It’s time for the August 2024 income report for my portfolio of websites. I was hoping to be able to deliver some good news following the August 2024 Google Core Update… but unfortunately, that’s not the case.
Not only that some of my already hit sites got further penalties… but none seem to have received ANY love from Google. And I’ve been working relatively hard on the select few below, hoping for the best. At this point, I really consider starting a new project using scraps and bits from the other blogs which are now dead.
But that’s for another article… for now, let’s dive into the numbers and performance for each of my top five websites in the portfolio.
August 2024 Website Income Report Overview
If you don’t want to go through the entire report, here is how things stand for my top 5 blogs. There’s some extra income from my other websites in the portfolio, but tiny amounts that don’t make any difference – and they’re even smaller now after the latest core update.
In August, my websites generated $1,740.66 in gross revenue. That’s $45.66 BETTER than last month!
These are my website-related expenses in August:
- Great hosting (BigScoots & WPX): $134.59
- GeneratePress Premium: $2.29
- WP Rocket Plugin: $19.76
- Domain-related expenses: $128.48 (renewed all of them, plus a few redirects)
- Accountant: $182
- Other expenses: $0
- TOTAL: $467.12
Also, I pay social security and health insurance (around $286 per month), plus tax on profits (10%).
This means that, all in all, my net earnings from blogging in August were: $888,79. (-$74.75 vs. last month). This amount is the lowest I’ve seen in a LONG time now.
It also shows that gross revenue (which most people report) doesn’t mean anything: NET revenue does. Even though this month was slightly better than last month for me in terms of generated revenue, my take home money was much lower because I had more expenses.
Now, let’s see how each of my websites performed last month!
Website 1 (entertainment niche)
- Traffic: 27,437 sessions (-547)
- Gross income: $558.96 (+$89.83)
- Articles: 10 new, 1 edited
This is where I’m waiting to see some Google traffic reversals, and I was EXTREMELY happy to see this in Google Analytics during the Core Update time:
But when I dug deeper… it wasn’t Google. It was a random, but still welcome, traffic boost from Bing.
It only lasted for a couple of days, though and overall the traffic, at the end of the month, was still lower than July’s traffic. That’s a bummer!
The thing is that I have to realistically consider Google traffic dead for this website. Before the HCU and the following updates, the site was getting anything between 2,000 to 5,000 sessions from Google search alone. Now, it’s just 100, with no signs of improvement in the past year.
While I consider the content posted on this website to be helpful and of decent enough quality to offer the reader a quick, complete answer to their search query, it’s clear that Google has a different opinion.
It’s true – much of the content on my blog is also available on at least a handful of other, much larger websites, but in some cases (not all though) it’s the better, more complete content. Of course, this only matters in PR releases to the public and it’s not something that influences anything when it comes to the rankings.
So my plan for this website – as it’s still generating a nice chunk of money – is to dig into Bing Webmaster Tools and see what type of articles Bing ranks. And I will give it more of those. After all… Bing traffic keeps going up on most of my websites, so I would be a fool not to focus on it more.
I also did a bit of an experiment launching a new website in the same niche and publishing there content that Google refused to index from this website. Surprisingly, even though that was a brand new site, Google indexed the said content and ranked it.
BUT traffic was going up slowly and I think that, realistically, it would’ve taken too much to get everything to Mediavine levels in decent amounts of time. Add to that the fact that content on this website is not evergreen, so long term it wasn’t a viable solution.
But at least it proved to me that the content itself is not bad – Google likes it (but on different domains), and people like it too. It’s just how things are nowadays, so Bing focus it is!
Website 2 (local travel niche)
- Traffic: 10,026 sessions (-2,542)
- Gross income: $134.37 (-$26.42)
- Articles: 1 new, 3 edits
Again, no love from the August Google Update here either. Even more so, traffic has dropped significantly compared to the previous month, despite the fact that there was a local event I was covering – one that used to bring thousands of visitors in the past. Now – crickets.
I am currently working on a website redesign here, updating the home page and creating more clusters to help people navigate the website easier and better. When it will be done, every article on the website will be at most 3 clicks away from the homepage.
I don’t really think this will help improve my Google rankings, but it is something that will hopefully be genuinely useful to the visitors… and maybe this will, in the long term, give Google the signals it needs to rank this one better.
Website 3 (health niche)
- Traffic: 12,922 sessions (+294)
- Gross income: $400.82 (+$63)
- Articles: 0 new, 4 edits
First of all, I realized that I wasn’t reporting a small source of income (Patreon) here, so I’ve included 3 months of that into this month’s income (it’s just $7.5 per month, so nothing huge).
Traffic here remains steady, although Google traffic is almost ZERO. While the website is not deindexed, it doesn’t show in the search results, even if I search for the exact title of my articles. It does rank for it’s name, which is a good sign – but branded search here is limited.
Income is really good here (thanks to affiliate offers mainly), so I am working on it regularly, trying to improve my social presence and traffic. This is my website monetized with SHE Media, so if you want to dig a bit deeper, I recommend checking out my SHE Media Ad Network review here.
I am also working on a book about this particular health topic, which will hopefully be published this month. I am actually editing it with Chat GPT, since I am not a native English speaker and – as you can probably see from the articles I write here – my English is not perfect, and this is taking longer than anticipated, because I have to re-read the entire book after running it, chapter by chapter, through Chat GPT.
Website 4 (entertainment niche)
- Traffic: 41,774 sessions (+7,287)
- Gross income: $607.00 (+$88.63)
- Articles: 6 new, 2 edited
This is the only website in my portfolio that is doing well and constantly getting extra traffic. Surprisingly, this one gets almost no traffic from Bing – so in this case, it’s all Google traffic. So I am very nervous about this, as you can imagine.
Even though traffic is growing – this is a Mediavine website, so the current 41k Sessions are still behind its peak… but at least I see nice progress here.
Since this is the only website that seems to be growing in my portfolio, it’s the one that I plan to focus mostly from now on. The biggest problem here is that most of its articles take A LOT to write (or edit)… but probably that’s why it also does so well: it’s not an easy website to replicate!
Website 5 (travel niche)
- Traffic: 5,816 sessions (-673)
- Gross income: $39.51 (-$169.62)
- Articles: 0 new, 3 edits
While this website was again penalized by the August Core Update, something extremely strange happened: it got accepted to Journey by Mediavine. (In September, and ads are not yet running… but still).
I was actually planning to stop working on this blog completely – since it’s basically monetized by AdSense only, with the odd (and very rare) affiliate sale every now and then. But with Journey potentially doubling the RPMs… it’s worth trying to get something out of this.
But apart from this potential good news, I don’t have the traffic trends to make me optimistic about the future of this website. But we’ll see, maybe things get better.
Check my previous earning reports:
If you want to get more in-depth with how things were in the past months, click the links below:
Final thoughts & plans
August was a tough month. Also, for my travel websites, it means that the best is behind us – and “the best” was actually the worst I’ve seen in years. It’s the first time since I started blogging when I don’t really look forward to Q4: I know how miserable it will be.
But we have to keep moving.
Hopefully, the book I am finishing for Website #3 will be published this month. It’s a health-related book for a particular condition, and these tend to do well in January with all the resolutions people set for themselves. So I MUST have it ready at least a couple of months before to optimize whatever I can.
Apart from that, I started removing articles from my dead websites (none included in this income report). I did this:
- looked at Analytics for the past 30 days
- moved all articles that had less than 1 visit to drafts
The plan is to create a list of all these articles (some are from “general” websites, so might still match the niches from other websites) and come up with at least 50 articles to be published on a brand new domain, based on these articles which were no longer ranking.
I plan to edit them manually to ensure they’re of a solid enough quality to be worth putting out there and see if there is any type of movement with them. I also hope that maybe deleting all this dead weight (for some of my websites, I deleted around 30 articles, but in one case, it’s 300+) will help with future rankings.
We’ll see. I don’t have high hopes from this approach, but I still consider much of the content I have deleted to be high quality and good enough to deserve better rankings. Sure, some of it it’s low quality filler content – and that will rot in the drafts – but the good articles… well… I don’t want to lose them.
Over to you know – how was August 2024 for your online empire? Anything in particular that seems to work right now? Let me know by sharing your thoughts down below in the comments section!