This is the September 2020 update for the Operator <> Investor partnership on the website in the Wellness niche. Details of the partnership structure and intro to the website were covered in the update here, the previous month’s update can be read here, and the archives here.
Let’s get to it!
📈 Highlights
- Overall traffic is up ~11%!
- Revenue was $378 (compared to $338 in August)
- 5 new articles added
- Push for Pinterest traffic
- Continued on-page SEO
- Continued keyword research and content planning
📊 Traffic Stats for September
Here is a comparison between September and August 2020:
Here are the last 12 months of traffic:
Here are the AHREF results:
💰 P&L in August
- Revenue: $338.42
- Costs: $168.45
- Profit: $169.97
All of the cost was for content from an agency. It was 10,000 words of content across 5 articles.
Note: None of us (investor nor operator) has taken any cash out of the business yet. We are recycling all revenue back into the site.
Revenue Streams?
Similar to last month, we are working on diversifying earnings. This site currently has the following sources and breakdown by percentage:
- Amazon Associates USA: 98%
- Private Affiliate Network #1: 0%
- ShareASale: 2%
Again, that’s scary with 98% to Amazon. Diversification will be a major focus going forward.
📅 August Improvements
Content Pipeline
The Operator is putting a lot of focus on putting together a streamlined content pipeline.
This is the current workflow:
- Long-tail keyword research using AHREFs
- Content briefs created from pre-made templates
- Frase.io is used to provide more context for the writer
- Articles are added to a custom Trello board
- Writers are assigned articles in Trello
- Writers upload finished article to Trello
- Operator uploads the article to WordPress, formats, and publishes
In September, 5 articles were written and posted onto the site.
At the end of the month, there were 7 articles in the pipeline with writers.
Goal: to get 30-50 articles in the pipeline to be written each month for the first 3-6 months. This will provide the fuel for growth. Still a long ways out!
The Operator is a Pinterest expert. This month he scheduled all new articles into Pinterest, created video pins for old articles, and optimized the Pinterest profile.
Here is the last year’s worth of Pinterest traffic data:
The previous owner built up a good profile overall. The Pinterest algorithms have had issues past 6 months resulting in a drop in traffic. If you want to learn more about what’s going on with Pinterest, this article is helpful.
Here are the stats of the Pinterest account as it stands today:
- 2,000 followers
- 122,100 monthly viewers
The Operator’s focus is to get the traffic back up over time.
On-page SEO
The previous owner was not an SEO expert; just a hobbyist. Many of her old pages were not optimized for search but still were getting traffic.
By performing basic on-page, we can get these pages ranked higher.
The process the Operator follows is:
- Plug in a URL into Google Search Console
- Check which sub-keywords it’s ranking for
- Extract keywords with high impression count but low clickthrough-rate (CTR) over the last 90 days (500-1000 impressions or more)
- Strategically add the keywords or update content to cover the sub-topics
- Track changes in rankings using SerpRobot
It’s a fairly simple process but can be time-consuming. The reward, however, is large if done right.
What we are doing is optimizing the page for extra keywords/topics that we did not plan for, nor write our article for. In general, when putting out content, you will target the main keyword will over time get traffic for hundreds of keywords.
Some of those keywords will be worth updating the original content to provide more focus. This will boost you up in search.
Note: You do not want to randomly add keywords that get impressions. This will mess up the keyword density of the page and may cause a penalty in the future.👉 What Can Be Improved in October 2020?
The Operator is working actively to do the following:
- 🆕 New Site Design: The current design is lacking. The theme has been customized by the previous to a point where it’s unusable. We will be shifting to the StudioPress theme framework to give us a fresh start.
- 🆕 New Content: Operator will be focusing on a cluster of topics that are bringing in the most traffic.
- Test Ezoic: We will be adding display advertisements to the website and Ezoic is our best bet for now. This can add easily another $100/month to the bottom line.
- 💰 Implement higher-paying affiliate products: We’ve identified a few high-paying products that we can implement using comparison tables and popups.
- Pinterest growth: Continue growing the Pinterest traffic
- Conversion Rate Optimization: increasing affiliate links, call-to-action-buttons, and comparison tables on specific articles.
The goal is to break $400 in October in total earnings. With the Prime Day event in October, that should be easily achievable.
Wrap Up
Thanks for reading! Let me know if you have any questions.
This is turning out to be a good website acquisition.
