[Journey] Growing A Money Site Network To Over $25,000 A Month!

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So my actual journey has been going for a while now and I managed to earn almost $6400 last month from the Amazon Affiliate program as you can see in the image above. Although I am yet to break the $10,000 a month mark yet, I have set myself the goal of getting to >$25,000 a month as I am trying to scale as rapidly as possible and want to document the process along the way.

The majority of my current income is from two sites that were not affected by the Amazon commission changes, I also have two sites still well within the Google sandbox too that should start aging out over the coming months, and another site that has been hit by Google updates and Amazon commissions that only makes around $200 a month now. I am spending most of this week trying to fault find the Google May 4th Algorithm update to plan for future domains as I want to try and outsource a domain as much as possible in August 2020 with the team that I am building.

The vast majority of my income currently comes from the Amazon Affiliate program but I am starting to diversify as I am overexposed to Amazon cutting their commissions as they did in April 2020. My current main project is mainly a display ad site and I am looking to add some stuff based around ShareASale and CPA networks to it too as it breaks my income sources up.

 

Update

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• Income seems to be down due to Amazon suspending delivery services due to the riots in the USA as actual orders seem to have held as normal.
• Article 1 - 2105 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 2 - 1500 Words - Outsourced.
• So I was talking to a friend who has been doing really well with affiliate blogging and asked how he is diversifying away from Amazon and he basically said he is going all-in with Amazon and dropping more per month on scaling than I am earning from my own network in total. I asked him about shareasale and other programs like that and he basically said how they have their own issues too as vendors leave the platform or close their affiliate program down with little to no warning and its usually harder to find an alternative where as Amazon can just do their job of trying to show an alternative/more recent version of an item to someone who clicks your links. Although I am still wanting to scale this latest domain to diversify income sources, I also want to look at getting back into a fresh Amazon blog in a month or two as I have more confidence in actually ranking those types of keywords.
• I spent most of today fault finding on May 4th update, and it looks like the YouTube videos in the SERPs for my niche have normalized into the horizontal YouTube widget now rather than 3 individual YouTube entries in the SERPs. I have been doing keyword research in a bunch of niches for “review” and “best x” terms and this seems to be widespread unfortunately and the niche for the domain I started in January is affected too. Amazon.com does look like it will hold on the top page too now as its showing results for some really good customer reviews rather than the old product page it used to prior to the update so seeing Amazon on the first page of Google is not a tell for low competition and an easy keyword anymore. I am wanting to put more time into trying to tweak my keyword research method to try work out a way to quickly find low competition keywords after the May 4th update for the potential new Amazon Affiliate project in a month or two so that will probably be the plan for tomorrow.

 

breaking the $10k a month mark is a great goal, good luck!

Let me ask you, how many posts do your top money site have at this point, and how many posts do you outsource per month?
Are you building backlinks?

 

Update

Income is from my full money site network.​

• Did a ton of keyword research ready for the potential new Amazon Affiliate site in a month or two. I ended up getting a fair few decent keywords that could actually be split into two domains if needed. I found 127 for one sub-niche and 55 for another sub-niche but will probably initially go with a much smaller number initially. I basically want to try a scaling process where I do the keyword research and then outsource the backlinks and content to keep as much as my time as possible. This next site can probably work as a test for for this process.
• Spent more time fault finding the May 4th update. It definitely seems as though YouTube and Amazon have been given more power for buyer intent keywords and Reddit, Quora, and stackoverflow have been given more power for informational keywords with Pinterest seemingly winning on both fronts too. Some of the keywords for a domain that I started in January have been effected pretty badly by the update unfortunately before that project even had a chance to rank.
• The owner of the new writing service that I am using got back to me and confirmed that she will tell her writers to type my content directly into Surfer SEO to prevent the formatting issues that I previously had. I have built out the first buyer intent template for this new site as it is currently all informational content and put the order in to see how it goes. Once it has been delivered, I will do some initial backlinking as this is kind of a mini test for the new affiliate domain I plan to build in a month or two with as much of the process being outsourced as possible. Should be a week or so before I get this buyer intent article back, my other freelance writers should be returning their informational intent content over the next few days.

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Wordcount breakdown is as above, I am outsourcing as many as my freelance writing team can handle right now and will be scaling up once I am done testing this new writing service too. I am having guest posts, niche edits, and manual forum posts built for my domains when it comes to backlinks.

 

Update

Income is from my full money site network.​

• Article 1 - 2003 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 2 - 1509 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 2074 Words.
• The second affiliate program that I applied to on ShareASale seems to have been removed for some reason. Not sure if they ended their affiliate program or if ShareASale kicked them off or not but kind of goes to show that programs other than Amazon can have their own dramas too so the grass is not always greener.
• Google put out a tweet last night saying that they were aware of and have now fixed a bug with their indexing, as search console has a few days delay on it update it will take a while before I know if its the same bug on the coverage tab thats being a pain for two of my domains or not but I have my fingers crossed.
• Finished putting together the services that I wanted for my outsourcing team to try scale as quickly as possible in the future. After reaching out to a bunch of web 2 services, one seemed promising but they seem to be ghosting now so I will just stick with guest posts, niche edits, and manual forum posts for the foreseeable future as it has worked out well enough so far.

I also published my monthly update video going over the progress for my full affiliate blog network that may be interesting for some following along.

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Update

Income is from my full money site network.​

• Article 1 - 2645 Words.
• Article 2 - 1496 Words - Outsourced.
• The Google indexing bug seems to be worse than ever, there's reports of all kinds of random stuff happening since Google pushed their fix live and it looks like one of my older sites may be affected by it now too. Until more is known about this indexing Issue I am slowing my content production right down when it comes to freelance writers to save cash.
• I got an email from ShareASale saying that one of the programs on there has changed their payout rates so with one program removing themselves from the platform and this new one changing their rates, it's making me just want to stick with Amazon even more. I have been asking around and people have told me that this is very common for platforms like ShareASale so I am just going to build out the keyword list for this next domain-based around Amazon and potentially eBay while also trying to fault find the indexing bug more.
• Spent some time doing keyword research for this new project, I have well over 100 keywords that fit my new keyword research method that I have tweaked since the May 4th Google update now but they are definitely harder to find than they used to be due to Amazon, Pinterest, Quora, Reddit, and YouTube taking up so much of the first page and seemingly being unshiftable able right now but I will keep doing keyword research.
• I had a little think about domain strategy for moving forward too, I am kind of looking more towards building smaller niche sites rather than bigger authority domains to try and reduce the risk and open the buyer pool more for potential exits on the domains in the future.

 

Update

Income is from my full money site network.​

• Did some fault finding for the Amazon.com pages pushing my blog pages down in the SERPs. From what I can tell, Google are now actually ranking reviews from Amazon in the SERPs as well as actual product pages. From what I can tell, if there is a decent review for the product on Amazon Google rank it highly but if its still just the regular product page then my articles are still beating them. Did a little keyword research based around this for my next project and it seems to be a mix of product pages and review pages from Amazon ranking for various keywords but I am still currently taking product pages in the SERPs as a tell for low competition but if a decent review is posted on Amazon then it could probably outrank me with ease.
• I got the new article back from buyselltext and although the actual content is great, it has the same formatting issues in the Surfer SEO again so I have requested they fix it as its a 4000 word article and I can't be bothered to fix it myself as the writer was specifically told to type the content up in the Surfer template rather than copy and paste the text in due to it breaking their formatting.
• Manually checked the keywords for all 136 pages online for the domain I launched in May and only 37 (27%) of them seem to have made it through the Google May update without having their competition increased by sites like YouTube and such on the first page. As it is a brand new domain I don't have any pages ranking for it yet so I couldn't see a traffic drop in my analytics to see this happening but the domains and level of competition on the first page has definitely increased in general.
• Due to so many of the keywords for the diversification domain that I launched at the start of May being affected by the May 4th update I have just decided to flip my freelance writers over to working on my next affiliate project to let the dust settle for the informational domain to see what happens with it. I pushed the first article out to one of my freelancers and I will put the rest of them onto this new project as and when they deliver their content jobs that they currently have. This domain will be outsourced as much as possible to try and use it as a proof of concept for a scaling system that I am wanting to use to grow everything rapidly over the coming years. I also have some keywords for another domain that I can work on in my downtime too in another niche that I know pretty well too.
• Built out a bunch of surfer SEO templates for this next project so I can easily send them to my freelancer writers when required and did some final keyword research checks too to double-check a few things.

I also published a video going over a zero search volume keyword strategy that I have been playing with over the years that may be helpful for anyone just starting out.

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Update

Income is from my full money site network.​

• Article 1 - 3195 Words.
• Article 2 - 4371 Words - Outsourced.
• The buyer intent article from buy sell text was tweaked and the formatting issues have been fixed, the content is excellent for the price in all fairness. Ordered a test batch of 10 manual forum posts from the new provider for the article as a test to see how they measure up against the other service that I have been using.
• Really not feeling well today so I'm taking the rest of the day off and probably going to take tomorrow off and sleep to try and get better for next week.

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Update

Income is from my full money site network.​

• Article 1 - 1959 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 2 - 4124 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 1971 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 4 - 1955 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 5 - 1959 Words - Outsourced.
• I published a pretty long traffic leaking post for Reddit.
• Released one writer from the contract on upwork as they are more of an informational content writer. Templates for this new affiliate project have been sent out to the buyselltext team and the two writers that I have on Upwork still so they are all flipped to the content for this new project now.

 

Update

Income is from my full money site network.​

• I feel better than I have the last two days but I still feel a little ill so I have just been in bed most of the day sleeping or watching YouTube videos on how to market on Pinterest.
• Ordered a >DA50 guest post from the new provider that I have been waiting to try. I have used it as more of a test of the service for my new project but targeted it towards a buyer intent term on the domain that I started in May as it has the highest chance of a return and may help push the other pages on that domain high in the SERPs.

 

Update

Income is from my full money site network.​

• Amazons one link dashboard has frozen again so just the income for Amazon.com above.
• Had another ShareASale commission rate change so I am planning to just go with Amazon/eBay affiliates for this next project.
• I have 3 buyer intent projects and 1 informational project planned for the future now. The informational project is just an extension on the domain that I started in May based around display ads using my new keyword research method based around patterns since the May 4th 2020 update from Google, just waiting to see if more of its pages have issues with the Google indexing bug but if it holds as it is for the next few days I will start to push content out for it again.
• Reached out for to a broker about selling my two highest income domains but I probably wont now, I am planning to slow time scale rather than rapidly scale as I need a proof of concept that this new keyword research method that I Have developed over the last week or so works or not.
• Tried to do more keyword research but Keyword Shitter appears to be offline, fingers crossed they can fix it soon.
• Seen a few people talking about a new Google update over the last few days for "Best x" keywords where Google essentially add a snippet from the ranking pages with product recommendations directly in the SERP, probably not good news if they scale this out.

I also uploaded my Q&A blogging video for June that might be helpful for people following along.

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Update

Income is from my full money site network.​

• Article 1 - 4063 Words - Outsourced.
• Got a few thousand words of content back from test writers on Fiverr for a video for YouTube to show the quality of content available while also trying to screen for a cheap writer. So far, none of these initial test orders are what I would consider to be good enough to use on a money site but it gives me stuff for video content.
• Sent out two new test orders for new writers from Upwork that I am wanting to work with on the informational domain that I started in May as it doesn’t seem to be having the issues with the coverage tab that my other domain from January is having. As it is lower-income content due to being based on display ads I am looking to drop the quality and get my better writers to focus on my buyer intent domain.
• Started looking at ways to try and integrate Instagram into promoting my YouTube channel and personal blog, I think I have a plan set out now but doubt that it will work on any of my actual money sites.
• Finished my Pinterest marketing plan, I am going to proof test it with my YouTube channel as it is black hat in case the account gets banned or URLs get ghosted then I plan to try build a new site in the future based around nothing but Pinterest keywords to try diversify traffic sourced across the network.
• Keyword research with my post 4th May update method is now complete or my new site for next month as well as the rest of the keyword for the informational domain. I also have keywords banked for two more future sites too but these initial keywords that I will order content for over the coming weeks are more of a test batch and proof of concept.

 

Update

Income is from my full money site network.​

• Unfortunately, I was absolutely smashed with returns last night dropping almost $100 on amazon.com.
• Article 1 - 4166 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 1 is from BuySellTexts and the feedback about using the Surfer SEO templates has all been taken on board so I have transferred $1000 to them to start getting these articles ready for the site next month.
• Set up the hosting for the blog I am going to launch next month but Namecheap took ages to propagate the DNS update so I will just prep the content and add the plugins and stuff tomorrow.
• Got both of the test articles back from the test writers for the informational domain that I put in last night and the content is actually worse than the stuff I got from Fiverr so not going to be moving forward with either of those writers. I have a guy in mind that I will probably use for it and he is starting writing again from Monday.

I also published a video going over some tips a friend gave me on how you can potentially get a higher blog valuation if you choose to try and sell the domain. I am going to try and implement as many of these as possible on the new domain that I am building to try and be able to sell it for as much as possible if needed in the future.

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Update

Income is from my full money site network.​

• Set up the new domain to launch next month, plugins and themes are all on there as well as the first few articles the first two 4000 word articles are now formatted and ready to launch on the 1st.
• Did some keyword research for the domain for next month based around the zero search volume keyword method that I have been playing with on other domains. I have about 50 keywords already, I have build Surfer SEO templates for 10 of them and will push these initial 10 to my Upwork writers when they are free ready for launch, the buyselltext team will be used for my higher search volume stuff.
• The writer that I was planning on using for my informational domain that I launched in May got back to me and said he is fully booked with content orders. I think I will just leave content generation for this domain until next month now and put the cash into my current writing team for the domain I want to launch on 1st July.

 

Nice reading, and great venture, hope you will reach your target!

Can you share what are your costs, too - hosting and backup services, writers, marketing, overhead costs, etc.?

 

Update

Income is from my full money site network.​

• I'm getting absolutely smashed with returns right now, the last three days have all had at least $50 of returns on Amazon.com. I'm guessing that it is due to so many people buying gear last month with their stimulus checks and then deciding to return it.
• Article 1 - 1463 Words.
• Article 2 - 4210 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 1455 Words.
• Spent some time getting my Pinterest marketing schedule up to date for my YouTube channel and setting tailwind up, I see some potential in it and if the strategy comes off then I will scale it into other money sites if possible.
• 100 manual forum links delivered, manually checked 25 of them and they are all good quality so I have pinged them to my indexer to try and get Google to crawl them, with the issues with indexing in Google these days though, not sure what kind of benefit this will offer is any.
• AAWP dev got back to me, the custom button idea is a no go but I have come up with a slightly different way to do it that actually looks better anyway so I have implemented it in the posts that are currently in draft ready for launching on the 1st July.
• Got suckered in by a paid traffic offer on Pinterest of £10 worth of credit if I spend £15 so I have decided to give it a little try to promote my Pinterest account.

Cheers dude, backups is just by the Updraft plugin to my Dropbox account, hosting is usually the Sitegrounds $10 a month package or a cheap package on Cloudways, Writers are anywhere from $5-$12.50 per 500 words depending on what I need, Marketing is usually around $9 per manual forum post, $250 a niche edit, and $300 a guest post right now.

The image below is of my budget for the domain that I am planning to launch on the 1st of next month showing the kind of spend I am putting into it before any of its content is even live yet.

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Update

Income is from my full money site network.​

• Smashed with returns again, this time on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca.
• Article 1 - 1685 Words.
• Shopllc kindly said he would help me with the custom AAWP buttons and although there was some user error on my part, we ended up getting it done. I spent some time going back through the articles saved as draft on this new domain I am planning to launch next month and added eBay links where possible.
• My personal blog is getting smashed with bot traffic and it will likely go offline in a few days if I can’t fix it. Installed the Blackhole for Bad Bots plugin to try and get a quick fix but will leave it for a few days to see if it helps or not. If I can't fix it I might just switch it to a branded domain on a service like bitly as I only need the shortened URLs.
• Applied to the Walmart affiliate program to try and increase diversification of income.

 

Update

Income is from my full money site network.​

• Article 1 - 1619 Words.
• Article 2 - 4468 Words - Outsourced.
• Spent some time trying to decide if going with genius links will be better for this new domain rather than intext buttons. A friend uses them and he said his income held after switching to them but it is much more diversified now so I think I will give them a try later in the week.
• Put a new test up on Quora for traffic leaking and I think I have worked out a way to track hits now.
• 10 manual forum posted delivered from the new service vendor, 2 dead, 4 do follow, 4 no follow, considering they are 30% cheaper then the old vendor I will probably stick with this guy from now on.

 

Update

Income is from my full money site network.​

• Article 1 - 1640 Words.
• Article 2 - 4011 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 3 - 4395 Words - Outsourced.
• Pinterest paid traffic test came in at $0.28 CPC so I will be focusing on just trying to grow my account and pull organic traffic if possible.
• Spent some time planning the diversification approach and I think that I might swap all of my domains over from AAWP to Genius links over the coming months or so. I have stuff on tomorrow so it probably won't be till Thursday when I actually sign up and see how I feel.

I also upload the video below going over what I would consider to be a realistic approach to the first six months of part-time/full-time blogging that may be helpful.

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Update

Income is from my full money site network.​

• Article 1 - 4059 Words - Outsourced.
• Article 2 - 1471 Words.
• MediaVine increased their minimum session requirement to 50,000 per month so it's going to be a pain to get the domain that I launched last month on their network in its current state, I guess Ezoic or Monumetric will have to do but I'm not even sure if it's going to be getting to 10,000 sessions a month anytime soon so it might just have to sit on Adsense.
• Bot traffic still smashing my personal blog even with wordfence and bad bot blackhole set up. Ticketed Sitegrounds support and apparently its something to do with the htaccess causing issues with Apache generating hits that aren't real from pretty links redirects so its not actually bot traffic. Their tech team has tried to fix it but its going to take a few days to see if it actually works.
• Turns out Pinterest traffic does track on YouTube analytics so going to look into scaling into Pinterest and Quora from now on as its more longterm traffic rather than one-hit-wonder traffic. I have only been messing with direct links with Quora for a few days and its already up to the fourth highest external traffic source for my YouTube channel. Now that I have a way to track the Quora traffic I am thinking of doing one post per day on the platform for all of next month.