This site is my favorite one because it's the one I started from scratch at the beginning of 2018. I'm finally hitting the growth phase where Google starts to show your website some love and you actually make money.

My revenue is tripling every month which is really motivating and makes waking up at 5:30 AM every day to work on it much easier.

Here's earnings from last month:

My earnings from previous months looks like this:

• August - $78
• July - $28
• June - $9
• May - $3
• April - $0

The problem you see with most people who "fail" at creating websites is that they give up too early. Even now when I'm making $78 per month, it's still tempting to quit if you can't stay motivated.

I've put a LOT of time into building this website. My total earnings are just over $100 and I've worked at least 100 hours on this site. $1 per hour is hardly what anyone would consider "passive income" but the potential for this site in 1 year is huge.

Here's what the organic search traffic for this site looks like. 

It's been a steady climb and in August it hit an important milestone: my outdoor site gets more daily visitors than this website and my home/DIY site which I acquired for $12,000...

And it's easy to see why someone would give up. In the beginning stages you don't know what you're doing, you're creating content but getting no visitors and no traction. It's pretty disheartening. It took 6 months before I started to get more than 1 or 2 visitors per day and it's only gone up since then.

Here's a look at my total word count on this site. The graph shows how many words were published each month. This is a combination of my articles and the articles I outsourced to HumanProofDesigns.

Unfortunately the HPD articles just weren't that good. To be fair, I've hired writers on Upwork that I paid $60 per 1,000 words who had real world experience in this niche and they just weren't that great.

Nobody cares about my website as much as me and nobody will try as hard as me. For a really low competition keyword that shows 0 search volume in Google, I'll spend an hour researching it, 2 hours writing, and create a super in depth article that's 3,000 words long. You just won't get that from a hired writer and even if you do, the knowledge and research won't be in depth. They get paid per article or per word so their incentive is to crank content out; not spend tons of time researching.

Here's what my word count looks like for this site (so HPD articles are removed).

So yeah...August wasn't a great month for productivity. I think I published 1 article. I've already surpassed my entire August word count with the 1 article I published in September. 

This is why I consider websites to be passive income. I put in the lowest amount of work so far and had my highest earning month ever. Good stuff.

The plan for September is to get back on schedule waking up at 5:30 AM and cranking out content. My word count goal is 15,000 words which should be about 7 articles. This means I need to write 2 articles per week which is definitely achievable with what I've done so far.

The problem is creating content for my outdoor site takes away time from creating content on this site or working on link building. I think I need to build up a solid base of content on the outdoor site before I can transition to link building so I'll probably spend more time on that towards the end of this year.

This was actually a pretty solid month for earnings but about 25% of the earnings came from 1 day when someone ordered a bunch of products after clicking through a link on my site.

There isn't much I can do to control the earnings so I'm just going to focus on increasing the traffic and then the earnings will come as a result.

This site didn't make any money this month. I've added sidebar widgets that show books I'm reading right now with links to Amazon and I had 50 people click on them but no purchases. I'm not really expecting this site to make money for quite a while but might as well throw something out there and anything that comes in would be a bonus.

I only wrote a few articles in August for this site since it was such a busy month and with my focus being on my affiliate sites I don't think I'll have much time for creating content here.

I'd rather go out and do things on my affiliate sites and actually make money so I can come back and share what I learn with you. It always drives me nuts to see income reports from bloggers and their only income is from people who signed up to start a blog because they read their last income report....just feels gross.

One thing I am going to spend time on for this site is Pinterest. I just signed up for an awesome design program called Stencil which makes it really easy to create nice looking graphics for Pinterest.

I've used some other services before like Picmonkey, Canva, and RelayThat. Canva was my favorite and the main tool I've been using for the last few months. I decided to sign up and pay for Stencil because their templates are eye catching and they have more flexibility than some of their competitors. It's $9 per month and comes with free stock images and icons so it's easy to use and only takes me a few minutes to create Pinterest images.

If you want to stay updated on my side hustles, you can join my mailing list and get the ebook I made about starting your own side hustle selling physical products or building websites like I do here 🙂