March 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 ~$635 in its first full month on Mediavine. I sold Niche Site 2 the previous month (for mid six figures), so I will no longer be able to provide monthly updates on this site.
I’ve also been working on getting several of my other sites to the point where they are ready for a premium display ad network (including onboarding a site to a new ad network as a test)!
Below are the details behind the earnings and traffic for each blog case study and some updates on how my other sites are doing.
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.
March 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 ~550 posts on this site, since it was created on a fresh domain in November 2022.
Niche Site 1 received 20,077 sessions in February 2024.
This is about a 30% decrease from February but this site does not appear to have been hit by the recent Google March Update.
Rather, the site had a temporary spike in social media traffic the previous month.
This site earned $635 in its first full month on Mediavine (March 2024):
Given all the turmoil with the recent Google algorithm updates, I was quite happy with this result.
Other Sites in My Portfolio
Sold NS2. I Sale is now completely finished for niche site 2, which sold for mid six figures.
Niche Site 3 was accepted to Mediavine. Unfortunately this site was crushed by the March Google Update not long after it was approved and started generating income from display ads:
Still, even after being hit by Google, this site is actually throwing of some decent money thanks to its traffic from Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo:
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