Niche Website Update 24 – $1,524 of Income – Amazon Site Progress and Next Steps

Welcome to yet another edition of my monthly niche website portfolio update.

Building and profiting from websites has become a very intricate part of how I’m slowly building my fortune and saving for financial freedom. The great thing about it is that it is in no way tied to my day-job or paycheck in any way.  I’m simply going above and beyond to create an income stream that will help support my goals regardless of my job.

November is over and winter has been very much upon us here in the mid-west.  These are the kinds of cold months where I really look forward to staying indoors (where it’s warm) with a cup of hot coffee and typing out brand-new content for hours on end.

There were a few surprises this past month but all in all not a bad haul.  Read on to hear more about the good and bad with niche site 4 (NS4) and where I plan to go next.

Niche Website Income Report – November 2014:

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 = $25.17. More on this below …
• Clickbank = $116.27.
• Google Adsense = $515.56
• iPage = $105.00.  iPage is really affordable choice for starting a first or second website.
• Personal Capital = $100.00. (If you’d like to make money by being an affiliate yourself, click here).
• Private Advertising = $661.68.

Wait … Wasn’t My Amazon Site Supposed to BURST with Revenue?

If you remember last month I predicted that November and December would be HUGE revenue months for my Amazon-based music-themed site NS4.  Why? Because of Christmas!

NS4 is completely monetized by affiliate sales with Amazon Associates (Amazon’s affiliate program).  The more people buy through my site the more I earn.

Last year when I was first thinking about creating the site I was completely blown away by some of the income figures people were reporting (in the thousands!!) in the months leading up to Christmas.  Makes sense, right?  People would go online, find my site, read about something they want, click over to Amazon, and then buy whatever it is.

As far back as a few months ago I wanted to prepare for this by putting NS4 in the best possible position I could.  To make the site more attractive, I:

• Added more content. We’re now up and over 50 respectable posts!  That’s just as big of a site as NS2.
• Improved the keyword rankings and increased SEO visibility.
• Got the main page to rank as high as No. 5 in Google for the main target keyword.
• Had an over 2x increase in traffic compared to two months ago.
• Raised the click-through rate (CTR) to Amazon.

Those were all the right moves, right?  So …. how much money did we make in November again?

$25.

What???  How can that be?

Unfortunately that’s just how it is.  You can work and work and work all you want on creating the most awesome site in the world.  But from a business perspective if you aren’t receiving any revenue, then something’s not right.

So with that said, let’s take a big objective step back and try to analyze what’s going on here.   There are a few things I can think of:

1. Perhaps the items I’m promoting are too “big” for people to buy on impulse. For example – If you’re in the market for a new guitar, it’s probably unlikely that you’re going to click on some random website you just found and then buy the guitar that day.  As a musician I know that the way this usually goes is that you do your research first, go to the store, try them out, and then eventually make a decision.  That process could take weeks!
2. Related to Point No. 1, the Amazon cookie only lasts 24 hours. Maybe people really are buying these products, but after the 24 hour mark.  That would result in me NOT getting a commission.
3. Maybe with the way modern computers, tablets, and phones are the tracking cookies are getting blocked?
4. Maybe I’m targeting too low of keywords? My main keyword only gets a volume of 1,600 searches per month.  All the other keywords only get around 500 to 100 per month.  There’s nothing wrong with going after long-tail keywords, but perhaps I was setting my limits too low.
5. Maybe with these low levels of search volume I need to think bigger – like 150 pages of content.
6. Perhaps these really ARE realistic conversion rates and I simply need more traffic to make this a sustainable business.

What do you think?

So should we give up on my Amazon site?  Was it all just a complete waste of time?

Not so fast …

At last check on Dec 5, my Amazon commissions were already at $57.  So 5 days into December we’ve already doubled the income I received for the whole month of November.

The point: You’ve got to give these things some time.  The long-term road to making money is never instant.  Sometimes you simply setup the best system you possibly can, sit back, and see what happens.  If after a while you’re happy with the way things are going, change it.

So for now my plan is …. not really to do anything different.  I’d like to see how these 50 pages of content do over the next 2-3 months in terms of revenue before I invest any more time or resources into the project.

I’m happy with the size of the site and keyword popularity of the posts.  There are only a few places where I could see adding 5-10 more posts to beef-up a few categories.  But otherwise nothing too crazy.

In terms of how to increase the conversions, I’m not really sure it’s within my control or influence to make people buy the products more quickly.  Perhaps I’ll need to read up on conversion improvement more on other blogs and see if there are any tricks I’m not quite taking advantage of.

What’s Next on the Online Business Agenda?  NS1:

For the last two months I’ve been all about NS4 and trying to get as much new content on the site as possible in time for the big Holiday season.

With that item checked off my to-do list, I’ve had to give some thought as to what my next priority will be.

If you remember back to when we discussed the 80/20 rule, we said that 20% of the things you do should lead to 80% of our income.

As I look over the revenue figures for the month, I can’t help but notice how one conversion from Personal Capital ($100) was worth almost 4x times my entire monthly earnings from Amazon.  (Actually we made $300 in total from Personal Capital, but $200 was from My Money Design which we don’t report here).

So if I’m applying the 80/20 rule, this tells me that figuring out a way to boost the conversions for Personal Capital would provide the biggest return on my effort.

That’s why I’ve decided to turn my focus back to NS1.  NS1 is by far the largest niche website I own.  It is over 80 posts big and I really want to see it grow to above and beyond 100.

My ultimate goal is to increase traffic to the site.  Increased traffic = increased earning potential from both Google Adsense and my Personal Capital affiliate links.

To get there, I’ll need to do the following:

• Re-write a few of the now-outdated posts with some new, fresh content.
• Research some new low-competition keywords using Long Tail Pro and add more brand-new content to the site.
• Add 1-2 incredible resource pages to the site. These should be mega-posts that would be almost equivalent to a smaller eBook.

These days I’m relying less and less on farming out the content creation to hired writers on eLance and then uploading the content as quickly as possible.  Though I will likely still use freelance writers, my publishing approval process has become far stricter.  I really just want every article to be worth reading; no fluff.  And if it takes a little longer to put together a better article and get it up on the site, then so be it.  I think it will be worth it long-term.

Readers – What do you think about the progress of my niche website portfolio?  How are your side income efforts coming along? 

Image courtesy of Nic Taylor | Flickr