It was a bit slower in December due to a couple of factors.
Christmas/holiday season is always going to be a little less busy. My main writer went on vacation for a few weeks, and I took a bunch of time to chill out and work on some other projects.
I also had one of my other writers go MIA near the start of the month, and I haven’t heard back since.
I heard through someone else that she might be dealing with health problems, so I just hope she’s alright.
Lastly, I got rid of a few writers requiring me to put in more editing time than I would have liked.
My girlfriend has helped me edit a bunch of articles from a previous writer, so that’s been a huge help as well.
Key Metrics
There were a few less articles published this month, but due to the factors above, it wasn’t that surprising.
I hit the 100 post mark though, yay!
| Total Posts published | 100 |
| Posts published in month 1 | 23 |
| Posts published in month 2 | 50 |
| Posts published in month 3 | 26 |
Rankings
I’m finally starting to see some traction in search console, and ahrefs is showing a bunch of the long tail, low-difficulty keywords have started to climb to the top.
| Date Checked | January 4 2022 |
| Avg. Position | 15.8 (21.7 prev) |
| Position in Top 3 on SERPS | 5 (0 prev) |
| Position in 4-10 on SERPS | 27 (2 prev) |
| Position in 11-50 on SERPS | 642 (168 prev) |
Traffic
Pinterest is getting way more traction than I would have thought.
Everyone says to ignore it since the clickthrough rates are shit (which they are), but the consistent traffic is nice.
I’m going to circle back and put some more effort into it going forward.
Pageviews quadrupled since last month, but the engagement time and pages/session dropped.
| Time Period | Dec 1-Jan 1 |
| Monthly Pageviews | 2229 (prev 518) |
| Engagement time | :33 (prev :53) |
| Pages/Session | 1.32 (prev 1.56) |
Expenses
Since the activity was pretty low, I managed to keep the spending down quite a bit.
I’m also took my main writers off of upwork so they don’t have to pay the exorbitant 20% fee.
I did purchase the link whisper plugin for WordPress to improve my internal linking, and it’s been a pretty big time saver so far.
I also upgraded my hosting plan to the next tier, but I’ll leave it out of this since it’s only $20 more per year.
I gave one of my writers a little Christmas bonus as well.
| Time Period | Dec 1 – Jan 1 |
| Writers | $400 |
| Link Whisper | $80 |
| Christmas bonus | $100 |
What I’ve learned this month
Adding in some additional content focusing on professionals in this niche has been a nice change of pace.
Since my main writer is an expert in the area, I’m going to have her focus on those topics going forward.
Plans for next month
I need to play a bit of catchup for the somewhat slow month.
Since I’m really only using one writer at this point, I’m going to try to crank out a quick article per night before I head to bed in order to keep up the pace.
I’ll continue to target the low competition keywords, since they really seem to be working.
Related
Starting a niche site from scratch
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