This month, I achieved another milestone by reaching over $11,000 in monthly revenue on my website, Urban Mamaz. This is especially exciting because I not only broke another income record but also found a successful path after a year of trying various strategies and feeling stuck.
Strategies that I follow now are working!
I have big plans for this website and now that my monthly revenue increased significantly, I can also invest more money back in my website and boost its growth!
Curious about the exact breakdown of my income and the steps I’ve taken to achieve this monthly figure? Interested in learning more about how I plan to double this income and what it has to do with AI tools and Google’s latest Helpful Content update?
Keep reading!
November 2023 – Urban Mamaz Income Report
Let’s start with a few screenshots of My Amazon Associates and Mediavine dashboards. Mediavine is the ad network I work with. I also share a detailed breakdown of the revenue later in the report.
Urban Mamaz Amazon Income report November 2023
Other revenue streams include a bonus I got from Amazon Creator Rewards, Affiliates, and selling my own digital products. More details below.
Urban Mamaz Website Traffic Report
Regarding my general monthly traffic, I have good news and bad news. I’ll start with the good news.
As you can see I got 209K total views and this is really cool! Most of the traffic is coming from Pinterest. If you want to read more about how I drive this traffic from Pinterest – make sure to read my Pinterest guide here (because I might turn this guide into a paid course one day lol).
Thanksgiving Content Got Viral
This month was great for the Thanksgiving articles on my website. Although I don’t have many articles on this topic, the few I have received good traffic. I believe experimenting more with seasonal content is a good idea. Many bloggers avoid writing lots of content about holidays since it’s highly seasonal and peaks only a month before the holiday. However, that’s what’s beneficial about it – with fewer people writing about it, you can get more exposure.
Here is a screenshot of my site’s views from Google Analytics:
Currently, I have only 14 articles about thanksgiving on my website. There are around 900 articles in total. But what’s more interesting in the website traffic screenshot I shared above is that the first article that is on the list that received over 40K page views during the month of November – is actually a Thanksgiving article. This is outstanding. If I had more articles like this, my site traffic could have blown up even more, which eventually turned to more revenue this month!
Here is a graph of the traffic views from November 2023:
In the graph above, you can see a slight drop in traffic starting on Thanksgiving. This happened because the Thanksgiving articles stopped getting views after the holiday. Now, I have to wait until next year for those articles to get traffic again. But, on the bright side, it gives me a lot of time to plan and create more content!
Google Search Traffic
With all the excitement, there is also some bad news: my Google traffic dropped by more than 70%, which is kinda sucks! Even though I didn’t have a massive amount of traffic from Google—around 20K views on a good month — now I have as low as 5K monthly sessions.
This made me think again about my SEO strategy. So far I tried to rank for low competition keywords. Which worked well when I wrote about mom related topics. But because I wanted to pivot my site niche, I stopped producing mom related content a few months ago and was waiting for the new content to rank. But then, Google’s update happened and I lost most of the organic traffic to these mom related articles.
And then one day, I suddenly bumped into this video posted by Spencer Haws from Niche Pursuits on YouTube:
Do you know those moments in your life where everything just started to make sense all of a sudden? This is exactly what happened to me when I watched this video!
Not only did it confirm my interpretation of how I need to adjust my SEO and content strategy after the latest AI revolution that took place in our lives this year, but it also made me realize exactly what I need to do to boost my site’s income and take it to the next level.
But before I get to my new strategy, let’s address the huge elephant in the room?!
2023’s AI Revolution and How It Affects SEO
In Spencer Haws’ YouTube video, he analyzes both of his websites to understand why one gained more Google traffic after the latest search engine update while the other dropped significantly. His conclusions were very interesting and actually supported my thoughts about how Google had to adjust its algorithm after the latest AI revolution.
You see, everybody uses AI tools, whether it’s for generating photos, articles, or integrating it into daily services and more. In the blogging industry, bloggers are seeking faster ways to generate more quality content by using tools like chatGPT and other AI content tools. This puts Google in a position where they have to deal with analyzing a huge amount of content that is published daily and also rank it. In the overflowed world of content, we as readers are looking for creative and valuable content that can help us or inspire us, not content that is full of fluff created solely for SEO ranking goals. Google had to adjust its algorithm, which makes total sense, but how?
Google’s Helpful Content Update
So, in the second half of this year, 2023, Google’s update arrived: The Helpful Content Update.
According to Spencer Haws, his blog Niche Pursuits continued to grow, while another website he had lost a major part of its traffic. He tried to compare and find what caused it and came to a few conclusions:
- Niche Pursuits’ Time on Page was longer than the other website.
- He got more returning visitors on Niche Pursuits.
- According to his Google Search Console, Niche Pursuits’ brand searches were higher than the other website that barely received any searches.
- His Niche Pursuits blog had a higher percentage of articles that weren’t keyword-focused.
He got to these conclusions after writing a post on X (formally Twitter) a post about how Google is killing blogging. His post received many replies and caught Google’s attention, and they even replied to his post – here is what they wrote:
But this in not the first time Google’s team share their thoughts about the use of AI tools when generating content.
In 2022, Danny Sullivan from Google explained in a tweet:
According to Google’s February 2023 guidelines on AI-generated content, Google reiterated that it doesn’t hate automatically generated content – as long as it helps users and abides by Google’s spam policies.
This Is Why I Lost 70% of My Google Website Traffic!
It brought me back to understanding why I lost almost all my organic traffic from Google. My SEO strategy was ranking for low-competition keywords, which worked well for a while. However, this approach stopped being effective after Google’s latest update. Instead of focusing on how to make readers come back to my website, I was concentrating solely on ranking for a list of keywords to generate traffic.
I didn’t build a brand!
People who visited my site, read my articles and didn’t come back. This happened because all of them arrived at the articles randomly from Google, and I failed to create that memorable first impression that would make them return.
How Did It Help Me Shape My New Site Strategy?
I believe this clearly indicates that we should shift away from creating websites solely to rank for lists of keywords. Instead, we need to invest in building an engaging brand and website that genuinely helps people, provides real value, and encourages them to come back repeatedly. By analyzing metrics such as the number of returning users, website name monthly search frequency, and average time spent on the site, Google can easily tell whos’ purpose is to solely rank for keywords and who is building a brand.
Build a Brand and Increase Returning Rate
You need to think about what will make people return to your website. What is that specific thing that they will want to come back for?
Here is what I plan to do to help me build my brand:
Freebie Library
On Urban Mamaz, I have a freebie library. If you haven’t visited it yet, make sure to visit it here.
In this library, I share free printables for download, including birthday cards, wall decor, planners, and more.
I noticed that my library’s organic traffic from Google wasn’t hurt after the recent algorithm update. On the contrary, it went up! People are returning to this website to download printables, and other websites are linking to it as a resource.
To-dos to improve this freebie library:
- Design more printables people love
- Improve navigation and linking from blog pages
- Upgrade website design.
Create Better Content
Another approach is to create truly great content that your readers will want to see more of. No more boring articles that focuse on targeting keywords just to rank on Google. I use tools like Uber Suggest, Ahrefs, and Pinterest Trends, to find trending topics that I know people love reading. This helps me get lots of page views from social media.
I’m still waiting to see what other articles will rank on Google besides the mom articles, and when I find something that matches my new content strategy, I’ll make sure to make more content around it and strength the SEO trough it.
Invest in Visual Content
During the last year, I invested in my visual content, and my website revenue grew significantly. Here is a list of things I did:
- Hired a VA to help me design more beautiful pins for Pinterest
- Bought premium stock photos that look amazing
- Spent more time picking the most beautiful featured photos for my website
- Improved my website design
Addressing these aspects, along with improving my site’s written content, helped me increase my revenue! And I plan to continue working on this. People love beautiful websites; therefor it helps them stand out, be remembered, and encourages them to come back for more!
To-dos to improve the visual side of my site:
- Collaborate with other influencers for unique photos (started recently)
- Upgrade Home page, Header, and Footer designs
- Buy more premium photos for my website
Don’t Worry If You’re Not Focused Only On One Niche
This helped me release the stress around being a lifestyle website and having to decide what niche I want to focus on. You don’t have to be a niche website to succeed. Yes, it can help, but it’s not a must. What’s more important is that you build a loyal audience that will return to your website for more of your content! You need to bring value to your readers!
Facebook Traffic
It’s my second month trying to generate traffic from Facebook. I think I mentioned it in my previous income report – I know it’s possible to bring lots of organic traffic from Facebook!
Anyway, the plan is this:
- Run Paid ads on Facebook and grow page followers and stop at some point.
- Post 10 posts a day on the most active hours.
- Generate traffic to my website.
In November I spent $892.11 of Facebook ads, and received 848 page followers – which is super expensive. But I made a mistake because targeted only NY audience – which made the costs so high. A week ago I expended the audience to ALL the US and costs dropped down significantly!
For example results from my latest campaign are: Ad spent of $122, and received 647 followers – which reduced the cost per result to only $0.18 – This is such a difference! I can’t believe I spent all the previous month just for get 848 for a cost of $892!
Anyway, but what’s more important is that it brought me only 364 page views – so it’s clearly still not working. I’m still checking what topics are working better and what are the best photos to publish and should I publish photos or just the link to the article and let it grab the photo from my website automatically. Will continue to update on those!
Income Report Breakdown:
Here is my income streams breakdown:
Skimlinks affiliates – $53.35
Mediavine – $8,983.68
Amazon Associates – $999.70
Amazon Creator Rewards – $1,300
Selling products – $72.66
Total income – $11409.39
Urban Mamaz Expenses:
$60 – Rocket.net hosting – love them – this hosting service makes my website so much faster and my website never shuts down like it used to happen often on Bluehost – worth every penny!
$600 – VA – publishing content and graphic design
$1500 – Content writers
$20 – Adobe – professional graphic design software when I need a better tool
$12.99 – Tailwind for scheduling posts
$10 – Buffer ($120 annual plan) for scheduling posts
$12.5 – Canva Pro ($149.9 annual plan) – User friendly graphic design software for my team
$892.11 – Facebook ads
Total expenses – $3107.6
Final Thoughts
I get that blogging can get tricky. There’s a bunch of stuff to do. Here’s my top advice: try to concentrate on tasks that give you the most bang for your buck. Do things that directly help you make money when your time is tight. But don’t forget to plan for the long term and how you want to grow.
Have any questions or want to share your thoughts? Leave a comment below and I’ll be happy to answer!
