Winter Is Here. Ezoic Earnings, Email Marketing, And Other Blogging Plans For November

Where's everybody in the world right now? Feeling the effects of winter yet?

I'm currently at home in Calgary and the weather has completely flipped from a nice, sunny Autumn weather to a crisp, snowy winter.

October has passed and November has begun, so it's a great time to review what has happened and is going to happen.

First Full Month On Ezoic

If you read my last blog post, you'll know that I implemented Ezoic on my badminton blog after a representative reached out telling me about the great results I should see.

The results have been fantastic.

I made $60.46 in my first month using Ezoic which is a huge jump from the $12.86 ($17.37 CAD) average I was making on Google Adsense.

Ezoic Earnings For October 2022

Google Adsense Earnings Lifetime

Aside from revenue increases, Ezoic also comes with many features that has helped my site as well.

On my last post, I remember quite a few people were concerned with Ezoic slowing down your website.

The good news is that my site speed problems have improved quite a bit since I first implemented Ezoic.

My site speed on mobile devices still remains an inconsistent problem, but it's not showing up as a problem in my Google Search Console or Ezoic dashboards, so I decided to just live with it for now.

I integrated Ezoic via the Cloudflare method which gave me access to many of Ezoic's speed optimization tools.

After the first two weeks of implementing Ezoic, I learned that I had to disable two of my speed optimization tools I was using to use Ezoic's optimization features properly.

The first thing I had to do was delete my image optimizer plugin and the second thing was to turn off SiteSpeed in my WA backend.

Ezoic comes with its own caching, image optimizing, and other site speed up tools if you integrate via the Cloudflare or nameserver method.

So for those who are interested in implementing Ezoic but very worried about site speed issues, I would definitely go with the Cloudflare integration strategy to keep most of your WA features and use the Ezoic site speed tools instead of the ones at WA.

It would be good to mention that I haven't noticed whether WA or Ezoic's site speed tools are better, but the one thing to understand is that there will be trade-offs when monetizing via display ad networks, especially when it comes to site speed.

Writing Content And Solving Problems

When you last heard from me, my goal was to focus exclusively on producing content and not steer away from doing other things unless absolutely necessary.

While I'm proud to say that I focused exclusively on content, I certainly did not produce the number of articles I would have liked.

I was facing my old content nemesis for my badminton blog where I had article ideas, but those article ideas didn't target low-hanging fruit keywords well.

And for the actual low-hanging fruit keywords in my niche, I found it particularly difficult to write articles on those topics.

I had high standards for my articles. Many of these low-hanging fruit keywords were phrases such as "best badminton rackets for beginners," "best badminton rackets under $50," "best badminton shoes for women," etc. Many other keywords were for product reviews of products I have not tested yet.

It was difficult for me to write on these keywords because I held myself to the belief that I only had the authority to write these articles having tested the product out personally.

Without testing each product out, I thought writing these reviews and listicles would be pointless because I would be simply regurgitating other people's reviews.

Ultimately, I would always end up procrastinating and telling myself that I'll write those reviews once I have the time and money to test each individual product.

However, I've realized recently that the time and money to test each badminton racket would most likely come from my efforts on the blog. Every venture had its own problems and what I already have now is much better than a complete clean slate.

There's one thing all of us on Wealthy Affiliate should know. By starting a blog, you are an entrepreneur.

The best entrepreneurs are those who are good at solving problems. By understanding that I needed to think more entrepreneurial, I sat down, listed my limitations, and looked at what I can do.

And there was a lot.

The solution for getting more content out that targeted low-hanging fruit keywords was extremely simple.

I could just tag a couple of words to the end of the keyword to make the article about a different topic. Let me show you what I mean.

My original problem with writing an article such as "The Top Best Badminton Rackets For Beginners," was I never tried out rackets for beginners. I could not provide an opinion on what are the best rackets for beginners.

However, if I spin the article a little to something like, "The Top Best Badminton Rackets For Beginners Based On Sales," this turns into a completely different article. Now I didn't need to provide an opinion on how each racket performs as my article is about what's selling the best. I didn't need to spend thousands of dollars buying and reviewing each racket anymore. I just needed to go do research.

This way, I can continue to build out my website, increase traffic and revenue, and eventually reach a point where I can review each individual product.

Email Marketing

Going along with my keyword problem, what I found was a lot of article ideas that I had did not suit good keywords.

Articles on improving specific aspects of your badminton game generally didn't suit any good keywords.

Other times, I would do something like write multiple "badminton tips and tricks" articles with a new trick each time. The keyword does suit the WA keyword criteria, but the articles generally don't rank super well on search engines.

To solve this problem, I was originally thinking of trying to rank on Google News and put a lot more effort into building out my social media.

This line of thinking actually led me to think about email marketing.

Instead of focusing solely on getting new visitors, why don't I try getting a lot more returning visitors?

Building an email list would be a great strategy.

I had previously stayed away from email marketing because of a similar problem I faced with my content. I thought that I needed a free offer or some sort of product to offer before email marketing would be effective.

The truth is, having a lead magnet (something you can give away for free in exchange for someone's email) and products to sell to your email list is not necessary to start implementing email marketing on your blog. It will be more effective, but you can also start with a simple newsletter.

And so, I added OptinMonster to my website and began collecting emails via a pop-up. One of my goals for this email marketing implementation is that I will build a sizeable list that I can send new articles to making me less dependent on search engines.

Making Medium A Relevant Income Source Again

A lot of the things I talked about above happened in the last couple of days. What was happening in the weeks right after my last post?

Well, I talked a lot about focusing on producing content and while I failed to reach my expectations I set for my badminton blog, I made up for it on Medium.

For a little bit of background, I write on Medium as if it were my personal blog. I write and publish pretty much anything that comes to my mind including articles on personal development, blogging, investing, and real estate.

I found quite a bit of success on Medium last year where a few articles really took off and generated nearly $700 on three different months. That's the closest I ever got to my original goal I set on WA of making $1000 monthly.

I did not write as much on Medium in 2022 due to my real estate auction job and lack of motivation to continue side hustling. Since I had not been targeting particular keywords on Medium, my earnings plummeted back to $20-$50 a month as my viewership declined.

Prior to fixing my content problems, I couldn't come up with anything for my badminton blog. I was still motivated to write and publish something, though, so I decided to go on Medium.

What I realized is that I was in the same situation on Medium with my badminton blog. Although I had not reached the level of success I want to be at, I've built a foundation and a great start.

I had an audience on Medium and I was generating way more views and revenue per new blog post that I publish than I had before.

By publishing an article every day for the last week of October, I doubled my Medium revenue for the month. There is reason to believe if I continue publishing consistently, my Medium revenue for November could easily be double that of October.

Publishing on Medium also did great things for me as a content producer. I finally got back into my groove of writing and I can pump out articles in as quickly as 2 hours like I used to.