A couple days ago I wrote a post about how I stopped procrastinating and started pumping out more content for my websites.

But after 66 days in a row of writing and putting 35,000+ words of content on my niche sites, I burned the f*&^ out.

For the next month I did almost nothing on my sites.

But the good part is it didn't really matter 🙂

One of the awesome things about running niche websites is that it takes 6-8 months for your content to achieve it's full traffic potential with Google. Once you publish an article, there's nothing else to do except wait and build some links if you're feeling amibitious.

All of the content I wrote is bringing in just a couple visitors per day right now and no money. But by the time summer-fall rolls around I should be seeing a huge increase in my traffic without putting in any more work.

On to the numbers...

So how much money did I make last month? Here's the break down:

Income

• Amazon Affiliate Income - $691
• Merch by Amazon - $203
• Ezoic (ads) - $503
• Adsense - $5 (this is how it should work. Ezoic should be showing all the income and Adsense should be near 0).
• Hosting Affiliate Income - $67
• Total Revenue - $1,469

This is a reduction of $224 compared to the previous month. Here's the pretty pictures.

Expenses

• Ahrefs - $99
• Ezoic Premium - $110
• Thrive Themes - $25
• Link Building - $1,929
• Total Expenses - $2,163

Net Profit (Revenue - Expenses) = ($694). So I lost $700 last month. Cool side hustle right? 

There were a couple changes from last month.

On the income side, the website I created from scratch in early 2018 is starting to build more income. A lot of the 35k words I wrote in the last 2 months was reviews of high end products in my niche that cost $200-$500. These bring in larger commissions from Amazon so my site is now bringing in a larger % of my total income (close to 50%).

That means the sites I purchased for $10k each are also not doing as well. In fact, they're probably only worth $10k-$12k combined right now. The good news is time is on my side. I can wait, add more content, build more links, and recover that lost value later on if I decide to.

The other plus on the income side is this site made money for the first time 🙂 Someone signed up for a hosting account with WPX hosting and I got a $67 commission. Pretty cool!

On the expense side I continued to pour money into link building. I use an outreach agency that finds websites that accept guests posts and they write the guest posts for me.  I don't have the time, desire or energy to manually do all of this outreach and I have money left over from selling my Amazon FBA business so I'm putting it to use.

These links don't kick in immediately. I've seen some links give me huge boosts in traffic within a month and others that take several months before I see a traffic boost. My niche is in the outdoors space so summer is huge for me and I expect these links to kick in to full force right around the peak of summer.

What's Next

Some day I'll get back to writing content for my site...I really got burned out doing the 2 months straight of writing every day. I've started to slowly get back into it and I need to keep chugging through it to get this content up and and ready by summer time.

I may also try to sell some of the sites I've acquired. Creating content and building links only helps out 1 site at a time. Since I've been focusing all my energy on my outdoors site, the others have suffered. 

If I can get my sites a little bigger to the point where I could hire a virtual assistant and have enough work for them to do then I could get some benefits to owning multiple sites. Right now by myself, it's just a distraction. And when I do get the time/motivation to write content, I end up creating it for my outdoors site because that's what I'm interested in and is the least painful to work on.