These past few months since the December update have been rough. Freefall continued.
Not going to lie, I entertained the thought of selling at the lowest point and running with my tail between my legs more than once.
But before I did that, I rolled up my sleeves and got down to work.
- I did a ton of keyword research, discovered shoulder opportunities, and ordered and published content for them.
- I’ve bought a link package to the post that has the most potential.
- I’ve optimized my on-page and technical SEO and internal linking and published a few posts…
But no matter how much I tried, all my keywords went deep down. My biggest earning keyword dropped from #1 to #4. Others lost 10-30 spots.
So I sat down and thought real hard about my plans for this. If you remember my first update, for me this has to be very much a side project because I have many other responsibilities.
But should I really be playing it safe at this point? How confident am I about my ability to succeed at this? If I’m not confident, should I be wasting my time with this at all?
I decided that I am sure that I can do this. So I went all in – time-wise and money-wise. If I fail, I’ll at least know I’ve done all I can.
What I Did
- Had someone go through my main pages and optimize them using Surfer even further.
- Bought an expired domain to merge with a specific category on my main site.
- Hired a VA specifically for HARO.
- Went back to my best writers and had them all write a big bunch of content for me.
- Spent some time tweaking my site’s speed. I was not reducing image size, and I’ve had triple minification by different plugins. Ultimately, I’ve decided to just go with Nitropack for everything after someone who’s on AdThrive said they recommend them in their FB group. My scores are finally looking good, especially for Ezoic.
- After my huge spending spree, I sat down and did my P&L. I am in the red, and I just can’t keep spending like this. I was almost broke. So I paid made my final outstanding fees and canceled everything except the HARO VA. I’ve told everyone we’re out of work for a while. For now, I will do everything I can do myself – optimization, writing, and traffic leaking.
- Thew caution to the wind and turned on Ezoic on my money pages, bringing my ePMV from $7 to $15. Soon after that, I graduated to the next tier of Ezoic Premium, bringing my ePMV to $20.
- REALLY went through the site and did all the technical, off-site, and on-site SEO I’ve been ignoring. Disavowed links, fixed general schema markup, alt tags, and titles for 600+ images, redesigned to reduce click depth and spread link juice to biggest money pages, etc. The works.
What Happened
I started doing this in February. Somewhere around mid-April/early May Google rewarded me: I recovered about 80% of my pre-December traffic.
This time though, things are different.
I permanently lost some lucrative keywords.
Although I now rank in top 1 and top 3 for a lot more small volume keywords, which drive little traffic on their own but a lot of traffic altogether. Most of that is to informational pages.
I am in the top 10 for money keywords as well, but they are driving much less revenue than they were. Ezoic is now my biggest earner.
I am fine with this. It was nice riding the Amazon pony, but info content seems to be a more stable source of traffic long term.The Numbers
| Month | Posts | Visitors | Amazon | Ezoic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| December | 4 | 17 | ||
| January | 1 | 4 | ||
| February | 1 | 3 | ||
| March | 15 | 267 | ||
| April | 9 | 1635 | $2 | |
| May | 5 | 5483 | $118 | |
| June | 1 | 7380 | $119 | |
| July | 3 | 10918 | $211 | |
| August | 2 | 14845 | $336 | |
| September | 11 | 18988 | $858 | $125 |
| October | 10 | 23849 | $1065 | $126 |
| November | 22 | 31745 | $1548 | $198 |
| December | 16 | 22905 | $1108 | $237 |
| January | 6 | 23449 | $718 | $296 |
| February | 8 | 18895 | $541 | $399 |
| March | 5 | 17430 | $381 | $409 |
| April | 0 | 16800 | $310 | $293 |
| May | 8 | 24642 | $462 | $452 |
| Total | 121 | $7777 | $2535 |
What Next
Alas, I just can’t keep spending. Until I am out of the red, I will have to do everything myself, which is essentially doing a new post or two a month, and uploading one or two a month from old ones that I commissioned but never got around to uploading.
