November is over and it’s starting to get really cold here in Belgium. I’m already looking forward to going back to Thailand in January and enjoy better temperatures.
November was an okay month. Not great in terms of overall revenue though. With Black Friday and shopping spree’s for the holiday season, one can usually expect a great uplift in sales. Since most of my sites got hit with an algorithm update and I explained in last month’s report that I’m not going to bother trying to fix it and just focus on Project Alpha, I probably left a good chunk of money on the table.
Either way, I’m still doing some freelance work but less than in September and October. As of January, I might get more occupied with freelance work again since there are some projects in the pipeline.
Even though overall revenue might have been less, I am happy with the work that has been done – especially for Project Alpha. Definitely making progress on this project and I feel like I’m actually learning much more by focussing on 1 project as well.
So let’s just dive in.
Project Alpha
Some great progress has been achieved even though I still think that the speed of content creation should be increased. Some of the things that have been done:
- Fixed some issues with hosting: ie the non-www version of project alpha didn’t redirect to the www version anymore since migrating to Kinsta. This has been fixed.
- Promoted 1 of the writers I found on Upwork to Content Manager. He was by far the best writer and understood the best what quality of content I was looking for. So now he is working part-time for Project Alpha to recruit writers, make briefings & guidelines and editing the content. That also means that he is no longer writing himself though and that is what’s slowing down the content creation part a bit. By now he has found some good writers, so in the coming weeks, content creation should be going faster.
- Took advantage of Black Friday to buy some guest posts
- Fired the designer. He was not delivering on time and I was fed up with the slow speed. So I decided to fire him and would start to do the work myself as I don’t want to waste time again on finding a designer. Doing that myself isn’t exactly going fast since I don’t have experience with Astra and Elementor. Therefor, I decided at the beginning of December to start publishing on the live environment with Thrive Themes and work/learn on the staging environment with Astra and Elementor.
- Published 1 article on the live site
- Around 4 more writers have been hired. Well actually the content manager has hired them.
- Around 35 articles have been written in total now and are waiting to get published. Another 24 are being written and should be written by the end of the month
All in all, definitely going in the right direction. The goal for the first months of 2022 is to have 2 articles published every day (except for the weekends) so that would come down to about 60 articles/month. A very ambitious goal and we’ll have to see how long I can actually do that because revenue would really have to go up to be worth investing this much in content creation.
Now, let’s take a look at some numbers:
Links
The guest posts are a mix of links to homepage and inner pages.
Rankings
Got an increase in rankings. However, I lost a number 1 spot for my (currently) most important keyword that is making probably about 80% of this project’s revenue. It might just be a google dance but I’m definitely going to keep an eye on that.
Traffic
More important than rankings is obviously the amount of traffic. And november was a bit down compared to October. Definitely not a good thing during the holiday season. But with more content published soon, traffic should go up again.
Revenue
Despite less traffic, revenue is up because of better conversion rates.
| Month | Revenue |
| July 2019 – July 2020 | € 0 |
| August 2020 | € 26,16 |
| September 2020 | € 57,55 |
| October 2020 | € 291 |
| November 2020 | € 310,44 |
| December 2020 | € 415,99 |
| January 2021 | € 478,03 |
| February 2021 | € 128,67 |
| March 2021 | € 487,16 |
| April 2021 | € 237,24 |
| May 2021 | € 1.337,4 |
| June 2021 | € 1.411,8 |
| July 2021 | € 1.700,5 |
| August 2021 | € 1.172,10 |
| September 2021 | € 1.176,3 |
| October 2021 | € 973,46 |
| November 2021 | € 1.274,2 |
Revenue level is not too bad but to be expected with Black Friday and holiday season to have bit uplift. I expected a bigger increase though to be honest.
Right now, average revenue based on the last 12 months is at € 899. That means with a conservative x25 multiple, the value of Project Alpha is at €22.475.
Project Beta
Since nothing has been done for this project, I’ll just share the number without any further comments.
Links
Rankings
Increase in rankings for keywords because of the season that’s starting for this niche. Typically for this kind of websites, when the season starts and some clicks are happening, I believe the CTR is a positive signal to Google which causes the pages to rank for more keywords.
Traffic
Organic traffic is still up compared to one year ago. However, I don’t expect to see the same spike in traffic for next January like in last January. Last January the spike was a combination of seasonality and ranking for more (important) keywords at the same time.
Revenue
| Month | Revenue |
| March 2020 | € 0 |
| April 2020 | € 0 |
| May 2020 | € 0 |
| June 2020 | € 0 |
| July 2020 | € 2,32 |
| August 2020 | € 114,71 |
| September 2020 | € 94,94 |
| October 2020 | € 377,41 |
| November 2020 | € 486,98 |
| December 2020 | € 607,48 |
| January 2021 | €1.292,90 |
| February 2021 | € 1.208,40 |
| March 2021 | € 706,02 |
| April 2021 | € 239,53 |
| May 2021 | € 274,20 |
| June 2021 | € 116,58 |
| July 2021 | € 339,69 |
| August 2021 | € 279,51 |
| September 2021 | € 74,66 |
| October 2021 | € 94,71 |
| November 2021 | € 391,34 |
Finally, revenue is a bit up again but nowhere near the level of the beginning of this year. Compared to last year, revenue is down, despite more traffic. Since I’m focussing on Project Alpha, I’m not going to dedicate any time into investigating this though.
Right now, average monthly revenue based on the last 12 months is €468,75. With a conservative multiple of x25, the value of this site is at around €11.700
That’s it for this month. Now let’s kick some balls for the last month of the year!