November 2022 Niche Site Income Report: $79,180

My bad, was busy and didn’t create an income report in October. 🤷‍♂️

At the beginning of 2022, I made a list of goals. I’ve failed most of them (or at least have just a few weeks to attain). But, one goal — and the goal I cared about most deeply — was to grow my niche sites to make $40,000 per month.

At the time we were doing $18-20K per month, so we needed to double in size (though Q4 is always higher paid).

And while I’m gutted I didn’t achieve a lot of my other personal goals, I’m overwhelmed with how well our niche sites performed in the last few months.

Our total niche site earnings across our portfolio in November 2022 was an insane $79,180.24!

**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. In fact, if you really want to know, the increasing.com brand and my Twitter account earned $1551 in November – bringing total revenue to $80,731.

Oh, and if you care about a few of my other 2022 goals I failed, here are a few:

• Release a WordPress plugin (not going into specifics here, maybe I’ll eventually make it lol)
• Get on the property ladder (got no cash, all in business, and why would I do this when it’s a recession and prices are falling…)
• Reach Champion 2 on Rocket League. I actually got worse and I’m not even Diamond anymore 😩
• Reach 5,000 subscribers on YouTube (currently just under 700)
• Be published in a major worldwide outlet
• Make good headway into publishing my first book (I’ll still do this, but I do not have time right now, and I have not fleshed out all the concepts yet.).

** 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.

November 2022 Niche Site Income Report: The Breakdown

The total breakdown for the earnings was:

• $750 in direct sponsorship (-$3250)
• $18840 in ads (+$7276)
• $58689 across Amazon Affiliates and other affiliate programs (+$30157)
• $901 in digital products (+$901)
• Published 39 new articles + republished 52 existing articles

I said in the September income report I hoped for $60K in Nov and Dec, but this at the time felt unrealistic. And still, we definitely overachieved in November; honestly, everything hit perfectly:

• Amazon rates were higher
• New affiliate programs hit better than expected
• Ad rates are higher across the board, accompanied by higher seasonal traffic
• We purchased a site that generated money we hadn’t accounted for

So, we got very lucky, and if we don’t work hard, we’ll be struck back down to earth in Q1 2023.

What Happened in November?

Frankly, there’s not much motivation to publish loads of new content in Q4, when you can be optimising existing content that can earn you more money. Everything is inflated in Q4 — higher ad rates (well, actually not this year), and everyone’s buying stuff for their families so conversions are way up.

Republish, Republish, Republish

So, our main goals were to fortify our existing content, both so they would convert as well as possible, and so they’d rank as high as possible while the rates and traffic were higher. So, you’ll see we republished far more than we published in November.

We bought another site

We bought a site for $12,500 – basically because it was a massive fucking bargain.

I don’t have the time or interest in the niche, so I’m supervising on strategy while another site operator runs the site in return for up to 50% equity — making us both rich 😉 — but the site is a real winner.

It only has 19 blog posts, but the site earns over $1,000 per month ($1500-ish in October, $1019 in Nov). It’s also exciting because it’s my first-ever foray into digital products.

90% of the site’s revenue comes from these digital products sold via an attached store, so this is a very interesting new meta to learn from, and become a better full-stack marketer as a result. It’s also a low-risk way of trying new strategies out and improving email marketing skills, product/e-commerce SEO, and a new style of brand building.

Because we bought the site at such a discount, we don’t really need to do any work on it. Could just leave it for 6 months and double my money. But, I really believe the site has potential: it has ~12,000 monthly users from just 19 blog posts because every blog post is incredible! They rank for some really high-traffic, competitive keywords, which really makes me feel this could be a winner.

That said, I’m spending basically zero time on it, so I won’t be in the trenches growing the brand. I’ll write updates though because it’s something I’m excited to monitor. In an amazing, perfect world, the site would grow to $10,000/mo by the end of 2023. 🙌🤘

Reviewed 40 products for a smaller niche site

I’ll fully publish the “Surface Area” theory of affiliate marketing product reviews soon. But basically, we used it here, but way less efficiently than I recommend beginners do, to try and grow a smaller site in our portfolio.

To boost the traffic and revenue, we spent $1.6K on 40 products in the niche (some expensive, some just a few dollars), and it took around 4 hours to take all the photos of all 40 products. I had a shot list of 5-6 easy-to-take shots for each, and if any more are ever needed, then I can do that at a later date.

We looked for the products:

• With high traffic for reviews competitors had written
• Internal sales data confirmed converted well
• That featured in a lot of our other “Best” buyer’s guides and “VS” comparison articles so we can recycle the photos across our buyer’s guides for better rankings

I recently took Jared Bauman’s (of Niche Pursuits podcast fame) photography course (not an affiliate link, just an honest recommendation) which helped with setting up the backgrounds for the photos, and basically it taught me the 80/20 of photographing objects.

This really helped – and frankly the photos don’t need to be incredible, they just need to be good enough to show people (and Google) that we really tested the thing.

We won’t get to actually publish all these until January 2023, but hopefully this further boosts this site. The site earned $2,600 last month, and I hope it can earn $5K+ by March 2023.

What We’re Doing in December

Basically, we’re trying to print money while the going’s good.

January will be a disaster – we already know this. The fact that ad rates didn’t really rise across Black Friday are very telling for how far they’re likely to fall in Q1 2023.

And with ChatGPT looming scarily, content creators of all kinds are being forced to adapt – the old rules no longer apply.

Here’s a short tangent on AI:

No, it isn’t going to destroy niche sites within the next year. It may do in 5-10, but not in 2023.

But, it will dramatically lower the barrier to entry and scalability of content. It already has. You can publish a million words cheaply already with GPT-3.

So, stop publishing easily replicable content.

AI is not creative (yet), it is inherently regurgitative. It doesn’t build any new floors on the roof of the Tower of Babel – it just copies the existing decor.

If you publish content to rank for “french open prize money” — yes you’re probably fucked. But all you did anyway was collate data – and collating data is very easy to do for machines that have access to the entirety of the internet.

But, if you have a strong opinion, you’ll be fine. It just means you actually need to know about your niche, have experience with the products you test, be able to rattle off personal stories around the guides you advise people on, etc. If you’re able to generate new insights, and really know your stuff – AI can’t compete with you. You just have to be better than what already exists.

But, if you want some SEO tips:

1. Focus on topical authority: AI can’t write well about less-known entities – simply because not much information exists on the topic. This is an easy way for Google to discern the real sites from the AI ones. The successful site owners of the last few years have been the ones who invested in the articles that didn’t drive massive traffic, and may not even have paid back the costs to write them – but were key spokes within their content hubs that powered huge gains on their most competitive posts.
2. Don’t be afraid to disagree with conventional opinion: I have a feeling featured snippets will change dramatically over the next 24 months. I think featured snippets will cease to be 1 option, and multiple will show up – most likely from different sources. And I think they’ll show differing opinions for subjective queries, to try to get you both sides of an argument. AI can’t have both sides of an argument, it just regurgitates, so if you can have a strong opinion, and even disagree with what you believe to be a wrongly held conventional opinion, you’ll be given more of a platform within your niche.
3. Do things AI can’t do: real product reviews, real intimate knowledge of lesser-known things in your niche.

But back to December

Basically, we’re worried, yes, about ChatGPT and if Google wants to eventually cut publishers out of organic search entirely.

But, if you’re willing to adapt, there’s some runway left.

Google also doesn’t want to kill its own business model, so – at least temporarily – content creators and Google are aligned in self-interest.

We’re focusing on shoring up our content for the moment, showing as much real-life experience, expertise, and personality as possible across our sites. I think that’s how you adapt for 2023 and beyond.

We’re also trying to scale up our content for a big 2023 push.

And… I can’t talk about it yet. But I’ve signed the largest deal of my 26 years of life so far. I’m excited to announce it, and while it’ll affect how much time I have left for my sites, I really think it’s worth it and I’m looking forward to the challenge.