Sorry for the delay in producing my September 2016 income report.  Yes, I’ll be adding June, July, August’s very soon.  I just wanted to get a recent income report published since recent income reports is what most readers care about.
I’ve been swamped building out 2 new niche sites using a totally new approach with which I’m very excited about. It took me months researching and testing and setting them up, but all that effort will be worth it.
I just added 23 new video tutorials to Niche Tycoon setting out my brand new niche website concept.
IMPORTANT:
My income reports only include income for 2 niche sites. Â This income report does NOT include revenue from Fat Stacks Blog. Â I’ll probably add a 3rd at some point showcasing the new niche site concept I’m using, but that will have to wait until I formally launch those sites. Â They’re still being built in the backend but should launch very soon.
Revenue and net income have more or less remained steady throughout much of 2016 with the usual fluctuations you can expect with publishing websites.
While net income is not going down, it’s not going up either. Â In fact, the year-long plateau is one reason I decided to built out 2 new sites with a totally different concept in mind… a concept that I hope and believe will create a foundation for much better long term growth.
Overall, I’m pleased. Â The 2 niche sites I profile in my income reports are cash cows. Â Every business needs cash cows for baseline income and resources to invest for growth. Â That’s how I view these. Â The key moving forward will be growing new sites hopefully into much, much bigger sites than the 2 profiled here.
B2B Site Opportunity
One major change with my new B2C niche sites is that they’re actually hybrid niche sites which will also cater to their corresponding B2B markets.  I’m very excited about this hybrid model.
One major opportunity I’ve discovered pertaining to my B2B sites is another very good product to promote. Â I’m just about to start promotion so I don’t know if it will knock it out of the park, but I’ve negotiated a referral deal with a very niche product and will commence promotion shortly. Â This could help break the B2B plateau.
Other than that it’s been business as usual. Â I probably have too much going on, but I can’t help myself.
Below are the income numbers for September 2016 for 2 of my niche sites.
| Fat Stacks Income Report September 2016 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| B2C Niche Site | ||||
| Revenue | ||||
| Ad Revenue | $19,829 | |||
| Affiliate Commissions | $2,135 | |||
| Total Revenue B2C Site | $21,964 | |||
| B2B Niche Site | ||||
| Revenue (affiliate) | $9,400 | |||
| TOTAL REVENUE BOTH SITES | $31,364 | |||
| EXPENSES (Both Sites) Prorated Because I Use These Tools Across Many Sites | ||||
| WPEngine Hosting | $250.00 | |||
| Amazon Server | $569.00 | |||
| AWeber | $288.00 | |||
| App Version | $4.99 | |||
| OptinMonster | $25 | |||
| Pushcrew | $15 | |||
| Viraltag | $35 | |||
| MeetEdgar | $25 | |||
| Instapage | $25 | |||
| Datafeedr | $33 | |||
| Total expenses | $1,269 | |||
| NET INCOME BOTH SITES | $30,095 |
FYI: My flagship product Niche Tycoon was just updated with 23 new video tutorials teaching my brand new B2B/B2C hybrid model (plus a whole lot more).
Proof
Below are a few screenshots of my larger revenue sources. Â I have many revenue sources, but only include a few of the larger sources as a source of proof.
1. Monumetric Ads
2. AdSense
3. Media.net ($3,939)
Want to learn more?
Check out Niche Tycoon here.
Jon runs the place around here. He pontificates about launching and growing online publishing businesses, aka blogs that make a few bucks. His pride and joy is the email newsletter he publishes.
In all seriousness, Jon is the founder and owner of a digital media company that publishes a variety of web properties visited and beloved by millions of readers monthly. Fatstacks is where he shares a glimpse into his digital publishing business.
Hi Jon, could you please tell us your traffic stats? Both for organic, social and others
And both visits and pageviews for big niche site. Thanks
Hey Deyan,
I’ll consider it. I’ve done it here and there in past income reports. I think it’s approximately 500K page views. My B2B niche gets very little traffic, but it’s very valuable traffic.
Yes, it’s true. seems like you manage to get high ROI with lower number of visitors than before. because once you hade almost 1 million pageview but the same income. And by the way, your hosting plan wont be able to handle more than 500k pageview for 249$. Just to say
I use WPEngine and rougly prorated the WPEngine cost for these 2 niche sites. I have all my sites on WPEngine and have a large account ($600/mo.), which gives me a lot of page views per month.
Why you use 3 ads alternatives together does adsence not enough for generating higher revenue ?
Hey Shyami,
Great question. For some reason incorporating all 3 ad networks generates best results for me. I’ve tried everything and this is a good mix.
Hey Jon, Casey here. Great job on keeping us updated. I am kinda surprised that your affiliate earnings are so low compared to your ads. Are those affiliate earnings from clicking on links on the site or from email promotions?
Either way you are my inspiration man. Keep up the good work. Also, that Monumetric Ads are they niche specific? I have a health site and it does poorly with adsense so am wondering if that would work.
Take care.
…..
Casey
Hey Casey,
September affiliate revenue was bad. I switched to skim links part way through which didn’t work out great for some reason. Admittedly affiliate revenue growth has been a disappointment. I also tested a bunch of stuff that didn’t work out much but I keep on trying to get some lift off with the affiliate stuff. One day I’m confident affiliate revenue will out-earn display ads.
Many congrats. Actually, I found Instapage when I was searching for the best landing page platform. Thanks for your transparent report.
Great work this month.
Where did your expenses go? You used to spend a lot on content creation and facebook ads. Are you going away from those?
Hey Adam,
I don’t buy traffic these days. It’s all organic and I’ve built an in-house team who works on all my sites now. For several months this year I slowed content production down a lot and did it myself and then decided to launch several new sites so I invested in a team. They do some work on one of the niche sites in this income report but focus on the new sites getting them off the ground.
Hi Jon, are you not buying traffic anymore? Is that purely off organic traffic ?
Hey Deon,
I don’t buy much traffic. Losing AdSense nessie arrows made it too hard and not worth the time so I shifted and focus on organic. So that rev. is based off organic, which I’m happy with because it’s more passive and stronger asset. However, if you can make paid traffic work, milk it for everything you can.
Thank your for your transparency Jon. You are saying that organic traffic (even if are millions of pageviews) will not affect nessie arrows?
Hey Alex,
I think what affects Nessie arrows is CTR. If you get a high CTR for your ads, you can lose the Nessie arrows. I’ve seen more and more sites lose the Nessie arrows, including top tier mega online publications such as online newspapers. I suspect the CTR threshold is pretty low. For instance, I tested it by removing all AdSense ads above the fold retaining only one unit in the sidebar above the fold and I still lost Nessie arrows.
I think it’s Google’s approach to combat excessive pagination.
The plus side has been a huge increase in CPC on my ads. I still earned more with Nessie arrows, but it hasn’t been such a massive drop that I thought it would be especially since CPC has increased quite a bit.
I’ve also noticed some advertisers are putting arrows in their banner ads which of course helps CTR and that’s totally cool because the arrow is inserted by advertiser and not by AdSense.
Thanks David. Yes, I’m fortunate to have some cash cow niche sites for sure.
Your Monumetric income is great! I didn’t have much success with them so far. Where do you place them – do you give them good spots or bad ones? Also how many of them do you have?
Also – their report only shows total performance and not specific ad performance which makes it hard to find out which ad performs best. Did you find a way around t?
Thanks – you are a true inspiration!
Hey Jack,
Talk to Monumetric about sticky ads. I use 2 and they work spectacularly. Other than that I place 1 on at the bottom and one in the sidebar. The sticky units perform best though.
hey jon,
Silent follow of yours here 🙂
You mentioned your traffic now is focused more on organic.. does that means it is exclusively SEO or your team do ample amount of content marketing? also let say I am starting a new site now.. should i be focusing using paid traffic to gain traffic initially or just focus on SEO or content marketing?
Hey Kj,
Using paid traffic is a very good way to gain traffic initially and if your site has decent on-site metrics paid traffic can help with SEO. It’s also a great way to build up a FB page/Pinterest following at the same time.
Hi Jon, great to see another report. Was there no writers cost this month?
Looking forward to seeing the other reports.
Hi Shaun,
With developing new websites, I put together my own team of writers. I spent a lot of time training them and some of them put time into one of the sites listed here but it’s an overhead cost. I suppose I could eyeball a prorated amount which would be approximately $400 to $500. Hiring my own writers and training them has offered significant cost savings and they get all my images. But the downside is it was a lot of work. I did this because I’m rolling out new sites with a lot of content so I didn’t have a choice.
would you be able to share how you find writers? Do you hire them through upwork or use any agency?
Hey Brian,
Check out my post on this at https://fatstacksblog.com/article-writing-services/
Hey Jon,
Nice seeing your income report after ages 🙂 If i remember correctly, in the May report, you had got a lot of income from ezoic and The Blogger Network. How is it performing now? Would you still recommend it?
Thanks 🙂
Russ
Yes, I always recommend trying Ezoic. The Blogger Network is now Monumetric and I still work with them. I’m going to be using Ezoic for AMP/Mobile since I think AMP is going to be important for mobile traffic.
Do any of these sites use PBN’s or are you using white hat techniques. Blows my mind how niche sites can make 30k.
Hey Jackie,
I don’t use PBN’s. I’ve been tempted but I’d probably screw it up. It’s not my forte.
One simple question, i don’t ask what is your site, but i want to ask, how much traffic do we need for earn like you. ex $30.000/month?
your media.net earnings are high. my site is also approved for media.net. please tell the tips how to earn more money from media.net
i heard about “monumetric.com” program, for what kind of niches are this ad netword works better, technology, programming, entertainment.
Hey Gautam,
Monumetric is awesome. I’m not using them right now because their ads don’t work on sites with SSL certificates. I hear they’re working on this so I may add them down the road. As for good niches with Monumetric, it’s just a matter of testing them out to see if it works well for you. I don’t think there’s a set list of niches.