Niche Site KISS Update #1 [March 2023]

Welcome to the first niche site update for Niche Site Project KISS (Keep It Simple, Steven).

This income report is for March 2023. Here’s a quick look at the stats:

In these monthly updates, I’ll be sharing things that happened in the previous month, how the site performed, and of course, how much the site made in revenue.

I’ll also share my plans for the current month and what I’m hoping for in the next update.

Let’s get straight to it.

What Happened in March?

As I haven’t been working on this site for a while, there’s not much to report here.

However, there were a fews things I did in preparation for this niche site project announcement.

They were:

• Did a small technical audit to see how I could improve pagespeed and performance
• Optimized the pagespeed using the LiteSpeed Cache plugin
• Created a spreadsheet of my top 10 performing articles
• Published 1 new article
• Added a table of contents to all posts

With the top 10 performing articles, I exported a list of keywords each of them rank for using Search Console.

I’ll use this data to update and optimize each post, and to find new content ideas.

For site speed improvements, I managed to go from this:

To this:

That’s pretty impressive for shared hosting on Name Cheap. I’ll be adding a tutorial on this soon.

Detailed Traffic Reports

Google Analytics

Overall, the site recieved 1,100 visitors in March, which is about 36 visits per day. That’s about the same for the previous month.

To give a comparison, the site was getting around 200 visits per day at one point.

Then, it was hit by the Google helpful update and the traffic dropped in the space of 4 days.

Pageviews in March were 1,380, which is 131 more than Febuary’s pageviews, although February does have less days.

Visits (Users) and Pageviews are the only metrics I’ll be focusing on in Google Analytics for now.

Honestly, I really don’t like the new GA4 layout.

It doesn’t feel as intuitive as Universal Analytics. If anyone knows of a better (free) way to measure traffic from all sources, let me know in the comments.

Search Console

Search Console shows the site received 881 clicks from Google search and 46,500 impressions.

I’m hoping to increase the clicks in April and bring my average positions up higher than 32.7.

Bing Webmaster Tools

The site received 1,000 impressions and 55 clicks from Bing organic search in March.

I haven’t looked into how to optimize for Bing search yet, but I will see how things change as my rankings go up in Google.

Other Stats

Keyword positions

I need to find another way to track keyword positions, as the tool I use (SerpStat) doesn’t update that frequently and I find it a little inaccurate.

However, it’s currently reporting 1,260 keywords are ranking for the site.

It also says I’m ranking 107 of those keywords on page 1.

I use the rank tracker SerpRobot, but I need to update the number of keywords in there before I start sharing those stats here.

Something I’ll do in April.

Income Report

Amazon earnings

Amazon earnings in March came to $24.08. Not the best month by far, but also not the worst.

The best month for Amazon income was in April last year for a nice $107.85 commission.

Ezoic not yet active

I took down Ezoic ads in December as the traffic had dropped so much and I wanted to give the little traffic it was getting a better experience.

When I’m getting closer to 3,000 pageviews per month, I’ll add Ezoic back. Hopefully, I can hit 3,000 pageviews in the next few months.

Content

Not much to report here, only that I added one article.

For this project, I’ll be writing the content myself, at least until I can afford to hire a writer to help me.

I’ll be using AI tools to assist me in the writing process. I have a well planned out AI blogging strategy that has given me good results on a new blog I started last year.

I’ll be sharing this strategy here soon.

What I’ve discovered since writing for Niche Pursuits is the importance of systems.

I spent years of my blogging career worrying about content quality, when it really comes down to a solid strategy and publishing consistently.

Expenses

Expenses for March was $6.48, which was web hosting.

I’m currently using Name Cheap and on a monthly plan, as I expect I’ll need to move to a faster server in the next 6 months.

That gives me a gross income of $17.06 in March 2023 and a net loss of $-650.52 for the entire project.

You can read the total income for the site in my project announcement.

Plans for April

Here are my plans for the site in April.

• Improve E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust)
• Publish 10 pieces of content
• Update 5 posts

E-E-A-T are the Google rater guidelines that help measure how authoritative and trustworthy a website’s content is.

I know I need to at least improve my about page, but not sure what else will be involved.

I’ll be following the advice in this interview with Kyle Roof to help with this.

I want to start the first month off with a conservative 10 new articles. What I’ll be focusing on in the first 2-3 months is developing a system to make this process a breeze.

Then, I can ramp up the content production once I’ve got a good system in place.

SEO has changed a lot in the last few years and it’s only going to change even more thanks to AI.

I think updating content will be more of a common practice in the near future. I have seen this approach work well for others and for my other blogs in recent months.

With that said, I’ll aim to update 5 old articles in March to see if I can get these bumped up in the search results.

Conclusion

That’s it for this niche site income report. In a sense, it’s early days, even though I’ve owned the site for three years.

Hopefully, I’ll have made some progress by my next update in May.