In November, I knew a lot of my traffic was coming off that Black Friday post so I wasn’t sure if it would sustain through December. Even though I had read the December can be better than November for some people.
I did write a holiday gift guide for both my two main sites, but was it enough?
Take a look as I get into the details.
Sales
- Adsense – $24.69
- Amazon – $819.94
- Amazon UK – £ 37.34
- Amazon CA – CDN 38.67
- Total – $920.64
Alright so it is now obvious I was seeing a huge benefit in November from Black Friday Traffic.
Although, I’m definitely not complaining about a $900 month!
This is definitely very helpful in paying down the money that I had spent in previous months.
One thing that I was super pumped about was my fourth site, which was only six months old and made almost $300!
Again, nothing close to the Niche Pie case study, but so far it is my best work yet.
One thing the Niche Pie study talks about is scholarship link building.
So, hungry for growth, I created scholarships for each of my main sites and began reaching out to schools in November.
I only landed about 25 links for each as I think this technique is getting played out.
Related: Wealthy Affiliate Review – How I learned Internet Marketing
But 25 links from trusted schools and a few had Domain Authority’s in the 80’s, I was stoked to see what could happen with my rankings.
I think this is why my new site started to grow so much in December as I got busy in my full time day job and as you will see in a second I slowed down content production.
Expenses
- Domain registrations – $0
- Hosting – $0
- Professional Fees – $179.82
- Themes – $0
- Software – $0
- Total – $179.82
Just like in November, my only expenses this month were for content.
I was forced to jump back full time into operations at the restaurant because labor was getting a little out of hand and we were heading into the slow season.
Duty calls!
So, that limited my time for keyword research and creating outlines for my writers.
Nonetheless, it was cool to see that my websites were still growing because of an increase in rankings.
This was also when I found that I was officially invited to Mexico, so getting ready for that trip and the holidays took even more time away from production.
Key Takeaways
Well, December was still a solid month despite not seeing the spike in traffic like I did in November.
It was nice to see my link building efforts still paying off even while I couldn’t work on the sites as much.
Since both of these sites are product related, I would expect January to be the slowest month of the year. Hopefully they don’t drop too much!
I’m headed to Mexico on Monday so I’m sure I will be very busy once I get there. I will try to post January’s income report as soon as I can.
In the meantime, since I will have limited time, I’m just going to try and post simple product reviews and not bigger posts so the sites don’t go stale.
I’m not expecting a ton of growth while I’m gone, but hopefully by mid-February when people start getting tax refunds the sales will pick back up.
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