Today’s website is a totally different cup of tea from our previous reviews. Instead of an e-commerce site, we will now be reviewing a well-established blog. According to the owner, this blog is 3 years old and has a Google PR of 2. It is hosted on WordPress and seems to have a very simple design. Upon checking the website, it is quite apparent that it was made with monetization in mind considering the spaces reserved for ads on the side and the top portion.

Basic Information

Business Type Niche Platform Age of the business
Blogging Money, Finances WordPress 3 years

The website caters to a growing number of people who want to know how to take good care of their money. This “money insecurity” is pretty prevalent at this point in time because of more and more people believe that it’s either hard to save these days or to even earn. The beauty about this website is that the niche is “immortal”. Being an immortal niche means people will always look for it. Additionally, there is no way for the well to run dry for this niche. People will always remain discontented and they will continually look for ways to make the most out of their earnings.

Majority of the articles found on the website are in the finance or business niche. The topics range from business ideas to tips on how to properly allocate budget for various needs and wants. The site boasts over 500+ articles in the niche which, according to the owner, attracts over 1,860 unique visits a month.
As what I mentioned above, the website in question is not an e-commerce website but a blog. This means that there is no selling involved. All the earnings from the site comes from two sources.

The first one is AdSense which is the ad placement service by Google. In a nutshell, the money is generated from ads found on the website. Google pays the owner depending on the number of impressions and clicks from your site visitors. The other method of monetization mentioned by the owner involves people paying him/her to get their articles published. This will be explained in detail below.

Traffic

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A large percentage (around 70%) of the traffic the site gets come from organic search. This is perhaps due to the fact that the site contains over 1,700 indexed pages with 500+ articles. Due to the nature of the niche, the website should expect a good number of traffic coming in from various parts of the world. Majority of the traffic comes from the USA with 66% while 24% of the remaining traffic comes from the Philippines. Due to the nature of the website, it also sports a very low bounce rate of 41%. This means that once a person visits the site, he/she goes from one article to another.

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According to Google Analytics, the average pages per session is 6.16. What this says is that up to 6 articles are viewed per visit. This can be due to the fact that there are a lot of articles in the website and that a lot of them maybe closely related to each other. Because of this, some visitors can’t help but click on “related items” to learn more about what they were querying at the start.

Financials

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Month Revenue Costs Profit
Oct 14 $492 $30 $462
Nov 14 $247 $0 $247
Dec 14 $205 $0 $205
Jan 15 $154 $0 $154
Feb 15 $383 $0 $383
Mar 15 $739 $0 $739
Apr 15 $380 $0 $380
May 15 $568 $0 $568
Jun 15 $283 $0 $283
Jul 15 $287 $0 $287
Aug 15 $418 $0 $418
Sep 15 $538 $95 $443

Like what was mentioned above, this is not an e-commerce site so there is no selling involved. The owner’s first income stream come from showing ads on the page itself. Using Google AdSense, the owner earns money every time a person visits the site and gets shown an ad. This might sound a bit small and hard at first but as soon as you get enough traffic, expect passive income to come rushing in. The secret is not just in making sure your content gets ranked in the search results but also in making sure your content is really good. I guess this is where the website really shines. With 500+ good quality articles, people will always visit this site.

Another income stream the owner mentioned is guest posting. Basically, people pay him money for them to post their articles on the website. Confusing? Well, here’s how it works. People are actually paying the owner for a link and hopefully a portion of the traffic the site receives. It might be that the guest poster is from a brand that offers a product or service and is expecting customers or another website owner that just wants good traffic. The amount people pay will depend on the PR of your site and its domain authority. The higher those metrics, the more people will pay.

Conclusion

I’d personally give this site a rating of 8/10. Here are the reasons why:

Pros

  1. If you love something then you surely have lots of things to write about. This is the same with this website. A blog is a place where you can just write about the things you like and hope people will read it. It can be any topic as long as you are confident enough that you can write about that topic.
  2. The niche is “immortal”. This gives you some elbow room to grow and develop into a much better writer/webmaster. People will always be looking for ways to save money or a way to earn more money. Make sure you find a niche that is not just a fad.
  3. The monetization of this site is really easy. Google AdSense will take you less than 15-minutes to embed on your WordPress site with the help of various plugins. After doing that, all you have to do is wait for a check on the mail. As for the second means of monetization, it’s also easier than selling stuff online because the website advertises for itself. No more hawking and advertising. People will just approach you if they want to get their articles published.

Cons

  1. The design can do some work. At first glance, you can really tell that this site was made for AdSense monetization and that might scare some people away. Make sure the ads feel “natural” wherever you put them. Don’t place ads that are too large as this might cause some readers to have a hard time using your website.
  2. Growing a website this big takes time. Don’t expect to have this much traffic and earnings with a 3-month old site. So if you are impatient and easily discouraged, this is not something for you.
  3. To keep a website like this in order, you have to make sure that you keep a level of standard with your articles. You can’t just put half-assed articles on the website and expect people to read it. People love it when they read something that amazes them or surprises them. So this means you will always be struggling to keep the standard high.
  4. Albeit profitable, the guest posting earning stream may be a little bit frustrating to a certain extent. Imagine going through various articles from different people. Because you keep a high standard on your blog, you might edit or refuse certain articles. Definitely not for the people who just want an easy way out of things.

They say that the best time to start a blog was 10 year ago but the next best thing would be starting today. So go out there and start your own blog. It might take you some time but with enough effort and determination, you can easily create a money-making website just like this with good decision making.