Income Report for May 2021 (Niche Sites Only)

What did I do in May?

I focused on my newest site which is site 11 below.  I enjoy rolling up my sleeves and figuring out a plan and then creating the workflow for new sites.  It was a good month.

For the 100+ hours I put into it, I earned a goose egg.  That site earned nothing but that’s not surprising because there’s no monetization. I’ll wait until there’s some level of steady traffic before I put on AdThrive ads.

That’s how these things go though.  One must put in a huge amount of work upfront in the hopes it pays off in the long run.

Niche site 11 offers different formats than my other sites so I spent plenty of time tinkering with layouts and some tech needed to make it work.  I’ve also launched a YouTube channel, Facebook page and Pinterest account for this site.  I’ve found some great gig providers on Fiverr for video production.

I have high hopes for this site but then I always do being a glass-half-full type of guy.

To help with growing niche site 11, I hired a VA which bumped up my VA expense.  It’s a somewhat labor-intensive site so I’m grateful for the help.

Disappointment

I have to say that site 9 is proving a modest disappointment at this point.  It’s been in a plateau for many months.  It’s earning nicely but it’s stuck. I’m adding a lot of content weekly but nothing is moving the needle so far.  I’m not giving up because I’m confident the plateau will end but I was hoping for more traffic and revenue by now.

What I don’t include in income reports

Just a reminder that the following does NOT include revenue or expenses from Fat Stacks. I  keep Fat Stacks out of these reports because it’s more of a metablog rather than a niche site or portfolio site.

Revenue

Missing sites below were sold.  All figures are in USD.

  • Niche Site 1: $114,567
  • Niche Site 3: $353
  • Niche Site 8 (Cyclebaron.com): $115
  • Niche Site 9 : $3,101
  • Niche Site 10: $379
  • Niche Site 11: $0 (just launched in March 2021 – aged domain experiment – obtained from Odys Global)

Total Revenue from 5 sites: $118,515

You can read about all niche sites here.

The lion’s share of revenue is from display ads.

Expenses

FYI, I also incurred a Trademark application expense in the amount of $579 using the Plug and Law trademark application service (enjoyed 30% discount with FATSTACKS coupon which expires Fri. June 5, 2021).  This was for Fat Stacks so I’m not including it as an expense … I only tally up niche sites here (not Fat Stacks).

Total expenses for niche sites: $11,355

Net Income: $107,070

Content investment: $19,911

Content sources include:
WriterAccess, in-house writers and Fiverr.  I spent $1,398 CAD on Fiverr (videos and visuals).  $230 on products to review. The rest on written content.

I also purchased $230 worth of products for product reviews (smartwatches).

Also, $4,010 of the content investment is for content management services (via WriterAccess and in-house).

Content is distributed across 5 niche blogs.

Net income after content investment:   $87,159

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

Since the lion’s share of revenue is from AdThrive, I’ll just include two AdThrive screenshots.

Niche Site 1:

Niche Site 1 AdThrive Revenue

Niche site 9:

Niche Site 9 AdThrive revenue

7 thoughts on “Income Report for May 2021 (Niche Sites Only)”

  1. Hi John,

    Mind sharing how many posts your main niche site has at the moment? I’m interested in the business model and think it’s very scalable to say the least. 🙂

  2. Thanks for sharing. I am curious to know about Rocket.net. How is the speed with them? There is so much buzz with Google Page speed, are they helping ? Adthrive recommends Bigscoots, but you are using rocket.net. Wondering what is the best one ? Please suggest your opinion.

      1. Thank you Jon ! Appreciate your insight.
        one last thing, is the speed with Rocket.net as good as Kinsta ? or better ?

  3. Hey Jon –

    Curious, what’s the Pinterest traffic contribution from Niche Site 1? We used to get 120K PV’s per month on Pinterest, but have seen slow degradation over the last 4 months. We are now only doing about 45K PV’s a month.

    I’m considering purchasing your course to see if we are doing anything differently than you, but I don’t want to invest time and $ in learning a platform that’s diminishing organic traffic over time.

    Great report. Cheers!

    Jason

    1. Hey Jason, Pinterest has been declining bit by bit for me too. I’m down to about 170K visits per month from Pinterest from 300K high. I’ve heard this is happening to many. I continue to do as I have done with Pinterest. Pinterest is always changing things so I’m confident it’ll turn around at some point.

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