February 2024 Niche Site Report
Written by Casey Botticello
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February was a huge month in terms of updates for my case study sites!
It was a record breaking month across both of my case studies, both in terms of sessions and earnings.
Niche Site 1 earned ~$356 and Niche Site 2 earned ~$25,000+ (I can’t disclose the exact amount because, as I’ll explain in this post, I decided to list the site and I want to respect the new owner’s privacy)
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 2023 or 2024 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.
February 2024 Site Progress
While the first 12-18 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.
Niche Site 1 (Craft & DIY Niche)
Published 25 new posts to a Craft & DIY niche site (Niche Site 1), built using a new domain. I have now published a total of ~540 posts on this site, since it was created on a fresh domain in November 2022.
Niche Site 1 received 31,620 sessions in February 2024.
The display ads on the site earned $356. Nothing close to Niche Site 2, but the site finally reached the Mediavine threshold!
Normally, new Mediavine sites require 50,000 sessions, but if you have another site in Mediavine Pro, you can onboard sites once they reach 25,000 sessions.
This was perfect timing, as NS2 crossed the $100,000 in the last 12 months from Mediavine ads level, and was accepted into MV Pro:
Niche Site 2 (Technology Niche)
Published 15 new posts to a 16 month old technology niche site. I now have ~790 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.
While I’m posting this before the end of the month (a few days before I decided to talk with some potential buyers), I can safely assume the traffic will be similar to last month’s if not slightly higher (probably will finish February with over 600,000 monthly 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.
I hope you enjoyed this monthly niche site portfolio update.
Next month, I should be able to get back to the previous format seen in my other monthly income reports where I share income, sessions, and other details about my sites.
Again though, since I am going to try to sell my larger site (NS2), I want to give the new owner the benefit of not sharing the latest data publicly.
The plan is to list the site for 3-4 months and see if there are any offers, If there aren’t any, I’ll continue sharing that site’s earnings on here.
And if it does sell, no worries either!
Now that I got NS1 accepted into MV, I can document those earnings in the same way (AdSense, unlike Mediavine, technically does not allow publishers to share their earnings screenshots)!
Additionally, I have another site that is very close to the 25,000 session second site threshold, and this will likely be accepted in a few days, meaning even if NS2 sells, there will now be a brand new Niche Site 3 that I can cover (I may also onboard this site onto Raptive, I haven’t decided yet. Like Mediavine, Raptive has a lower second site traffic threshold (30,000 pageviews).
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
