Every month I like to share with my readers what’s been going on with one of my biggest passive income building activities – being the owner of several niche sites that I created and maintained. Each of these websites has their own particular monetization strategy that I’m constantly trying to foster and develop. The goal of course is cultivate them into streams of regular income that I can use to supplement my savings efforts each month.
To be honest a lot of my time in April was spent on a different passive income effort – the release of my first eBook. (More to come on that topic in a later post.) Even though that project did suck up a lot of my attention, I did manage to spend some time with my niche sites adding some new material and making a few strategic decisions that I hope will pay off big in the upcoming months.
Here’s what’s new with my niche website collection.
Niche Website Income Report – April 2015:
Here is my income and expense report for the month:
Income Breakdown:
Here’s a closer look at my income sources for the month:
- Amazon = $129
- Clickbank = $248
- Google Adsense = $413
- Web Hosting = $130
- Personal Capital = $0
- Private Advertising = $200
Continuing to Build Up My Amazon Site NS4:
The one place where I was very active this month was my Amazon-based music site NS4.
Last month I sought out to hire a writer who would produce new content for a batch of great keywords I had researched and found using Long Tail Pro Platinum.
I started by posting a job for a writer on Elance. Right away I got a number of good applications. Despite making a decision about which one I thought was the best and then offering that person that job, something inside me told me I better break the project up between two writers. And so I did.
It turns out that was a smart choice! Writer #1 flaked out and never delivered anything! She did really well in her initial interview and was very responsive at first. But then after several repeated attempts at communication she never delivered one single piece of writing. So I had to let her go and cancel her contract.
The second writer I hired at the last minute turned out to be phenomenal! He responded to every email within 24 hours in great, short, affirmative replies. On top of that – his writing was excellent! I only had to make a few relatively small changes.
The lesson learned: When it comes to working with freelancers, sometimes it pays to diversify and spread the work out among more than one person. If nothing else it can be a good insurance policy!
With the cancelled contract from Writer #1 and the $129 of income we made this month, I plan to do the business-like thing and reinvest some of those earnings back into the niche site. What that will mean are two things: 1) more content and 2) more link building.
Depending on my overall I’m sure I’ll eventually hire Writer #2 to complete the articles that Writer #1 never delivered. (I did get my escrow money back from Writer #1, so that’s why I show a credit in my expenses for NS4.)
An Upcoming Link-Building Experiment for NS1:
Last month we reached a milestone with NS1 when the site finally grew to 100 published posts. Even though I was really excited about this, as it turns out the Internet wasn’t really feeling as ecstatic about it.
Why do I say that? Because nothing changed for us in terms of income! I’m still getting roughly the same number of visitors and revenue for NS1 as I have been for the past few months.
So what does that tell me? Maybe the ole-stand-by of adding more posts to the site isn’t the answer … I’m beginning to think that perhaps new growth will come from doing a better job of promoting the content that’s already there!
There are a lot of different ways I could go about doing this. One would be to use the same strategy I did last year when I guest posted several times a month. Another way (and the more lazy option) would be to simply buy up a link package from an SEO service.
Well, guess what?
At the end of month I made my decision to go ahead with a link building package. (That was the expense I show for this month under NS1.) Next month I’ll get more into what service I’m using, how I made my decision, and hopefully have some positive results to share!
Readers – How are your passive income and website building efforts going?
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Looks like a relatively good month overall MMD. Great decision on breaking up the writing! It’s a shame that there are those out there who’ll not follow through on their word, but it happens and even better that the other writer turned out to be a keeper. Last month was relatively good for me as well, nothing too earth shattering. I’m interested to learn more about the link building package you went with and hope you have some good results with it.
Any month over $1,000 I’ll take it!
To be honest I’m pretty interested to see what happens with that link building package as well. Hopefully it will turn out to be money well spent and good news all around, but we’ll see.
Great job on your side income! Our other websites still make around zero dollars. We’ll get there one day!
Feel free to hit me up and let me take a look at them. Perhaps I can offer a few suggestions.
You know, I practically salivate over these Niche Site updates. I’m waiting for the day that my Adsense revenue is 4 digits per month.
I’ve decided to complement my blog’s income with some niche sites as well. Micro niche sites that will have nothing to do with retail banking, of course. Just completely different topic based on some different ideas I’ve had. I spend a lot of time taking things and asking myself “Can I write at least ten great articles about this topic”? The answer is usually “no”.
I’m really curious about how sales are going for your eBook. Perhaps you’ll put out a monthly eBook income update?
Keep up the march to financial freedom! It must certainly be a great thing to have your passive income on track to covering your monthly expenses! Or at least a sizable portion of them.
Sincerely,
ARB–Angry Retail Banker
I’m still waiting for the day when my Adsense account is 4 figures in one month as well! I came close once, so I know its possible!
Congrats on the decision to branch out building other sites. The most important thing is to be willing to try new things when something doesn’t work out the way you think it will (because that will happen). To get my sites to where they are today I’ve had to do hundreds of cycles of testing something new and then coming up with something new to make it better. It’s easy to give up but challenging to make it work. However the rewards are there!
Unfortunately the eBook sales are slow to non-existent. I’ve been doing a lot of reading of posts by other authors to try to pick up some good tips for things to try next. We’ll see how this all goes.
Just realized that you might have calculated your April earnings for NS4 wrong. It looks like you added your revenues and costs to get your profit rather than subtracting your costs from your revenue.
Nope, it’s correct. That was a tricky one. In the post I mentioned I got a “credit” from Writer #1 failing to deliver on her services. So in other words my expenses for the month for NS4 were “negative” $76.71 (i.e. a credit rather than an expense). I choose to do it in this way so that I could accurately keep track of my overall expenses. Plus just because Writer #1 failed to deliver doesn’t really make the money “revenue”.
Ah. I actually realized it after rereading the post. My mistake.
Great job. My niche site is going pretty slow right now. I plan on adding some more post to it this month.
In the early stages of building your site adding more content can be a great way to build up it’s authority as well as create more internal links. Plus if you’ve done your keyword research, it increases your chances of being found organically. I definitely plan on adding more content to NS4 at some point in the next 1-2 months.
I am very impressed with you income MMD despite having a condition. It seems like nothing has changed and you’re still motivated and determined! Kudos. I think you made a good point on work diversification, which I am planning to do for my next website.
Thanks Jayson. Behind the scenes I don’t really have as much time as I’d normally like to spend on my sites, however I have managed to keep the ball rolling on a few items during the weeks I feel good.
Looks like it was a good month overall for you! I’m curious about how your link building turns out. I’ve heard quite a lot of people don’t trust it anymore since Google can just implement new algorithm whenever they please then the old method becomes obsolete. The worst comes to worst, you might also be penalized. But anyway, I guess it really depends on the strategy.
I am very curious about how the link building package works out too. I really hope it isn’t money wasted or worse – results in a Google penalty. I did intentionally use this package to target sub-pages where the rankings weren’t really that high anyways. That was my insurance policy that if things didn’t work out, then there really wouldn’t be any change or loss.
You have to spend first in order to get revenue from a business. I’m interested what the SEO link building will bring you, as I get daily emails from business promising me great results. I’m trying to find a way to build revenue the slow and steady way as to not rush into things.
I’m curious how it will work out as well. My problem is that the site seems to be stuck in a plateau that I can’t quite seem to break out from. My hope is that these extra links will give it the little “kick” it needs to start showing some more growth and get a few thousand more visitors per month.
Congrats on your success! I’m interested to see how the link building turns out for you. I’ve thought about using Long Tail Pro for a while but have yet to pull the trigger. Are you a fan?
I am a HUGE fan of using Long Tail Pro Platinum, mostly because of the Keyword Competitiveness score. It makes searching multiple keywords and making judgements about which ones I want to go after such a breeze when they can be quantified by one single score.
Heh, hope that link building package works out for you. Adding more content only makes a notable difference if you have a the proper internal linking (a good silo) set up. So do you? If you do that then that should add to the traffic and income 🙂
Thanks Josh. Unfortunately no. My NS1 site was my first niche site, so there were a lot of fundamental mistakes made in the beginning in terms of structure, internal linking, etc.
I have seen the benefits of siloing in my latest niche site NS4. That one was planned out and constructed ahead of time with silos in mind, and I believe that is what has helped many of the pages to rank so much better without hardly any off-page SEO.
Nice income report,
I’m putting together a roundup report on bloggers income figures and would love to include your May figures if that’s ok?
Let me know when you publish them and I’ll get them included in my report.
In the meantime keep up the good blogging!
Raj
Hi Raj and welcome to the site!
Absolutely you can publish my income figures. I’d love to have your readers get referred to these reports and gain some value out of finding out what’s been working and what hasn’t.