December 2023 Niche Site Report
Written by Casey Botticello
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December was a record breaking month across both of my case studies, both in terms of sessions and earnings.
Niche Site 1 earned ~$171 and Niche Site 2 earned ~$22,212 (not a typo!).
Below are the details behind the earnings and traffic for each blog.
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.
December 2023 Site 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.
Some highlights from December 2023 for two of the niche sites I’m currently focusing on building:
Niche Site 1 (Craft & DIY Niche)
Published 50 new posts to a Craft & DIY niche site (Niche Site 1), built using a new domain. I have now published a total of ~450 posts on this site, since it was created on a fresh domain in November 2022.
Niche Site 1 received 12,819 sessions in December 2023.
The display ads on the site earned $171. Not very impressive compared to the monster earnings numbers from Niche Site 2, but the site is doing great, significantly increasing traffic compared to last month.
Niche Site 2 (Technology Niche)
Published 90 new posts to a 14 month old technology niche site. I now have ~740 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. December is the twelfth full month of regular content posting.
In December 2023, month 12 of posting content to this aged site, I received a 480,682 sessions!
But why exactly is this site performing exponentially better?
It’s hard to say definitely, but a few key trends:
New posts and pages are being indexed extremely quickly. Google Likely sees this site as having both high topical authority and unique content.
Top performing posts have begun to naturally attract high quality backlinks.
Site is well structured, fast, and focuses narrowly on its niche with no deviation from the topic at all. It is also getting close to covering the topic in its entirety as this is a very narrow niche.
The combination of a higher RPM in the first half of December, was what made this earnings leap possible! Over $22k from display ads alone!
Even by my own impossibly high standards, this site has continued to amaze me with its growth and earnings.
But if you are looking for a relatively low cost business that offers remote work, asynchronous work, and relatively high financial upside, blogging is still very profitable.
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
