December 2022 Niche Site Income Report: $81,320.48

The year has drawn to an end, and I’m very grateful for how everything has gone. It’s been a very transformative year for me, especially since I joined Twitter and began to interact with so many other knowledgeable and great people – after a few years as an anonymous niche site writer.

I’ve learned so much more from you super-talented people, who I’d never have heard from otherwise, so I think a lot of the uptick in my site income is due to others sharing their insights – and I’m very grateful to all of you.

But you came for numbers. So here they are:

Our total niche site earnings across our portfolio in December 2022 was $81,320.48.

**This only includes income from our niche sites. We don’t include income we make from anything to do with increasing.com or my personal Jamie I.F. brand.

I’ll do a more detailed round-up of 2022 in a separate article, but with the $80K months in Nov and Dec, our niche sites earned a total of $452,233.51 in revenue across 2022.

Based on an L12M earning average, and a very conservative 38x multiple, that makes the sites worth a total of $1,437,051.62. Which is cool. Not that I have any intention of selling.

Now we’re into 2023, and other projects have come up that will take time away from my niche sites, I have drawn up a list of 12 goals for 2023 — of which only one is financial targets for my sites. A few of these goals include:

• Post 25 videos (can include income reports, but mainly I want to create more cool content on SEO, niche sites and affiliate marketing – and maybe even other stuff)
• Improve my email, social media, and video skills significantly
• Move out of where I currently live
• Start and complete a creative project TBD
• Go on 2 holidays for at least 14 days off work (last 3 years total holidays abroad: 0 days. Officially a workaholic.).

** I also want to say these are revenues, not profits. We spend a LOT on these sites, and have not been profitable for the majority of our existence. Whereas some have very profitable business models where they write all their own content, we have not followed that route, and a writing team, VAs, and full-time and part-time employees work on these sites.

December 2022 Niche Site Income Report: The Breakdown

The total breakdown for the earnings was:

• $0 in direct sponsorship (-$750)
• $18,618.24 in ads (+$-221.76)
• $61,642.88 across Amazon Affiliates and other affiliate programs (+$2953.88)
• $1059.36 in digital products (+$158.36)

I expect an enormous drop-off in January and February, and I’ll be ecstatic if we maintain $40K/mo in Q1.

What Happened in December?

A lot of the tail end of the month involved planning for 2023 — especially the time between Christmas Day and New Year. So, naturally, we didn’t publish as much during December as we plan to in a standard month.

Creating topical maps for 2023

I’m working hard on delegating as much as possible, and so my focus in the second half of December (and continuing in January) is to create the full 2023 topical map and keyword research databases, so from there everything can be delegated, briefed, written, edited, formatted and published.

It’s a lot of work upfront and doesn’t feel like I’m getting a lot done, but it’s key in being able to take a bird’s eye view of content and save time throughout the year as the entire structure is already in place.

Our site died, and came back

On the 16th December one of our largest sites was struck down in a Google algo update, instantly losing 70% of traffic. This was devastating, but people far cleverer than be told me to wait it out and be patient, as these can sometimes be rolled back.

I was skeptical, but left it alone. Sure enough, in early January, the site has magically returned to the traffic level it had prior to being hit by the update, so I’m stoked.

I’ll be frank – I was a ball of stress and anxiety from when it hit, over Christmas. But fuck it, it’s back now.

What We’re Doing in January 2023

Site speed and technical work

Honestly some of our sites are a mess. None really pass CWV, and one is only a matter of time before we get de-indexed because for some users it just doesn’t load, and infinitely refreshed a blank screen.

My main goal is to completely revamp the sites: new fast theme, new faster hosting, optimal integration with Cloudflare, and all technical issues sorted.

While I don’t think Core Web Vitals are a key ranking factor, it definitely affects conversions if people bounce more, and so we’re definitely hemorrhaging money by being slow here. I look forward to measuring the differences in results when we’re faster.

And thank you very much to @andyfieb from Lasso for helping here.

EAT plan (or is it EEAT now?)

I listened to Kyle Roof’s excellent Niche Pursuits episode a few days back, and it’s given me a lot of think about and implement.

In addition, I had a reality check when @ViperChill very kindly took a look at our site that was hit by a Google update, and really drove home how the site wasn’t a brand at all, and that we might have issues with people trusting the site – especially for high-ticket affiliate conversions.

So, the plan is both to have our developer make key tweaks to our theme that promote the authors and their expertise, as well as injecting more personality into the surrounding theme (we also need to do that in the content, though) – as well as the more generic EAT things like adding our business address and emails to the site, as a real business would. Kyle Roof’s podcast was an eye-opener (or perhaps more likely, that my eyes were closed and I was slow here) to what we could be doing better with our sites.

Delegation and training up staff

A hugely important part of January is training up two key members of our team to take a larger role in our sites and management.

The first is a new member of the SEO team who will work with us for 3 days per week, and is solely in charge of creating briefs for our sites. I personally find the briefing part to be the most energy-sapping part of the content process, so I’m grateful to free myself up from this somewhat. But we have a very in-depth briefing process, and so it’s important that we keep our briefs super detailed to create excellent content that AI cannot compete with.

The second is that our current VA, who is doing a fantastic job helping format and publish content, will hopefully move into a larger Operations position. They’ll then build their team, bring on additional VAs so we can format and publish more content, and scale.

But, both need to be coached 1-on-1 and need specific training videos and documents created for them (I’ve never done this before, so no pre-existing training docs exist), so this takes time.

That’s everything for January, and I have a huge announcement to make once the contract has been signed, that will be my main project moving forwards. But, I don’t want to reveal it until everything is in place, but hopefully I can do that soon.

I hope everyone’s online ventures are successful in 2023, and that Google’s temperament stays far away from your sites 🙏.