Hi all, I’m back with my third and last update.
What Happened
A lot happened. In a nutshell, since I took out a loan at the beginning of the year and then dug out an even deeper hole with content and stuff, I promised my wife to pay the loan back instead of reinvesting. This leads me to starve the site for content. For a long time, I was only writing myself, and I had less and less time to do so because of life. This leads me to some difficult decisions, which I mention at the end of this post.
Ezoic Trouble
At one point, I started using Nitropack. My Ezoic ePMV dropped significantly – you can see it in my numbers from June through October (in August, I got $37 instead of $400+!). It turns out that Ezoic is incompatible with them. On a hunch, I turned Nitropack off, and my ePMV went back to normal levels immediately. I wish they mentioned this somewhere.
Emails
I used to gather emails via a lead magnet and a “subscribe to blog updates” button, and then I would never follow up.
I was urged by people to stop messing around, so I finally followed up on my email list. I sat down for a few days and designed, wrote, and automated a 4-month series of emails. My workflow is a monthly repetition of something like this:
- Week 1: Big value email with secret downloadables and stuff.
- Weeks 2-3: Value email with links to info content.
- Week 4: Value email with links to money content and/or an offer.
- If any of this month’s emails have been opened, mark them as warmed up and continue. If none have been opened, move to a win-back workflow. If the win-back fails, unsubscribe.
My stats looked pretty good:
- Open: 21%
- CTR: 2%
- Unsubscribe: 2%
- Bounce: 2%
I had 255 subscribers when I started weekly emails in August, and 146 were removed by my “self-cleaning”. So, only 57% of that list was remotely interested in my emails a year after giving me their email.
On Black Friday, I did an email blast with deal roundups and got 2 clicks. Of course, my list was only 100 by that point. Oh well.Pinterest
My niche lends itself well to Pinterest, and I was neglecting it to my detriment. I hired an account manager, and my Pinterest-generated sessions grew from 56 a month in August to 1121 in January. Yay.
Other Stuff I Did
- I have done more interlinking, broken link fixing, and other on-page SEO than I care to admit. Then I did some more. And I’m still not done with my to-do list. It’s a never-ending chore but it helps with rankings.
- At one point in June, I bought a domain off an auction, researched and commissioned content to 301 it to, and did so. I failed to rank for almost anything.
- At one point, I realized I was being DDosed. My droplet was going down once a week until I rebooted it. I upped it a level and it started surviving being DDosed. After that, the attacks stopped.
- I made some CRO and ad optimizations: made sure my CTAs are contrasting in color to the overall color of the site; turned off the price display in AAWP and changed “Buy Now” to “Check price”.
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 |
| June | 22 | 25855 | $623 | $296 |
| July | 0 | 27518 | $466 | $188 |
| August | 2 | 24759 | $744 | $37 |
| September | 5 | 24449 | $438 | $169 |
| October | 5 | 23949 | $526 | $137 |
| November | 8 | 28699 | $1097 | $716 |
| December | 4 | 30581 | $728 | $652 |
Why Last Update?
This site is now up for sale.
This is my first site. It’s my baby. I spent countless nights studying and writing for it, tried so many different things, learned so much. I chanced on a great sub-niche, snagged awesome backlinks, created top-notch content, gained a topical foothold and I have a game plan for years to come. The site has the most potential out of everything I have.
But I needed to decide whether this was a hobby simply, or a business. If I’m looking at the numbers, all I see is missed opportunities. I’m not content with $1k a month, but this is where I’ve been for the last year. If I want to take this home, I need to scale. Sure, I would love to scale this site if I had the resources, – but I don’t. What I do have is a smaller project that has some potential and two tiny ones on the back burner. So it’s either slowly growing with small risk, or risking a lot more to potentially grow a lot quicker. So even though I’m sad to leave the site behind and wondering about the opportunities I’m going to miss, I’m saying bye-bye to Mr. Hobbyist.
I tried a couple of brokers, including a private brokerage. Found the best deal I could and the listing is now live.
