myself. That would have taken weeks.
Dinged for another copyright infringement
This irks me. I made a mistake. I had incorrect image attribution for an image that I had permission to use (on the condition I provided proper attribution) and so I received a copyright infringement notice. It was my mistake. It was one image. The claim was for $570. I paid it without haggling. Be very careful with images.
I’m in the process of getting business insurance. I have a broker looking into it for me. More on this when I have more to say.
That’s about it. Here are the numbers.
DISCLAIMER: This income report does NOT include any revenue or expenses pertaining to Fat Stacks blog as well as several other niche sites. All revenue and expenses are derived solely from SOME of my independent niche sites. I publish these reports merely for illustrative purposes to illustrate that content sites can be a good business.
Revenue for 8 niche sites I own (August 2020)
Click here to learn more about each niche site featured in my income reports.
All figures are in USD.
- Niche Site 1 Revenue: $63,044
- Niche Site 2 Revenue: $4,988
- Niche Site 3 Revenue: $553
- Niche Site 4 Revenue: $1,890
- Niche Site 5 Revenue: $37
- Niche Site 6 Revenue: $747
- Niche Site 7 Revenue: $253
- Niche Site 8 (Cyclebaron.com) Revenue: $50 (this revenue is primarily due to Fat Stacks readers visiting. It’s not based on organic search traffic… that will take some time).
Total Revenue all 8 sites: $71,562 (July revenue was: $64,488)
Expenses for all niche sites
I lump together all expenses for all 8 niche sites because it’s difficult, impractical and unhelpful to spend the time allocating each expense to each site.
- Kinsta hosting: $1,600
- Bluehost hosing (for cyclebaron.com): $5
- Amazon AWS (still host some images on this): $114
- Lasso: $80
- VAs: $5,226
- Cloudflare: $200
- Loom: $10
- Onlinejobs.ph: $69
- Ahrefs: $179
- AWeber: $19 (still use AWeber for my small B2B site)
- Shutterstock photos: $400
- Quickbooks: $10
- Jotform: $40
- Tailwind: $120
- MeetEdgar: $50
- Grammarly: $45
- NitroPack: $150
- Canva: $48
- Buzzsprout: $12 (this is the podcast hosting platform I use for niche site 1 podcast).
- Adobe Spark: $20
- Copyright infringement fee: $570
- BlogFixer.com: $275
- Answerthepublic.com: $99
Total expenses for 8 niche sites: $9,341
Net Income: $62,221 (July net income was $56,666)
Content investment in August 2020
- In-House writers: $5,220
- New writing service: $1,425 (testing phase – still far too early to mention the company)
- Products purchased for content write-ups: 6
Total content investment for August 2020: ,641
Net income after content investment: ,580 USD
I explain here why I extract content costs from expenses.
Learn more
If you’re interested in learning what I do in detail, grab my entire bundle of courses here.
Screenshots (just a couple of the main ones)
AdThrive (Site 1)
EX.co (formerly Playbuzz)
Jon runs the place around here. He pontificates about launching and growing online publishing businesses, aka blogs that make a few bucks. His pride and joy is the email newsletter he publishes.
Hyperbole? Maybe, but go check it out to see what some readers say.
In all seriousness, Jon is the founder and owner of a digital media company that publishes a variety of web properties visited and beloved by millions of readers monthly. Fatstacks is where he shares a glimpse into his digital publishing business.
Thanks for this great information. 🙂 Question: why do you have to set all affiliate links as nofollow? do you nofollow all Amazon affiliate links as well?
I didn’t know about this. How does this affect SEO?
Thank you!
Hey Meital, because it’s not a true editorial link, Google suggests it should be nofollow. Short answers, because Google says affiliate links should be nofollow.
Thank you Jon:)
This is so inspirational. I’ve subscribed to your newsletter. Hope to apply what I’ve learnt from you to build my site. Well done Jon.
Thank you Muyiwa.
I have a question about time management.
Where did you find time to work on websites? I am sure that before Internet marketing you probably worked on a typical job that took up a part of your life.
Before I went full time I worked on my sites weekends, mornings and evenings. I didn’t have kids at the time so had quite a bit of time. I just hammered away.
Hi Jon, very curious what you ended up doing regarding business insurance. Are you able to share anything on that front yet, or know when you might? Thanks as always for ALL you inspire and share!
I never ended up getting it. I made some half-assed inquiries but never pulled the trigger.