January 2023 Niche Site Report
Written by Casey Botticello
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For many bloggers, January felt like an exceptionally rough start to the year. Especially since December RPMs were generally far lower than usual.
RPMs always drop in January.
This is due to a number of factors, but primarily driven by the cyclical nature of advertiser spending.
However this year was somewhat unique. Lots of bloggers reported seeing record drops when comparing their data year over year.
While my RPMS did drop as well, they dropped far less than many other blogger’s stats.
Across sites of all sizes, authority, and levels of traffic, many bloggers reported a 50%+ drop at the beginning of January.
My RPMs across all my sites dropped between 20-35% on January 1st (typically one of the single worst days for bloggers in terms of RPMs). However, many have since steadily increased, meaning my RPMs actually fared remarkably well throughout all this chaos.
I also saw a brief drop in affiliate income, but this income stream has already recovered fully. So, overall, I’d say I was pretty fortunate!
Progress of New 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.
January 2023 Progress
While the first few months of building a new niche site can be very slow, I decided to hit the ground running.
Some highlights from January 2023:
Niche Site 1 (Craft & DIY Niche)
Published 17 new posts to brand new Craft & DIY niche site. I initially seeded this site over the past 2-3 months with 10 fairly high quality articles. As I had hoped, this site is starting to show signs of life, getting its first clicks and impressions in Google Search Console:
As seen in the next screenshot, the pages are slowly but steadily being indexed in Google (one of the signs I look for when evaluating a new site):
Since the site is still so relatively new, it hasn’t even recorded enough data to assess Page Experience or Core Web Vitals, but based on my own website speed testing the site is looking good:
As this site is so new, it’s hard to tell if it is in the very early stages of escaping from the Google sandbox or if this is a temporary blip on the radar (only time will tell):
Niche Site 2 (Technology Niche)
Published 29 new posts to a 4-5 month old technology niche site. I initially seeded this site over the past 5 months with 10 fairly high quality articles and some supporting pages. This site appears to have easily made it out of the sandbox in under 5 months with less than 40 posts!
Although this site had a couple months lead time on the previous site, this site’s quick growth trajectory would appear to be much better.
It received 752 web search clicks in the past 3 months, with most of this activity occurring in the past month:
As seen in the next screenshot, the pages are slowly but steadily being indexed in Google (one of the signs I look for when evaluating a new site):
Although Core Web Vitals are not essential to a site generating massive traffic (I have a few large sites failing CWV, but doing just fine), it’s always nice to start off a site with a light theme that easily is understood by Google in both desktop and mobile versions. As you can see, it took a little bit of experimentation to pass CWV in the beginning, but I made an effort to improve the site this past month:
These “good URLs” have already received a fair amount of search impressions, which I’m sure is not a coincidence:
Overall, the technology site is definitely ranking higher on average. the average position within the SERPs is 18.4, and the 1.8% CTR is not too bad for a site that is just taking off.
Although this next graph may not look impressive, it is actually a great indicator of future success, based on my previous experience. The chart shows traffic received from Google Discover. This type of traffic is usually much harder to come by and is a further signal that this site is beginning to develop authority in Google’s eyes. For comparison, it took Blogging Guide (the site you are reading right now) nearly a year to see its first burst of Google Discover traffic:
This all resulted in the technology niche site reaching 1,114 sessions (1,717) pageviews! This is definitely a great start and shows the potential of this site if I maintain the high content velocity.
While a long way off from the 50,000 sessions needed for Mediavine, this initial growth and the traffic trajectory are very exciting! While my goal of onboarding this site onto Mediavine by the end of 2023 is still unlikely, this site is at least still in the running!
Other Blogging Goals Accomplished in January 2023
One of my goals for 2023 was to do more promotion for Blogging Guide. While reaching out to podcast hosts, scheduling a time, recording an interview, waiting for it to be posted takes a while, podcasts and interviews are a great way to get higher DA backlinks to your site.
These backlinks are necessary for Blogging Guide as it is competing with some very high DA sites. I will probably wait at least a year until using this same strategy on my two new starter sites.
I was a guest on the Blogger Genius Podcast:
I also did a quick written interview with Go Solo of Subkit:
Interview with Go Solo: Interview with Casey Botticello of Blogging Guide
Scaling Content Production
Another one of my goals for 2023 was to massively increase my total monthly content production.
In 2022, I published between 20-50 posts per month. These posts were split across all my 5 main money making sites.
I also did a few extra posts in November and December to help jump start my new series of niche sites (about 35 total).
In 2023, I set a goal of more than doubling my content production.
January was the first month of actually implementing this strategy.
In total, across all sites, I published 143 articles in January 2023!
This was no small feat.
In addition to my small army of writers (5-7 freelancers), I personally wrote a sizeable chunk of this content.
And while these articles range in length, the average was around 2600 words!
I also had 2 freelancers helping me with the graphic designs that I included in every single post.
Honestly, this month was incredibly stressful producing this much content.
I averaged nearly 5 posts per day, 7 days per week!
To be clear, this level of content production is not sustainable. It was my own personal experiment to establish a maximum monthly content velocity.
Going forward, I will try to average 2 posts per day, or roughly 60 posts per month.
The distribution of these posts will change, as I plan to stop adding new content to Niche Site 1 (Craft & DIY site), at around 70 posts.
At this point I’ll probably wait 6 months to let the content fully index so I can assess whether it’s worth investing more money and time into this site (with maybe 1-3 posts per month added during this 6 month period).
This site is covering a pretty narrow topic so 70 posts should definitely give me some meaningful data.
As for Niche Site 2 (Technology site), this site covers content from a much larger niche and is a topic that interests me personally quite a bit. So the goal is to hit at least 100 posts as quickly as possible in 2023.
This site may take longer to assess the full traffic potential given the size of the niche, but I will likely continue posting on this site even after I hit 100 posts because I am confident it will generate significant traffic.
It’s definitely still a gamble as I am taking money/time away from my 5 main sites, but this site is the type of project that, if properly monetized, I could see myself working on for a few years but not so attached that I wouldn’t be opposed to eventually selling it.
When building niche sites it’s important to think about how you plan to monetize your sites, as well as developing an exit plan.
For me, I’ve done a great job monetizing sites in the past, but the sites I enjoy working on are usually the hardest to sell.
But with blog valuations trending upward at a quick pace, a sale is definitely appealing.
After all, I am sinking a lot of money and time into these sites. The current plan is to hold most of them long term as part of my larger passive income portfolio, but sometimes it makes sense to derisk and effectively take some money off the table, with the future of blogging rapidly changing.
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
