100K Project: Episode 14 (Slow Down, Keep Your Wheels in Motion)

A Google update was rolled out in May. My project site got hit.

Welcome to my $100K Project update. You can read my previous update here.

Over the past few months, my $100K Project niche site has been on a roll; upwards trajectory.

However, the project wouldn’t really be exciting without any setbacks. I mean, how else can I pay my dues in my journey to $100K?

May was my 11th month into the project. And Google decided to release an update.

My site got hit.

I lost approximately 40% of my traffic.

Since the update, I haven’t tried to game the system to find out how to recover the traffic.

Yet.

Instead, I’ve been working on my goal of writing 50 more articles for the site.

Well, I hit that goal.

At the moment, the site has exactly 300 articles.

And this is where the fun begins.

June Goals

This is my 12th month working on this site. And there are a couple of things I need to do and get them out of the way. Here’s what I have planned:

i) Store

I’ve been talking about setting up a dropshipping store for the site. I’ll do it this month. In case you are interested, it’s just a normal WooCommerce store.

I’ll mainly be sourcing products from AliExpress suppliers.

However, with the Covid-19 thing going on and America-China politics, I’ve realized things can be tricky. I mean, just by looking at AliExpress, it’s clear most products take about 30 days to get to the US.

My US audience is likely not to be patient to wait for products for 30 days, when they are used to next-day shipping (Thanks Amazon!)

So, apart from looking for suppliers from AliExpress, I’ll be looking for partners in the US or UK that have the products I want to sell.

I have a subscription to Worldwide Brands directory and have started making inquiries.

ii) Lead Magnets

I’ve been talking about lead magnets since like forever. I went through my previous $100K Project posts and realized I’ve been skimping on some things. Lead magnets are something that I had in mind from the very beginning, but have never actually put effort in making them. This is the time to do it.

With the site having 300 articles, I estimate I’ll need more than a dozen lead magnets created.

I recently enabled custom sidebars on the site to make it easier for me to target readers with relevant lead magnets. Apart from this, the custom sidebars make it easier to put targeted ads as well as other information that may be helpful to a reader.

iii) Links

Well, good ‘ol links. I need to up my referring domains for the website. I’m not looking at expensive niche edits. Rather, I’m more focused on guest post links and link exchanges.

I’ll be scouring Fiverr and SEOClerks for cheap relevant guest post links.

Also, I’ve always wanted to do Shotgun Skyscraper link building. However, I’ve not had the time. Perhaps I should end the 12th month with this link building tact already done?

iv) Email

I’ve been steadily gathering emails from subscribers that stop on the website. At the moment, I have just over 300 subscribers.

My goal is to create a welcome email sequence for this audience. I’ve written email sequences for various clients in the past. So, this shouldn’t really take a lot of my time.

v) On-page optimization

I now have 300 articles on the site. It’s time to start optimizing them. I pulled the plug and bought SERPWoo about two weeks ago. I’ll be using their on-page optimization module, Zora, to optimize the content. Granted, this will take longer than a month to complete.

vi) Forums

I’m back to the forums. I’m warming up different forums where my audience congregates. I’ll be talking about my brand subtly in the forums. The accounts are not well-aged yet for me to drop links to my niche site.

That’s a rundown of what I have planned for the month.

Statistics

Let’s check the visuals to see how the site performed in May

SEMRush Stats

The site’s keyword rankings on SEMRush have been steadily dropping. This is expected since the site got hit by the recent Google update.

Here’s how things look like:

Google Analytics

Like is expected, the site’s traffic declined in May y 42%. (Thanks, Google!). Here’s how the stats look like:

By the way, see those two days where the graph is a flatline? Well, that wasn’t because of the update.

I installed WP Rocket on the site to optimize it to load faster. However, I got the settings messed up and the Google Analytics tracking code stopped firing.

I got the issue sorted out after two days, as you can see from the chart.

Earnings

Total earning reduced across all platforms. My Amazon earnings took a hit, mostly due to the change in commission structure as well as reduced number of visitors due to the Google update.

This is what we have.

Project 100K Amazon Earnings (May, 2020)

Coming to Svorn, earnings were also down from $39 to $13.

Google Adsense earnings were: 35 euros. However, after much thought, I’ve switched off Google Adsense on majority of the site’s articles. The only articles where Adsense is currently showing are informational articles.