Fridays with Vicky 85
July has come to an end and it’s time for another monthly update of my Amazon Niche Case Site.
July was filled of summer, travel, beach and fun. Didn’t work much with the site. This is exactly the setup I was looking for, a handsoff site with outsourced content.
Don’t get me wrong a lot of work goes into the site, but all content for July and August has been submitted and scheduled ahead of time. The schedule feature in WordPress is a life saver during the summer months. This allows me to submit new content on a regular basis.
Right now I’m sitting in Sweden summarizing last month’s numbers. The beauty of working for yourself, from anywhere at any time.
Today I will keep the update short and sweet…
Let’s look at the numbers for my Amazon case study site, numbers for July 2016.
Traffic Progress
How do I get traffic to the site?
This is a site based on outsourced content. The main traffic comes from organic listings in Google and other search engines.
June 2016 (Month 16)
- Sessions 5133
- Users 4631
- Pageviews 7243
- Session duration 1.26
July 2016 (Month 17)
- Sessions 5614
- Users 5107
- Pageviews 7670
- Session duration 1.15
Sessions, users and page views are up from previous month, this is a good sign. Hopefully my dip due to seasonal products were last month and from now on we will see an overall climb in traffic numbers.
The one thing that is dropping is session duration, I need to look into this further, figure out if it’s because my visitors click through to Amazon earlier due to some picture ads that I added further up in my content or if unrelevant visitors are landing on my site… need to look into the bounce rate here.
Overall all I’m happy with the positive trend.
Ranking Results
New and lost keywords
June 2016 (Month 16)
- Gained 542
- Lost 294
July 2016 (Month 17)
- Gained 617
- Lost 227
I use SemRush to check my gained and lost rankings, I also use them to see my keyword rankings. Again I’m happy about the gained keywords, 617 gained keywords an upswing from the month before. The site also lost less keywords than the previous month, so a great sign.
I love their new addition – notes. This will give you additional information about Semrush and Google, you can also add your own comments in the note section. A great addition that makes a great tool even better, well done SemRush.
Sales Result
This is always an interesting number to look at, hopefully the sales numbers will follow the traffic increase and keyword gained.
June 2016 (Month 16)
- Sales: 208
- Commission: $518.24
Expenses June
- 8 outsourced articles $48
- 3 Outsourced reviews, (these are longer in depth articles 1000 words at least) $37.5
This site is on shared hosting. Read about my recommended hosting here.
Total Expenses: $85.5
Total Result June: $432.74
July 2016 (Month 17)
- Sales: 213
- Commission: $648.55
Expenses July
- 9 Outsourced articles $54
- 4 Outsourced reviews, (these are longer in depth articles 1000 words at least) $50
This site is on shared hosting. Read about my recommended hosting here.
Total Expenses: $104
Total Result July: $544.55
Happy to see that the numbers are increasing from June to July. The site is still focused on a “winter” niche so very happy with the July result. Can’t wait to see what this site will do during the cold months.
Total Result for the Site
- Result Month 1 – 6: $–265.36
- Result Month 6 – 12: $817.13
- Result Month 13-16: $1770.23
- Result Month 17: $544.55
Total result after 12 months: $551.77
Total result after 17 months: $2866.55
Couldn’t Have Done It Without…
This program:
Wealthy Affiliate Review – An Online Community That Might Surprise You
And this plugin:
EasyAzon Review – Save Time and Increase Amazon Commission All With this 1 Plugin
Did you miss the related posts in this case study serie?
Enjoy the rest of your summer!
Have a productive day,
chris verhoeven says
hi vicky,
i just stumbled upon your article through twitter.
I always love to see income and progression reports.
but with expenses, shouldn’t you add your website costs, listbuilding, etc?
i think it will show a more clearer picture of the actual money you’re making with your website.
I’m going to do this too soon. my website only went live last sunday and today i published my 2nd article.
I’m documenting my journey into setting up a profitable blog from the start.
These days too many people are presenting themselves as marketing guru’s so this was my usp.
Have a great sunday.
xoxo chris
Vicky says
Hi Chris,
If you look at the first couple of months you can see larger expenses WordPress theme purchase and domain for example.
The site is on shared hosting, same thing with the list building, the cost is shared through many sites. You are right though, I should calculate the cost even if it’s just a few dollars / site and include that in the expenses.
I appreciate your feedback and will ad those costs in.
Good luck with your site!
Vicky