[Journey] Niche blogging using Income School Concepts

ramuite said:

Can you tell how to find Facebook Groups in Luxury Items category for getting Pinterest "repin chores"? To get my Pinterest pins repined by other members. I searched on Youtube for it with Income School channel but couldn't find it.

Click to expand...

The Facebook group stuff I do isn't something I learned from Income School, they don't really teach much of anything related to social media. I don't necessarily want to share publicly and specific FB group names but if you private message me I'll share. Or I can also tell you that another name for them is 'pods' like 'facebook pods' or 'pinterest pods' etc if that might help you find any groups.

I will say though that the groups I'm in aren't for specific niches, so you have to repin content that is from other niches, and many of the groups have certain requirements for the types of pins that they'll let you share. In general, product-specific pins aren't usually well received in these types of link up groups as they aren't a very natural fit for pinterest, generally speaking. So a pin that is just a picture of a specific luxury item isn't a good fit, but something like 'the 5 best X for Y' might be okay if you make a custom pin graphic.

Anon9109 said:

The Facebook group stuff I do isn't something I learned from Income School, they don't really teach much of anything related to social media. I don't necessarily want to share publicly and specific FB group names but if you private message me I'll share. Or I can also tell you that another name for them is 'pods' like 'facebook pods' or 'pinterest pods' etc if that might help you find any groups.

I will say though that the groups I'm in aren't for specific niches, so you have to repin content that is from other niches, and many of the groups have certain requirements for the types of pins that they'll let you share. In general, product-specific pins aren't usually well received in these types of link up groups as they aren't a very natural fit for pinterest, generally speaking. So a pin that is just a picture of a specific luxury item isn't a good fit, but something like 'the 5 best X for Y' might be okay if you make a custom pin graphic.

Click to expand...

do you plan to sell the site or are you thinking of growing it further?

ANewBeginning said:

do you plan to sell the site or are you thinking of growing it further?

Click to expand...

I'm still making new content and have a list of topics that I haven't covered yet that I plan to cover. Once I feel like I've thoroughly covered all the topics within the niche, my current plan is to just let it sit and continue to make money, maybe make edits to old content periodically if it feels needed for whatever reason. I haven't looked into selling blogs much at all but I've read that the norm is to sell for 30x your monthly income. So it seems to me that just keeping the blog for 30+ months would be a better financial choice? Though I definitely have a lot more to learn about selling blogs. I realize many people sell blogs and they must think it's a good financial choice, so I guess I may be missing something. Also this blog is very personalized to me. Every blog post includes my personal photos. So it would be really tough for someone else to buy and make 'theirs' which complicates things.

Anon9109 said:

I'm still making new content and have a list of topics that I haven't covered yet that I plan to cover. Once I feel like I've thoroughly covered all the topics within the niche, my current plan is to just let it sit and continue to make money, maybe make edits to old content periodically if it feels needed for whatever reason. I haven't looked into selling blogs much at all but I've read that the norm is to sell for 30x your monthly income. So it seems to me that just keeping the blog for 30+ months would be a better financial choice? Though I definitely have a lot more to learn about selling blogs. I realize many people sell blogs and they must think it's a good financial choice, so I guess I may be missing something. Also this blog is very personalized to me. Every blog post includes my personal photos. So it would be really tough for someone else to buy and make 'theirs' which complicates things.

Click to expand...

Well, nowadays, people are selling blogs for 40x to even 50x the monthly profit, so yeah, it's pretty profitable

October 2021 update (month 14)
Total pageviews: 115,976 (up 4226)
Total sessions: 76,543 (down 3668)
Total blog posts: 80 (4 new in October)


Total organic visits: 47,151 (77.2% of my traffic). Up 2931 vs September.


Pinterest traffic: 6332, up 1133 vs Sept.

Search console screenshot for Oct



Income results:
Adthrive: $2197. (Down $74 vs September. )
Amazon affiliates: 104.32 (up 50.33 vs Sept)
Impact affiliates: 24.37 (up $15.45 vs Sept)
Rakuten: $30 (up $30 vs Sept)
Total: 2,355.69 (up 21.78)

It was nice to see a bit more traffic from Pinterest this month, as it had been declining the last few months in a row.
Adthrive RPM really crashed in early October, giving me my lowest-earning days to date early in the month, but then they started to recover late in the month, but only back to 'normal' which was a bit of a bummer as everyone says Q4 is always higher. I know this is't specific to my site though, I've seen lots of discussion of lower-than-expected RPMs for October in the adthrive facebook group.

I get really busy with my other blog in November and December, so I'm not sure I'll get my usual 4 posts a month out this month or next month.

In late July I published an article that was Halloween themed. I wasn't sure how a 'seasonal' post like that would do, it was an experimental topic for me to try something seasonal, I thought that results info might be worth sharing. I ranked #3 for the main keyword that is really relevant to my post, #7 for a bigger keyword that is slightly less relevant. It got 2,852 pageviews total. The screenshot below is for that one specific post so you can see the traffic trends for it. This was a pretty easy post for me to pull together, I didn't have to do any prep work or take my own pictures or anything like that. Probably an hour to an hour and a half total spent creating it? According to adthrive, this specific post earned me 54.56 total. Not great, but I don't feel like it was a terrible waste of time either. Will be curious to see if it brings in similar numbers next fall.

Anon9109 said:

Adthrive RPM really crashed in early October, giving me my lowest-earning days to date early in the month, but then they started to recover late in the month, but only back to 'normal' which was a bit of a bummer as everyone says Q4 is always higher.

Click to expand...

Don't worry about that much. Statistically Q4 is the best, but not because of October. Even historically (at least from what Adthrive shares with their users), September's RPM > October's RPM, but November's RPM > September's, and December's RPM is the best one .

Well, this core update is reminding me a whole lot of last year's Dec update. Traffic has been cut in half or so. Sites that are outranking me right now are healthline, magazine brands, and various company websites. At the risk of sounding quite arrogant, when I look at the content, it's clear to me that mine is better. Mine is significantly more thorough. I think it'll probably correct itself over the course of a few weeks like it did in Dec 2020. My guess is that because I have low backlinks and less domain authority, that these updates are sort of 'resetting me' to lower rankings thinking that my site 'shouldn't' rank as well as it does...but last time it seems that my content proved itself over time, so I think it likely will again. Certainly sucks to see my analytics numbers crash and my earnings, too.

Anon9109 said:

Well, this core update is reminding me a whole lot of last year's Dec update. Traffic has been cut in half or so. Sites that are outranking me right now are healthline, magazine brands, and various company websites. At the risk of sounding quite arrogant, when I look at the content, it's clear to me that mine is better. Mine is significantly more thorough. I think it'll probably correct itself over the course of a few weeks like it did in Dec 2020. My guess is that because I have low backlinks and less domain authority, that these updates are sort of 'resetting me' to lower rankings thinking that my site 'shouldn't' rank as well as it does...but last time it seems that my content proved itself over time, so I think it likely will again. Certainly sucks to see my analytics numbers crash and my earnings, too.
View attachment 193004

Click to expand...

Absolutely hate to see it. you'll recover no doubt

Anon9109 said:

Well, this core update is reminding me a whole lot of last year's Dec update. Traffic has been cut in half or so. Sites that are outranking me right now are healthline, magazine brands, and various company websites. At the risk of sounding quite arrogant, when I look at the content, it's clear to me that mine is better. Mine is significantly more thorough. I think it'll probably correct itself over the course of a few weeks like it did in Dec 2020. My guess is that because I have low backlinks and less domain authority, that these updates are sort of 'resetting me' to lower rankings thinking that my site 'shouldn't' rank as well as it does...but last time it seems that my content proved itself over time, so I think it likely will again. Certainly sucks to see my analytics numbers crash and my earnings, too.
View attachment 193004

Click to expand...

dang, I was reading through your thread and I loved your story. I was really rooting for you to crush the earnings this year.

do you have some sort of other active income like contracting to help offset the variability of SEO?

Anon9109 said:

Well, this core update is reminding me a whole lot of last year's Dec update. Traffic has been cut in half or so. Sites that are outranking me right now are healthline, magazine brands, and various company websites. At the risk of sounding quite arrogant, when I look at the content, it's clear to me that mine is better. Mine is significantly more thorough. I think it'll probably correct itself over the course of a few weeks like it did in Dec 2020. My guess is that because I have low backlinks and less domain authority, that these updates are sort of 'resetting me' to lower rankings thinking that my site 'shouldn't' rank as well as it does...but last time it seems that my content proved itself over time, so I think it likely will again. Certainly sucks to see my analytics numbers crash and my earnings, too.
View attachment 193004

Click to expand...

I can't figure out how to DM you privately but if u need any financial help or investment to get through this, send me a DM. I understand this website can be a bit sketchy but I'm not looking to gain anything here (I don't even desire to find out what niche or website you're doing, I have my own websites to attend to), I just wanna help you out after an awful update like that.

Anon9109 said:

Well, this core update is reminding me a whole lot of last year's Dec update. Traffic has been cut in half or so. Sites that are outranking me right now are healthline, magazine brands, and various company websites. At the risk of sounding quite arrogant, when I look at the content, it's clear to me that mine is better. Mine is significantly more thorough. I think it'll probably correct itself over the course of a few weeks like it did in Dec 2020. My guess is that because I have low backlinks and less domain authority, that these updates are sort of 'resetting me' to lower rankings thinking that my site 'shouldn't' rank as well as it does...but last time it seems that my content proved itself over time, so I think it likely will again. Certainly sucks to see my analytics numbers crash and my earnings, too.
View attachment 193004

Click to expand...

That's tough! I hope you recover fast.

If you search for "site:domain" on Google, are all pages still indexed?

Anon9109 said:

Well, this core update is reminding me a whole lot of last year's Dec update. Traffic has been cut in half or so. Sites that are outranking me right now are healthline, magazine brands, and various company websites. At the risk of sounding quite arrogant, when I look at the content, it's clear to me that mine is better. Mine is significantly more thorough. I think it'll probably correct itself over the course of a few weeks like it did in Dec 2020. My guess is that because I have low backlinks and less domain authority, that these updates are sort of 'resetting me' to lower rankings thinking that my site 'shouldn't' rank as well as it does...but last time it seems that my content proved itself over time, so I think it likely will again. Certainly sucks to see my analytics numbers crash and my earnings, too.
View attachment 193004

Click to expand...

Interesting it happens year after year. Any chance it is more of a seasonality thing than an update? Do you track your rankings for different keywords? Are you sure you've been hit?

In any case, you still have four times more daily visits now than you had last year around the same time, so looking at the bigger picture, I still think you are on a right track with this site...

Anon9109 said:

Well, this core update is reminding me a whole lot of last year's Dec update. Traffic has been cut in half or so. Sites that are outranking me right now are healthline, magazine brands, and various company websites. At the risk of sounding quite arrogant, when I look at the content, it's clear to me that mine is better. Mine is significantly more thorough. I think it'll probably correct itself over the course of a few weeks like it did in Dec 2020. My guess is that because I have low backlinks and less domain authority, that these updates are sort of 'resetting me' to lower rankings thinking that my site 'shouldn't' rank as well as it does...but last time it seems that my content proved itself over time, so I think it likely will again. Certainly sucks to see my analytics numbers crash and my earnings, too.
View attachment 193004

Click to expand...

I found this interesting reddit post on the flaw in the income school method: https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/comments/e0rowe
the basic summary is...while income school is great in the beginning for the first 12 months in growing, the problem comes later when bigger websites start competing with you. Becuase you've built no moat with backlinks, and because their raw backlink profile is so huge, they easily outrank you.

Possibly this is what happened to your website? Do let me know your thoughts if you think so!

actually I like income school methods a lot, but as a habit I actively look at all disconfirming opinions just in case I'm wrong.

bluehathacker said:

I found this interesting reddit post on the flaw in the income school method: https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/comments/e0rowe
the basic summary is...while income school is great in the beginning for the first 12 months in growing, the problem comes later when bigger websites start competing with you. Becuase you've built no moat with backlinks, and because their raw backlink profile is so huge, they easily outrank you.

Possibly this is what happened to your website? Do let me know your thoughts if you think so!

actually I like income school methods a lot, but as a habit I actively look at all disconfirming opinions just in case I'm wrong.

Click to expand...

Yeah.. that's right. But I learned Income School has updated some of its methods.

That thread on Reddit was posted over 2 years ago.

HungryKarma said:

Yeah.. that's right. But I learned Income School has updated some of its methods.

That thread on Reddit was posted over 2 years ago.

Click to expand...

ok what is a summary of new updates since then?

Anon9109 said:

Well, this core update is reminding me a whole lot of last year's Dec update. Traffic has been cut in half or so. Sites that are outranking me right now are healthline, magazine brands, and various company websites. At the risk of sounding quite arrogant, when I look at the content, it's clear to me that mine is better. Mine is significantly more thorough. I think it'll probably correct itself over the course of a few weeks like it did in Dec 2020. My guess is that because I have low backlinks and less domain authority, that these updates are sort of 'resetting me' to lower rankings thinking that my site 'shouldn't' rank as well as it does...but last time it seems that my content proved itself over time, so I think it likely will again. Certainly sucks to see my analytics numbers crash and my earnings, too.
View attachment 193004

Click to expand...

Interesting stuff. It has happened to my sites, but they never recovered. But maybe as your site recovered last time maybe it will recover

Anon9109 said:

Well, this core update is reminding me a whole lot of last year's Dec update. Traffic has been cut in half or so. Sites that are outranking me right now are healthline, magazine brands, and various company websites. At the risk of sounding quite arrogant, when I look at the content, it's clear to me that mine is better. Mine is significantly more thorough. I think it'll probably correct itself over the course of a few weeks like it did in Dec 2020. My guess is that because I have low backlinks and less domain authority, that these updates are sort of 'resetting me' to lower rankings thinking that my site 'shouldn't' rank as well as it does...but last time it seems that my content proved itself over time, so I think it likely will again. Certainly sucks to see my analytics numbers crash and my earnings, too.
View attachment 193004

Click to expand...

Oh and by teh way, have you built backlinks to this site of yours?

This has been an awesome journey to watch. I plan to start a blog soon with the same approach. I doubt I'll be as successful at niche selection though--you really killed it!

That November crash in traffic is substantial. Sorry to see that happen to you, I hope it recovers.

I like your way of motivating. I also think that your site is now worth ninety thousand dollars. My advice is to sell it and invest half of this amount in creating 5 sites in one year. You will make half a million dollars selling those sites if you repeat the same method. Good luck

@Anon9109 Do you still work on your site or has this journey ended after that sharp traffic drop in November? Was hoping you will reach new milestones in 2022.