September 2023 Niche Site Report
Written by Casey Botticello
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning that at no additional cost to you, I will receive a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Read our full affiliate disclosure here.
September 2023, was a crazy month for most bloggers.
Shortly after the August Core Update rolled out, many of us were hit by the September HCU. Luckily, most of my high earning sites were spared from the carnage that most people saw:
Niche Site 1 has now been monetized with a display ad network (Google AdSense).
While traffic is down 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 absolutely skyrocketed this month. It more than doubled its pageviews, sessions, and monthly revenue!
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.
September 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 September 2023 for two of the niche sites I’m currently focusing on building:
Niche Site 1 (Craft & DIY Niche)
Published 5 new posts to a Craft & DIY niche site (Niche Site 1), built using a new domain. I have now published a total of ~275 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 3,066 sessions in September 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 September 2023, the site earned $17.18. Not very impressive, but the site is still ramping up RPM wise, and it is not receiving much traffic yet, so it’s definitely better than nothing!
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 130 new posts to a 12 month old technology niche site. I now have ~415 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. September is the ninth full month of regular content posting.
This site had a major surge in traffic during the end of August and all throughout September.
While the trajectory did become steeper after the September Helpful Content Update, the traffic was already trending up before the update and I was rapidly adding a number of articles early in the month, so it’s hard to fully attribute this growth to the update (although it certainly could have played a role). I’ve had surges in traffic after previous updates and they tend to be less evenly distributed than this site’s traffic (site traffic still followed previous pattern of about 6 weeks).
Either way, the site is doing fantastic in terms of traffic.
In September 2023, month 9 of posting content to this aged site, I received a staggering 283,542 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 September and skyrocketing pageviews was clearly what made this surge possible!
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 HCU. 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
