November 2018 Income Report

Things were busy in November. So busy that my last post was also another short income report. In the last month I completed the sale of my Amazon FBA business and have moved on to spending all of my time and effort on my websites. But since I constantly get shiny object syndrome I’ve created 2 new sites. I’ll touch on them at the end since they’re making no money right now.

FBA Business Is Gone

In my last income report I talked about selling my Amazon business and ending up with about $20k in proceeds after a $40k selling price (taxes, fees, business debt etc makes up the difference). I’ve invested half the money into a combination of high yield ETFs that are low risk. These are in my after tax Robinhood account so I can just pull the money out if I choose to spend it building my websites or buying something else.

Some day I’ll write a post up going through the whole sales process but it was pretty exhausting and I’ve taken it easy since I sold my Amazon business. I’ve been putting some content on my new websites but the old ones have kind of been on autopilot. I’m planning to change that this month.

Quick Disclaimer:

Because I lost my Amazon account when I sold the FBA business, I don’t have a full month of sales data. It took me about 5 weeks to get my account reapproved so there’s a gap in the earnings which caused them to be about $50-$100 lower than normal.

Total Website Income – $953

Last month was actually pretty promising due to a couple of things.

1 – My new site I’m building from scratch is killing it. It’s now up to 450 ish pageviews per day which is somewhere around 12k-15k views per month.

2 – One of the sites I acquired is starting to see traffic growth through some link building I did. It almost doubled it’s advertising revenue last month.

Here’s some screenshots of the earnings:

And here’s the advertising income

I just learned today that you can’t share all of your Adsense numbers so I’m just posting the income.

Why Do I Share This Stuff?

I don’t share these income reports to brag. I just do it to show what the process is like. A lot of the people I follow in the online marketing world have crazy numbers like millions of visitors per month and $50k or $100k monthly income reports.

But I want to show it’s totally possible to make a 4 or 5 figure monthly income from websites. It takes a while and it’s a lot of work, but if you stick with it eventually the numbers will start to grow and you’ll make real money.

I have a plan and a system to start growing my sites that I’ll be testing over the next 6-12 months. If everything goes well I’m expecting to grow my monthly income to around $3k-$5k per month.

Websites I Acquired

The 2 websites I acquired have been doing well. Unfortunately I was late switching over their Amazon affiliate codes so I only have a few weeks of earning data. The backlinks I built have helped traffic grow on the advertising site and doubled since last month.

I also partnered up with the broker who sold me the first website I acquired. He put up a bunch of content on the site and we’re going to split the earnings 50/50.

It’s a good deal for both of us. He can outsource the content and use my website’s existing authority to rank and earn money.

I get to use his content to make money, kind of like renting out digital real estate on my website and sharing the profit.

The plan for these websites is to leave them alone and let them grow. I may do some additional linkbuilding for the software site since it seems to be working well. Organic traffic on this website has grown from 17k visitors per month to 25k visitors.

My Own Creation

After acquiring those 2 sites in March/April of 2018, I created my own site in the outdoor niche. I love the outdoors and camping/hiking/backpacking so I made a site in something I knew really well and was interested in.

Things have been going really well on this site and I’m happy with the progress I’ve made so I’m going to share some more details.

Here’s what the traffic looks like for the last 90 days:

And here is the Amazon earnings:

You can see the blank area where I didn’t have my affiliate account setup. So in about half a month I made $103 which means this site is making about $200 per month just from Amazon affiliate income! Obviosly it was higher because of Black Friday but it’s still pretty promising.

I also added some Adsense ads. I have one page that’s 100% informational content. I paid $25 on Textbroker to have it written and it just has a few affiliate links to Amazon for products that cost like $5k. I rank #2 in Google and get about 100-150 visitors per day just to that page. Even with all those visitors, the affiliate income was pretty low so I decided to add some ads as well.

Adsense brought in $14 but I might switch it over to Ezoic which is what my software site uses. The software site went from $30 per month in Adsense to $200 per month on Ezoic. Using those same numbers that means I could bring in about $100 in ads if I put my outdoor site on Ezoic.

I have high hopes for December. I’m going to double down on creating content and with the Christmas season I wouldn’t be surprised if I could hit $300 in December just with this site.

Why I Created Two New Websites In November

I get shiny object syndrome pretty bad so I actually ended up creating 2 new websites.

The first one is in the video game niche. After putting a deposit down on Empire Flippers for a promising listing, I was shocked at how crappy the content was and how much money the site was making.

The site was related to a mobile game. I don’t even remember what it was, but it was something fairly obscure that you probably weren’t familiar with; I had never heard of it.

This guy was getting 2 million pageviews per month and was making about $3k from JUST display advertising through Adsense.

Knowing that I can swap out Adsense for Ezoic and 3x-5x the earnings means buying a website with Adsense can be instantly profitable for me. Unfortunately the guys website was just starting to tank and his traffic had already fallen by 50% from the prior month. Buyer beware….

So I bailed on that listing and decided to start my own. Since I don’t have time or the interest to create the content, I’ll be outsourcing most of it. I came up with a huge list of keywords and I’ve spent a couple hundred dollars on new content.

I’ve also purchased an expired domain that has quite a bit of authority and done a 301 redirect to my new domain. Hopefully this passes over some of the authority and link juice to help my traffic.

I’ve also started building links back to my homepage and creating some social signals on Instagram/Facebook by using IFTTT to automatically share my posts. This is the same strategy I used on my outdoor site and the growth has been pretty impressive.

Here’s where my new video game site is currently sitting:

It takes a long time for sites to take off but this one has definitely jumped up quickly. I’ve taken a little break from adding new content to see how it does and so far it looks positive. I’ll be ordering more articles on Textbroker and adding more pages with monetization. Right now everything is informational content and there’s no ads since it would just make pennies.

The second site I’m starting is about marijuana. I live in Michigan and they just legalized recreational marijuana in November. In 3 days you’ll be able to legally grow your own weed and eventually buy it from dispensaries.

Unfortunately selling weed is a pretty bad side hustle so I have no plans to start doing that πŸ™‚ If you want to see why, check out this interesting article on the over supply of marijuana in Oregon.

But I’m interested in it and started researching how to grow your own weed. And holy SHIT is it confusing. All of the information online is haphazard, old wives tales and superstitious. It’s a bunch of stoners telling other stones what another stoner read online one time. No offense to stoners, but it’s just not a good experience for someone looking to get into the hobby.

So I’m going to try to change that. The current websites out there about marijuana are sites like growweedeasy.com which gets a TON of traffic and is considered an authority in the space. Unfortunately it’s not easy to read, the authors write extremely long articles to pad the word count and show more ads. They recommend products that are actually not very good (based on Reddit opinions which are generally more truthful than affiliates pushing you to Amazon).

So the first green light for this niche is the fact that the competition is beatable. I know I can make a better product than them so I could rank higher in Google.

The second green light is monetization. The search volume in the marijuana niche is MASSIVE. And it’s only legal in a handful of states right now. In the next 10-20 years marijuana will be legalized in every state and will become a huge industry. There’s no better time to get started than now. My site will build authority and rankings as time goes on which will give me a leg up on future competition.

Additionally, the stuff is EXPENSIVE. If you want to create a simple marijuana grow op,you’re looking at $200-$1,000 of expenses depending on how elaborate you want to be.

All the stuff can be purchased on Amazon which means if you can help 1 person figure out what they need to buy, you’re looking at a commission of $10-$50.

If you can help just 1 person per day do that, you’d be making $300-$1,500 per month. This is a super profitable niche which makes me think it will be worth investing into.

How I Plan to Get Shit Done

One of my biggest problems has been laziness. I spend most of my free time playing Rocket League and hanging out with my wife/kids so I don’t have a ton of free time.

But if I want these sites to grow there’s no other way than putting in the time and work. Sitting down and writing the content is all it takes.

If I do that I win. If I don’t, I lose.

Over the last month I’ve been reading a new book by James Clear called Atomic Habits. It’s a really great book and there are 2 ideas I’m going to use to force myself to get shit done.

1 – Make your habits small.

The example the author gives is instead of promising to run 5 miles every day, just tell yourself you’ll get your running clothes on and go to the end of the driveway.

So since my goal is to write a bunch of content, my goal will be to write 100 words per day. That’s it. If I don’t feel like writing more, I can just quit. But I started writing this tonight with 0 motivation and I’m currently sitting at 1,974 words so this strategy seems to work pretty well. Once you get into the flow it’s easy to keep going.

2 – Track your habits.

By tracking your habits, you’ll build progress and momentum and keep the streak going. I got an app on my phone that I check each day I complete my goal. I’ve got a little widget that shows the days I’ve done my habit so every time I get on my phone I have a huge progress indicator staring me in the face. Hopefully this works, time will tell πŸ™‚

Some links on this website may earn me a small commission if you click on them at no extra cost to you. For more information please click this text to see the full affiliate disclosure.

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