May 2019 Side Hustle Income Report

May was another hands off month for my websites, including this one. 

I've found 4-5 really good writers on Textbroker so I'm just ordering tons of content and getting my sites built up.

My process right now is:

  1. Keyword research in Ahrefs for 30-45 minutes which yields 40-50 keywords.
  2. Assign the articles to specific writers. My gaming website articles go to 1 writer. My outdoors site goes to another. If I don't have a specific writer for that site/topic, I'll post it as an open order on Textbroker and hope for the best. Once I get a good article back, I save that writer and use them as my go to in the future.
  3. Run the articles I get back through Grammarly and Hemmingway to find errors or things I need to re-write.
  4. Move the articles to a Google Drive folder.
  5. Repeat until I have 12 articles ready to go.
  6. Send them to my VA on Fiverr who formats the post, finds images, adds links to Amazon products and publishes the post.
  7. Rinse and repeat until I blow through my monthly budget.

The best part about this process is I only have to do a little bit of work up front and in the middle and the rest is handled by other people.

I'm planning to hire an editor in the future. This will take me out of the middle step meaning I'm just left to do the keyword research. This is something I'm good at and wouldn't want to outsource. It's also not very time consuming and is sort of my competitive advantage.

So on to the numbers for May. It was a decent month, not too different from April.

Here's the breakdown by revenue source:

  • Amazon Affiliate Income: $771
  • Ezoic Advertising Income: $750
  • Merch by Amazon: $56
  • Adsense: $18

Total: $1,595

Expense breakdown:

  • Ahrefs - $99
  • Thrive Architect - $25
  • Ezoic Premium - $110
  • Link building - $1,243
  • Writing - $680
  • Virtual Assistant - $364

Total: $2,521

Net Profit (Loss): $(926)

It takes a special kind of side hustle to lose almost $1,000 in a month...

But it should pay off later πŸ™‚

Creating content is an up front investment that pays out for a long time, like an annuity.

My average cost per article is probably around $20-$30. Once that page starts getting traffic, it makes about $10 per 1,000 visitors.

This means my articles need to get 2-3k visitors to break even. Everything after that is profit.

If an article does OK, it should get at least 100 visitors per month. This means 20-30 months to break even.

Some do much better than that and break even after 3-6 months. 

Others flop and never make money.

But building sites is a numbers game so the more content I can create, the more visitors I can get, the more money I can make and average out the home runs and the strike outs.

Here's a good example from my Video Game site. I've outsourced every article on this site and It's growing like crazy in the last 3 months:

This site has quickly grown to be my #1 site for traffic and doesn't seem to be slowing down at all.

If you want to stay up to date on my progress as I build these websites you should join my email list below.

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5 comments

    1. I have links to products on Amazon but those have made $0 so far πŸ™‚

      All of the monetization is through Ezoic. They do a lot of testing/optimization for you so my EPMV has been improving. Here’s what it’s been for the last few months.

      March: $6.31
      April: $6.91
      May: $10.60
      June: $11.71

  1. Nice work! I am also a niche site hustler, have been doing it for 4 years and recently cracked the 3k/mo profit mark.

    I have shied away from display ads, but those EZOIC numbers are tempting. What’s EZOIC premium?

    Also how do you find the AHREFS subscription? Sounds like its worth it. Have you tried Semrush (paid)?

    1. Ezoic premium is supposed to make you more money by using a different set of advertisers. Honestly it’s barely worth it and I’m mostly in it for the credit card points πŸ™‚ In a normal month I’ll spend $110 on the Ezoic premium subscription and make like $150 off the ads. It helps but doesn’t move the nedle much.

      I love Ahrefs. I’ve been lazy lately and not using it very much so I might cancel it soon, not sure. It’s an amazing tool. I’ve tried the SEMrush free trial but never paid for it.

      Nice work on the 3k/mo! That’s huge. I’m stuck around $1.7k-$2k right now. Need to get some more content ordered so my sites will keep growing. They’ve been on cruise control for the last few months.

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