Case Study & Income Report #20 [July 2021 edition]

July was another great month for posts that trend high in the summer.

Overall income was up a bit compared to June, and compared to last July the income for these sites is almost double.

So, things are going well and I’m stoked about that.

Anyways, let’s get into the details of these three sites.

Remember, the sites in this report are only a portion of my portfolio and not the only sites that bring in revenue.

**And as always, I’m an affiliate marketer and this post contains affiliate links, meaning I will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on my links

What Happened In July

While I did get up some content on these sites, as well as others in my portfolio, I also took a lot of time off.

Watched a lot of the Olympics and just generally chilled out.

Outsourced a few articles at Writer Access to writers that seem to do high quality work, even though I still think content agencies are rubbish for the most part.

Overall, not much happened and the sites kept chugging along nicely.

The Sites – July Update

In case you missed it in the announcement post, or just can’t remember, I’ll be recapping the basics of each site before I give you the details on what the month looked like for each site.

Site #1

It’s gone from my portfolio.

So, no more updates on this one.

Site #2

So, when I first put this site on this list to update you on monthly, my goal was to maybe hold onto it until $1K/mo and then flip it.

And yeah, I’ve known for a while that it has big money potential, but it’s also a niche that I’m not too interested in.

Then I was talking about this site with my wife and she gave me some ideas on shoulder niches that fit in well with the site…so I guess I’ll actually be holding onto it for longer than expected.

And I’ll soon be moving content from neglected sites to this one to start filling out these new topic clusters that I need to add to the site.

As you can see in the analytics screenshot above, traffic in July increased compared to June.

Looks like around a 25% jump in sessions (or 4,500 more sessions) when you compare July to June , so I’m quite pleased with that.

And can I just say how I’m so glad that I switched to focusing on content for this site instead of links this year?

The growth this year has really just been phenomenal.

When you compare this July to last July the traffic is up 261%!

And I’m really, really happy about that.

Looking that the YoY growth really gets me motivated to add more content to this site.

Though, I only added two new posts in July…really gotta ramp that up soonish.

And I keep forgetting to add it, but if you’re curious about my EPMV for this site, it was $19.49 last month.

New posts for this site: 2 (not outsourced)

New links for this site: zero

Total income for this site last month: $494.90

Last month’s income is a mix of AdSense, Ezoic, Amazon affiliate, and other affiliates. I use the AAWP plugin on this site.

Summary for site #2: A nice boost in income with a good rise in traffic. And amazing YoY growth when you look at the same month last year.

Site #3

This site really just keeps crushing it and exceeding my expectations over and over again.

I spent the month adding content for a whole new topic cluster and Google seems to be responding well to it.

Overall, traffic for the month was up by about 15%, which resulted in me sailing past the requirements for AdThrive.

Yes, I did apply this site for AdThrive. So, that’s super exciting.

That 15% traffic increases is around 13,000 more sessions than June, but if you recall June’s traffic was a boost of 21K sessions.

So, that means one of two things are happening –

• growth is slowing, or
• it’s a seasonal traffic decline

There’s also the possibility that both things are happening.

I do know that the algo updates did not hit this site, so I won’t really know what’s going on until August is over.

All I can do right now is just keep adding content as fast as I can to combat both potential scenarios.

Just a quick reminder that this site is still pulling in around 15% of its traffic from Pinterest. (I just use Tailwind for that.)

New posts for this site: 41 (wrote most and outsourced three to Writer Access)

The articles were mostly informational.

New links for this site: none

Total income for this site last month: $5,659.66

Last month’s income is a mix of AdSense, Amazon affiliate, and other affiliates. I use the AAWP plugin on this site as well.

Summary for site #3: Traffic increased a good amount and income went up as well. Overall another awesome month for this site.

Site #4

Each month when I do this report I really beat myself up about not working on this site.

July was no different. I did nothing on it.

The good news is that content is on it and the site it really just sitting there aging nicely until I get back to it.

But I have so many other sites in my portfolio taking off that I just can’t justify taking the time away from them to work on this one.

Though, I am considering adding a bit more structure to my months and designating a day for each of the stagnant sites (like this one) that are in my portfolio.

Unfortunately, this site has two days of referral spam before I caught it and filtered out those sites.

So, July’s analytics is fucked.

I think this ends up skewing it by around 725 extra users in the data, leaving this site right around last month’s traffic numbers of ~2,000 sessions.

Yeah, I know the updates for this site aren’t really all that exciting. Maybe I’ll guilt myself into working on this site soon.

New posts for this site: zero

New links for this site: zero

Total income for this site last month: $8.91

Only has one post live with an affiliate link, and AdSense is bringing in the monies.

Summary for site #4: Zero new posts, traffic is maybe the same as last month? and income from AdSense went up a little compared to last month.

New Expenses for July 2021

If you want to know about any recurring expenses or previous expenses, then refer to February 2020’s report in this section.

Here’s new expenses for the sites for July 2021:

Site #2

• $6.50 Vultr server at Cloudways (two sites on this server, so I split out the cost for just this site)

Site #3

• $22.45 hosting with BigScoots (this account is split with another site)
• $182.22 in content from Writer Access

Site #4

• $6.50 Vultr server at Cloudways (two sites on this server, so I split out the cost for just this site)

Final Thoughts & Summary

Overall, I think things are looking good in terms of both traffic and revenue.

However, I am slightly concerned about the growth decrease with site #3.

Anyways, here’s a look at overall expenses and revenue:

And remember, these sites are only a portion of my portfolio 🙂  I also want to remind you that sites #2 and #3 were existing sites that have been earning and ranking before starting this whole monthly update thing.

Got any questions? Requests for other data in future updates? Let me know.

Shawna Newman

Hey, I’m Shawna. I make a living working from my laptop in places like London, Sydney, Dubai, Rome, Oslo, Bangkok, Las Vegas, Barcelona, and Amsterdam. I share how I do some of that on this website.