Fridays with Vicky 139
Time for another case study report, for the niche site monetized with Amazon. I spent most my time in August visiting family and friends in Sweden. It meant that I took most of the month off enjoying time with my loved ones. We all need that time away to recharge.
Since some of the sub niches of the site focus on winter month related products, I was curious to see if it would still bring in some money for the hot summer month of August. Not the best performing month for the site, but still a decent income for the summer month.
Not the best performing month for the site, but still a decent income for the summer month.
If you are new to this case study this is what the site is based on.
- It had to be hands-off with most content outsourced to other writers.
- It had to be in an evergreen niche, so I decided to work with the health niche.
- It had to be monetized with Amazon.
One of the reasons why I started the site was because I wanted to see for myself if it was possible to make decent money as an Amazon associate. This is one of a few different websites that I run at the time. It’s been an interesting project with exciting growth. We are now into year 3 of the site and there sure has been ups and downs.
You can see the other case studies here.
For me working for myself creating websites and monetizing them in different ways has created the freedom I always looked for. Taking a couple of months off like I did this summer would not have been easy working for somebody else. So for that, I’m forever thankful!
But let’s get back to the case study site and how it performed in August 2017
Traffic Progress
July
- Sessions 18.590
- Users 16.968
- Page views 22.953
- Session duration 49 sec
August
- Sessions 18.586
- Users 17.010
- Page views 22.923
- Session duration 47 sec
Looking at the numbers from July to August they are very similar. The session duration is dropping and that’s not good. But I do know that the visitors are finding what they need at least at the top traffic generating pages. The top 10 pages have an average of 3.20 minutes session duration, so that’s good.
The main traffic source is Google and other search engines. It means that I constantly have to put out great content that has the chance to rank well. So what type of posts and pages is it that rank well for the site?
Content
Over the summer I submitted 3 posts weekly. Two general informational posts and one review style post. Starting in September I’m bumping it up to 4 posts weekly, hoping it will generate some more traffic and rankings for the site.
These are the top 5 traffic generating posts for the site:
- Top 5
- 5 Best
- 5 Ways to
- Top 10
- 5 Ways
People love lists they generate traffic!!
Since we rely on organic traffic from the search engines, we need good rankings for people to be able to find the site and click on the posts that relate to them.
Ranking Result
We’ve seen a great growth curve for this site when it comes to keyword rankings. It’s dipping slightly in August but I hope that’s temporary. Compared to last year we’ve done a lot of growth.
Rankings August
Rankings July
According to SEMRush we only lost one Top 3 ranking, so that’s not too bad. I don’t want to see this trend continue though.
Case Study Income Report and Sales Result August 2017
Looking at the earnings this month, I can’t say that I’m happy about it. I do know it’s August, summer month and I know things will turn around. I’m disappointed in the earnings per 1000 visitors but excited that we earned more this August than last.
This is the numbers for August.
August 2017 Earned Commission
- Amazon $949.36
- Affiliate program 1 – 3 sales $157.19
- Total Ordered Items: 512
- Total Commission: $1,106.55
We had 27 returns so that lowered the earnings for sure.
To make a “fair” comparison I like to see earnings per 1000 visitors. That gives us a good number based on traffic and earnings, that we can compare.
- Dec $217.98 / 1000 visitors
- Jan $139.96 / 1000 visitors
- Feb $128.6 / 1000 visitors
- March $93.68 / 1000 visitors
- April $92.04 / 1000 visitors
- May $157.23 / 1000 visitors
- June $81.75 / 1000 visitors
- July $93.77 / 1000 visitors
- August $65.05 / 1000 visitors
Ugh, the lowest number for sure this year! The returns really put a dent in the earnings of this month. Also not having very many sales from the additional affiliate program contributed to low earnings.
Expenses August
Outsourcing: $113
- 9 Outsourced articles ($7 each) $63
- 4 Outsourced reviews, (these are longer in depth articles 1000 words at least, $12.5 each) $50
Hosting: $2
This site is on shared hosting, there for the low cost.
This is the hosting I suggest if you are new.
BlueHost Review – Top Notch Domain and Hosting Under the Same Roof
Listbuilding: $5
Aweber listbuilding, shared cost with other sites $5
Total Expenses: $120
Total Result August 2017: $986.55
- August 2016 – $831.22
- August 2017 – $986.55
Although we didn’t increase much from last year, it’s still an increase so happy about that.
Total Result for the Site 
- Result Month 1 – 6: $–265.36
- Result Month 6 – 12: $817.13
- Result Year 2: $15,767.08
- Result Year 3, 6M in: $8,080.55
Yearly Site Result
Monthly Results
What Does the Future Hold?
Last year we finished off great. December was bringing in 35% of the total income for 2016. The site had an amazing growth over last year. This year so far has been amazing as well.
In the beginning of the year, I asked myself what if we follow the same growth, would it be possible to get the site to earning 100K in 2017?
Well for that to happen, we should have been at 29K after August. We are a little behind lol.
Total earning for 2017 this far $12,504.35
Just hoping we can finish off the last quarter of the year in an extraordinary way! I’m still very hopeful and excited for the future of this site.
Tools That Help Me with My Site
I often get questions about what tools I use for my sites, so I thought I would share them here with you. These are the tools I couldn’t have made it without… they save me time and help me maximize earnings.
- Wealthy Affiliate for training and updates (Free and Premium membership)
- BlueHost (starting from $3.95 monthly)
- Jaxxy for keyword research (Free trial)
- WpZoom Theme I use for the site (Premium theme)
- EasyAzon to fast and easy include Amazon links on the site (Premium plugin)
- Aweber to collect emails (Premium tool)
- SumoMe (Free and premium for social share)
- Crowdfire for Twitter growth (Free and premium)
- Google Analytics (Free)
- SemRush (Free and Premium)
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Do you want to start your own blog or website? Want to make money online doing affiliate marketing? I show you how to get started in my free video course.
To a great September 2017!
Vicky
I guess you got to Sweden, I hope so, fun with the family!
John
I did John, it was great!! Thank you.