Well, folks, it’s time I started publishing some honest income reports about a blogger’s 1st year. In this article, we will cover my portfolio of niche blog websites and the earnings from each. 

I will cover the history of the site, the niche, the traffic, monetization, and overall earnings and expenses. 

Hopefully, this will give you some motivation to start blogging and earning for yourself. 

So, I’ll shut up, and let’s get started!

My Niche Blog Website Portfolio

So, like most bloggers, I jumped right into my first site and did not take into consideration a good method for selecting a niche. 

If you are new yourself and just starting your research phase, I would recommend checking out my write-up on Niche Selection 101: Do Not Make THIS Mistake.

You never know, it might just save you some failures I experienced due to improper niche research. 

So, here are the sites in my portfolio:

	Niche	Launch Date	Article Count	Traffic	Monetization
Site #1	Camping	06/2020	128	3,058	Ezoic/Affiliates
Site #2	Dog Breed	09/2020	26	1148	Ezoic/Affiliates
Site #3	Grilling	09/2020	103	40,422	Ezoic/Affiliates
Site #4	Food	05/2021	27	110	N/A
Site #5	Diet	01/2021	7	26	N/A
Site #6	Blogging	07/2021	4	N/A	N/A

Traffic Overview

Traffic has been very interesting lately. First off, there were the May AND June Google Core Algorithm Updates. 

Spoiler Alert: My Camping Site was hammered by these updates, see below:

If I’m being honest with myself, I probably earned this. 

My original site in the camping niche (site#1) was loaded with lots of cheap writers and poor affiliate-driven articles (Think Top 10, Best Of) in a highly competitive niche where the big players owned the first two pages of the SERPs. 

Fortunately, as you can see, it’s starting to recover, so we will monitor this and keep pushing. 

Site #2: Is finally starting to gain some nice traction, I can’t be too hard on its metrics here as it only has 27 posts and is less than a year old. 

Growth is good and the future plans are CONTENT, CONTENT, and more CONTENT. 

Site #3: Site 3 has always been my moneymaker. I found an underserved niche where the seed keyword has search volume estimations of 300K and very little real competition. 

As you can see, each spike is a Sunday as that is often a big grilling day nationwide here in the states. 

Traffic continues to grow and new content is added each month. Onward and Upward!

Site #4: Site number 4 is a bit of an experiment. It is a “food” blog….BUT, it’s not recipes. Let’s just say it’s a popular food choice in the states and the posts are all information-styled response posts about that specific food item. 

Like I said, it’s an experiment, but as you can see for only being a month old, it’s starting off strong. 

More content is coming and will monitor its progress. 

Site #5: This is a Diet site, I understand this area is highly competitive, potentially YMYL and it could be horrible. 

I plan on holding this long term, add content, and see how long it takes a diet site to rank with mostly informational content. 

Traffic, for now, is basically nothing but by looking at Google Search Console below, you can see it’s getting a touch of love from the Google Gods. 

Site #6: This site is the site you are on right now! 

It’s my only shared public URL and it’s not really anything more than a way to document this niche site journey and share it with you. 

Don’t really have much plans for it other than posting informational content and tossing in a few affiliate offers for plugins, tools, and themes I genuinely find useful to new bloggers. 

Monetization Overview

My monetization strategy has really evolved over the last 12 months. Previously, I would try to rank for competitive “best of” and “Top 10” articles with hopes for big affiliate conversions. 

But, like many of you know, Google doesn’t really like that and I have found that a better strategy is creating content that is informational, getting that organic traffic, and using display ads with limited affiliate offers.

So far, it works much better than hoping for the “top 10” crap to rank and fight for a few clicks after 18 months. 

For my ad network, I am using Ezoic honestly, I am very happy with them. 

Ezoic recently eliminated its traffic requirements and you can now join Ezoic regardless of your traffic!

If you want to join Ezoic, here is one of those affiliate links I told you I might peddle here and there, but I really do like Ezoic and definitely recommend any blogger to them over Adsense. 

Site Income Totals

Ok, here is what you really care about, the dolla’ dolla’ bills y’all.

As stated earlier, monetization is primarily displayed ads with a few hundred coming from Amazon, Avantlink, and Affinity. 

As you will see below, I have not even attempted to monetize Sites 4, 5, or 6 yet, not enough traffic to even bother for a few bucks here and there. 

Full breakdown here:

	Ezoic Ads	Amazon	Avantlink	Affility
Site #1	$37.87	34.41	$0	$0
Site #2	$4.71	2.67	$0	$0
Site #3	$1,103.53	330.74	$0	$58.22
Site #4	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Site #5	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Site #6	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

So, as you can see, the grilling site is top dog, but I suspect sites #2 and #4 to start doing well over the next 12 months. 

The total for the month of June 2021 is $1572.15

Blogging Expenses

June 2021 was an interesting month for expenses. 

Like many, when I first started blogging I didn’t know where to start so I googled “WordPress website” and found myself signing up with the first result of WordPress.COM.

If you are even considering them, don’t. It’s so flipping expensive. For example, if you want your site to be able to have plugins and ads, you will need the WordPress.COM “business plan” and that runs a whopping $300 a year and that’s $300 per year for EACH WEBSITE.

So, as you can imagine, after my first year I ran as fast as possible to a new host. 

Shopping for a new hosting provider is exhausting, everyone’s reviews are just affiliate funnels and you don’t really know what’s good and what’s not. 

After lots of guessing and wondering, I just went with Dreamhost. So far, it’s good, no complaints, and will update if it goes bad. 

For the sake of ease, any purchase I made that was an “Annual” license will be broken into 12 payments and that single month price will be shown. 

So, after that explanation of hoisting, here are my expenses for June 2021:

• Hosting: $2.95
• Theme: $4.91
• Link Whisper: $5.75
• Amalinks Pro 3-Sites: $10
• Ezoic Premium: $220
• iWriter: $739

Total Expenses for June 2021: $982.61

Now is iWriter an actual expense? Not really, but I choose to re-invest most of my earnings to scale this operation, so for now, I’ll include it as an expense of the business.

Future Plans

Future plans are pretty simple! I’m going to crank out more content, do good keyword research, and hopefully, make more money!

I appreciate you guys and gals stopping by, if you ever have questions just shoot me a message, I’d love to hear from you!