July 2023 Niche Site Report
Written by Casey Botticello
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July 2023 was an OK month across my portfolio of niche sites.
RPMs across my sites generally dropped compared to the previous month, but that is typical for the month of July.
Specifically, Niche Site 1 reached 2,385 sessions and Niche Site 2 earned $2,230.
Progress of Niche Sites
While I am working on a larger portfolio of sites (read my intro post to this series to learn more about each), for the purposes of this niche site report, I’ve decided to focus on two of my sites launched in the last few months.
Why?
To name a few reasons:
Building income producing niche sites is harder than it used to be. While it’s interesting to see earnings figures from well established sites, as many readers have pointed out to me, building a site (on a “fresh” domain) in 2022 or 2023 is much harder than it was even 5 or 6 years ago.
The sandbox period seems to have become longer, and sites with low domain authority (i.e. any site under a year old) is susceptible to Google algorithm updates. So in order to help newer bloggers, it’s vital that I stay up to date on the latest trends in blogging, and one way to ensure I do this is by going through the website building process myself, on a regular basis!
Competition has increased. There has always been some level of competition in most niches, but it used to be possible to identify larger segments of long tail keywords, with obvious indicators of high traffic, yet low quality SERPs.
Finding these easy wins or low hanging fruit is much harder now, and the rise of AI writing tools will only make this more competitive. So, I’m looking for new strategies by going through the process again myself!
The tips and tricks used to start a successful niche site are very different than those used to boost an existing site. The early stages of launching a niche site are all about reaching enough traffic in order to optimize your content to the fullest extent possible. If you are building a site designed to run display ads, you want to get into a premium display ad network (Mediavine or AdThrive, ASAP).
If you want to apply to top tier affiliate programs, hitting certain traffic thresholds is also key. But getting traffic to a new niche site is very hard. So, it’s important that I am able to replicate this process to expand my own portfolio but also so that I can best help my readers!
All of these factors led me to conclude that showing my readers a behind the scenes look at my two newly launched sites will be extremely valuable.
I am still running all my larger sites (as those are funding all these experimental smaller sites) but I will focus these reports on the findings and insights from the newly created sites.
July 2023 Progress
While the first few months of building a new niche site can be very slow, I’ve made a deliberate effort to scale these sites by maintaining a very high content velocity and establishing topical authority much quicker than usual.
Below is a traffic overview from July 2023 for two of the niche sites I’m currently focusing on building:
Niche Site 1 (Craft & DIY Niche)
Published 45 new posts to a Craft & DIY niche site (Niche Site 1), built using a new domain. I have now published a total of ~245 posts on this site, since it was created on a brand new domain in November.
Many publishers do not see significant activity until 6 months in, so my expectations have been pretty low for this site.
While the first several months had generated negligible amounts of traffic, this site received 2,385 sessions in July 2023.
I’d say of the two new niche sites that I’m covering in these reports, this Niche Site 1 is far more typical in terms of site performance and growth.
While this site’s growth so far has been pretty boring, I’m definitely happy to see it start to gain some traction.
Niche Site 1 will likely require a few more months of fresh content, and more importantly time, in order for the existing content to age.
While it is nowhere near Niche Site 2 in terms of pageviews, it is showing all the right signs that it could reach the same level of earnings:
New posts and pages are being indexed quickly.
Site is ranking for new organic keywords.
Top performing posts have begun to naturally attract high quality backlinks.
However, as my second niche site is still performing exponentially better and is generating decent monthly cash flow, (and I only have finite time and resources) I plan to primarily focus on Niche Site 2 (covered in next section of article)!
Niche Site 2 (Technology Niche)
Published 30 new posts to a 10 month old technology niche site. I now have ~230 total posts published on this site. I built this site on an aged domain that I had purchased about a year prior to launching the blog in its current form. July is the seventh full month of regular content posting.
In July 2023, month 7 of posting content to this aged site, Niche Site 2 received 73,499 sessions!
Here is a look at the the third month’s display ad earnings for Niche Site 2 (site was approved by Mediavine in middle of May, so July was the second full month of earnings):
Niche Site 2 generated $2,230.15 in July 2023:
While it’s always disappointing when earnings inevitably plateau or drop after several months of step rises, I am overall pretty happy with this site’s performance. Traffic only dropped a very small amount so most of the earnings drop can be attributed to lower RPMs.
I am still confident I can continue to grow traffic for this site, but am not expecting to see noticeably higher earnings until later in Q3 or Q4.
I plan to keep adding 20-30 posts per month until the end of the year, and then reevaluate where the site is at.
If you want to learn more about getting accepted to Mediavine, how much Mediavine pays per 1,000 views, or are looking for other top ad management companies, check out our articles!
I hope you enjoyed this monthly niche site portfolio update. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions! You can follow the whole series by clicking here. If you want to stay up to date on the latest blogging tips and tricks, be sure to check out my newsletter!
Best of luck on your blogging journey!
Until next time!
-Casey
