Author: Vincent S

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Click Update, RPM, Ad Network Alternative

Reached 3K clicks in 28 days on 11 June. Session start data on analytics shows 5.9K.

RPM (Revenue per thousand PV)

I always wonder how much I will get and by extension when I can quit my job. A guy on Twitter educated me yesterday. He got about $1.4K from about 80K PV -> this means he gets $17.5 per thousands view.

Meanwhile, my data from 16 May to 16 June is 6.9K PV (according to analytics) and I made $112 from Ezoic. This means I only have $16.2 RPM.

Ezoic count it by visitors, which they count as 5.7K, making it $19.6 EPMV (earnings per thousand visitors).

The number isn’t bad but isn’t good either. With this RPM, I will need 187K PV to reach $3K/month, which seems very var now.

The other way is to increase the RPM, which on ‘normal range’ can be up to $40. It seems NSL is able to achieve this as she makes $40K from 1 million PV. If I manage to achieve this I only need 75000 PV to get $3K/month, but this is an idle thought.

Ad Network Alternatives

I checked a few sites I came across that show advertisements and found that many of them use Criteo. Did a bit of research and apparently Criteo has much bigger market share than Ezoic. The sites that use them are good ones with hundreds of thousands of traffic

This can be a good alternative to the Ezoic -> Mediavine path that everyone is going.

May Update: More Traffic, Adding Ezoic, Increase Article Frequency

May came and 3 things happened:

  1. I decided to increase the article frequency to 5 per week, making it approximately 20 per month
  2. I added Ezoic after seeing that Income School recommend to put it on after just 1K PV/month and apparently Ezoic has a program for publisher with less than 10k/month. Within days after added, I (based on the dashboard) make $1-$2 per day.
  3. Traffic keeps climbing. I get my 1800 clicks in 28 days notification and for the last 4 days GSC shows quite constant 100+ per day.

Past 3 months:

It’s far from all those heavy hitters on Twitter whose graph climbed at 80 degree elevation but at least it’s progress.

GA shows more than this but I had 2-3 days anomaly when traffic spiked (probably from Ezoic bot, I’m not sure) so it’s not showing average.

GA for the last 28 days. The actual average per day is actually within 120+

April 2023 Update

The first thing noticeable is that the change n direction into focusing on topical authority paid off. That was October 2022, 3 months later on January 2023 I got my first revenue.

Now, after 6 months of trying to dish 4 posts per week, I see quite an improvement.

Yesterday I got another congratulatory message from Google for 700 clicks in 28 days, which is great

Regardless, I feel kind of frustrated with the growth speed, it feels like it crawls slowly upward. Now I’m at 2100 PV/month and it feels like the number increases 100 by 100 every week I check. When considering you need 10K just to apply to Ezoic, it feels thousands of miles away.

My frustration came from several factors

  • I saw people making more visitors with less time and fewer articles (I’m now nearly at 160 published posts). Granted some of them are not researched well and I still throw in a few more best X articles regardless knowing they’re hard to rank, but it’s still frustrating when comparing my own progress with them
  • I saw people making 50-60K PV registered with Mediavine and they’re making about $1.7k – 2K / month. That’s a good amount but hardly a ‘liberating’ one. By ‘liberating’ I mean the kind of money enough to quit your job and live in your term.

Factoring that, it seems the realistic one to aim for secure income (not factoring drop from google update) is 100-200K PV per month? Seems like unbelievably far away.

First Revenue

I earned the first revenue from my work. First time after 2-3 years working day job + trying to create a business afterward. The first one flopped after wasting money and time (the writing was on the wall but I refused to acknowledge it and keep pushing, resulting in more time & money wasted)

I worked this one for more than a year now, started doing it seriously from around May 2022 then wasted around 2 months pursuing BLs from guest posts. From October I ditched guest post and tried to push content instead. Currently 2 of my 3 best performers are posts without link at all.

Around last week I have about total 700 PV on the last 2 days and decided to add affiliate links to pages that get views. Got 2 conversions into Amazon purchase shortly after

The amount is laughable and minuscule compared to the cost I’ve spent so far but at least it’s a sign to the right direction.

What’s Your Worth?

I’m working in a big company and over the years I’ve been approached multiple times in linkedin by competitors. Since I have low interest in just changing masters mostly I ignored them but I did entertain 1 or 2 out of curiousity.

The theme is quite similar: they expect me to bring ‘book of clients’, basically ‘stealing’ client database from my current company and bring it to them. The term is ‘bring in business’. Nothing about my years of experiences in the industry or how I can help growing the company based on those. All they want is ‘business’ AKA instant client.

When this expectation pop up I instantly reject them, the reason are simple:

  • I don’t want my worth decided simply by data I ‘stole’ from my old company. It seems like a very shaky ground. You’re not appreciated as a skilled professional, just as some kind of a corporate spy
  • If they expect the data would bring them instant clients, they’re in for a big disappointment. There’s a reason why my current company is big and if they won’t improve themselves, nothing in those data will help
  • I can see easily that the reason they expect me to ‘bring business’ instead of asking for my feedback about growing business is because they don’t want to change a thing. They want to stay the same but expect client base to grow, and I’m for sure don’t want to be at the end of that expectation.

Gratefulness

Each morning when I do my morning jog I saw this car that I really wanted to buy months ago but decided against it because I wanted to prioritize my spending on things that are more important: traveling & the business.

The business alone on average now eat about 50-60% of my salary so if I want to travel there’s no way I’d waste my money paying installment for a thing I would not even use once every 2 weeks.

This morning I saw the car again and this time it comes down to me: this guy has been going to work at my morning jog time. He’s going to work at 6 AM in the morning! Meanwhile on non-jogging day I wake up at 7, start working from home at 8:30. No commute, just in my shorts.

Be grateful for what you have.