October 2023 Niche Site Report
Written by Casey Botticello
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After an extremely tumultuous August & September (for most bloggers), October showed some continued signs of SERP volatility.
Despite this, October was a record breaking month for me for my case study sites! Niche Site 1 earned ~$50 and Niche Site 2 earned ~$15,000 (not a typo!).
Below are the details behind the earnings and traffic for each blog.
Niche Site 1 has now been monetized with a display ad network (Google AdSense) for over a month.
While traffic is up slightly for this site, and it is not eligible for a top ad network like Mediavine or Raptive. I wanted to start generating some income from this traffic, both as an experiment and so that readers could get a better sense of what this traffic would be worth, should they choose to put the AdSense ads on their site.
Niche Site 2 has continued to skyrocket this month!
I will provide more details in the site specific section below, but this site is really hitting its stride and is paying off much better than I had expected!
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.
October 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 October 2023 for two of the niche sites I’m currently focusing on building:
Niche Site 1 (Craft & DIY Niche)
Published 15 new posts to a Craft & DIY niche site (Niche Site 1), built using a new domain. I have now published a total of ~290 posts on this site, since it was created on a fresh domain in November 2022.
Many publishers do not see significant activity until 6-12 months in, so my expectations have been pretty low for this site.
Niche Site 1 received 4,131 sessions in October 2023.
The display ads on this site were only live for about 10 days (it took about a week for Google to accept and approve this site), but for the month of October 2023, the site earned $47.37. Not very impressive compared to the monster earnings numbers from Niche Site 2, but the site is doing great RPM wise. It just needs a bit more traffic! And traffic for October did bounce back to August levels (high) after dipping in September, so no complaints here!
However, as my second niche site is still performing exponentially better and is generating substantial 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) and will probably stop new posts on Niche Site 1.
Niche Site 2 (Technology Niche)
Published 112 new posts to a 12 month old technology niche site. I now have ~510 total posts published on this site (I also pruned several posts that I were published early on, but were now too close in topic to other subsequent articles). I built this site on an aged domain that I had purchased about a year prior to launching the blog in its current form. October is the tenth full month of regular content posting.
I was worried this site has been affected by one of the October updates, as traffic did dip for about 4-5 days, but it recovered quickly so I think it was just temporary SERP volatility. With the exception of this one week, the traffic continued its growth trajectory, which I found astounding!
In October 2023, month 10 of posting content to this aged site, I received a staggering 446,113 sessions!
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 October and the continued surge in pageviews was clearly what made this earnings leap possible!
Even by my own impossibly high standards, this site has continued to amaze me with its growth and earnings. And the nearly $15K is just in ad earnings.
I’ve been applying to a number of affiliate programs over the past few months, and have been accepted to a few, which I’ve added and am now starting to see earnings from. While it’s probably too early to predict, if traffic remains at this level, I think I can add another $2k-$4k per month just from affiliates within the next few months (I already did just under $1,000 this month).
I have a few other plans to expand the monetization of this site, which is what I will be considering over the next month.
But I want to underscore an important factor: while I may have done a lot “right” on this site, so have countless other bloggers, and they were still hit by the September and October. So there is definitely some large degree of luck, timing, and the ability to implement new technology ahead of the curve (using AI writing tools like Koala at least in my case). These gains could disappear as quickly as they came. But that is the nature of a blog dependent on Google traffic.
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
