Weight: 150.2
It’s Tuesday morning. I’m proud of myself for not eating after 5:30pm last night. I’m also proud of myself for continuing with this journal for an entire week. I have a habit of starting lots of things but not always finishing.
For example, I’ll work for hours on a blog post on one of my sites but then never go back to it to finish and publish.
My anxiety is running high now because I really feel all over the place. I’m trying to figure out next steps for me to earn money. Where will I get the most bang for my buck? Should I spend more time on my websites? Should I do something else?
Please note, I am not using my real name in these posts. I want to be as transparent as possible, and being anonymous allows me to do so.
The Past
I used to have up to 8 – 10 websites I was working on at a time. Unfortunately, none of them made money. The reason is because most of them were not monetized. I had no way to earn money from them so I focused on building traffic by writing new posts.
There were exceptions, depending on the site. Over 10 years ago, I had sites where people ordered products from me, and I ordered them from somewhere who shipped them. These were small sites. I earned at most probably $3,000 total.
I remember on another site, for a year or so, I made $200 – $500 a month from Amazon affiliate revenue.
What’s Happening Now
With my current sites, four are monetized with ads. We set it up right before Covid hit which was unfortunate because for many many months, we earned $0. Companies weren’t paying.
The ads show up on the blog. I earn money when people scroll past them. For every 1,000 views, I can earn around $20. It depends on many factors; many niches pay more than this.
This is a way to earn passive income. I don’t need people to click or to buy anything. I just need them to find my post or my website, and stay on the post reading as much as possible. The goal is for them to then click to another one of my posts (through internal links on the page) so they will keep reading.
Two of my current four sites never made any real money ($2 – $3 a day) and less during Covid.
So now I’m down to focusing on two websites (I’ll discuss them in the next section) plus this one that I’m journaling on. This site (socialmum.com) has never made any money. A few of my friends and I started it but never focused on it enough.
A Bit About My Websites
Site One: Personal-to-me blog
I have one in a health niche but the problem is, I’m not a qualified health professional. I write from my own experience. Google could “punish” the site because of this.
This site has never been large but it was personal to me. Google now is rewarding authentic sites now, especially because of AI. So there may be some hope here. I just don’t know.
My traffic before the recent Google updates was growing to be a steady 350 – 450 page views a day. It did get hit with the updates, and now it’s down to around 300 a day. That’s not bad, considering.
Aside from hosting fees, I wasn’t spending money on developers or content. I make less than $10 a day on this, and it was the same before the Google updates. Is it worth expanding on it?
Site Two: Home-type niche
We put ads on this site right before Covid, and it was making around $30 a day. Then traffic started increasing during Covid but the advertisers weren’t paying. So we literally made $0 for months.
Once the ads started appearing again, for around 2 years, I started ramping up to earn $200 a day. It started going down to around $150 but was still steady from January – August 2023. I think I was earning between $125 – $160 fairly consistently.
Google did a big Helpful Content Update (HCU) in September 2023, and it crushed thousands of sites. Mine was one that got crushed. My $125 – $160 disappeared and went down to around $15 – $22 a day.
It’s been horrible. I lost revenue but also my page views.
I wasn’t using AI on the site. I wasn’t mass-producing content. It makes sense Google needed to clean up the internet as there are many sites trying to gain the system by using SEO tactics instead of creating the best content for the reader.
It worked for many until it didn’t last September.
I wasn’t spending a lot of money, but I stopped paying some content writers in December 2023. I really need to hire a tech person to work on some stuff but don’t want to spend the money.
Now What?
So now what do I do? This is a huge issue. I don’t want to use time trying to resurrect Website Two if it’s pointless.
I sort of want to really focus on Website One and see what happens. But I don’t want to give up on Website Two. It used to make $200 a day!
But with Google making so many changes, it’s difficult to bank on that.
I see what happened to me and thousands of others sites through the years when Amazon slashed the commission they were paying bloggers. It’s hard to rely on something external.
But what can I do on my own? I’m unsure what to do to earn money now.
I’m considering doing a podcast as add-on to Website One. I’m also considering doing a fun podcast on a topic I’m interested in as long as I’m doing one already… what’s one more?
I’m going to be writing more about this tomorrow on Day 8 and probably for a few days so please stay tuned as I hash this out more in my mind.