ChatGPT is an Inspiring artificial intelligence tool that can make your life much easier. It can be a valuable tool when it comes to content marketing, and Chat GPT definitely can assist you in upgrading your productivity.

Despite having some major limitations to match its hype in the media, ChatGPT is quite impressive, at least as a product very much a work in progress. Its generation capabilities are particularly useful.

So ChatGPT by your side, you will be able to craft an e-mail copy effortlessly, dissect customer data, to prepare your marketing plan to drive conversions and boost revenue.

Let’s take a look at how you can use ChatGPT to improve your marketing strategies and upgrade your content production. 

1. Brainstorming content ideas:

Finding new ideas for content is a challenging aspect of content marketing as a whole. Generating fresh and engaging ideas that fit into your website niche will attract and retain an audience can be difficult, which makes it challenging.

So you can ask your AI assistant to find out ideas that are relevant to your site. OpenAI excels at generating numerous ideas once you give it a single concept as input. Its technology is based on predicting the next word in content, which makes it highly skilled at expanding ideas once you have given it a starting point.

For example, if you have a site that discusses mobile apps, now you can ask the AI what industries can be benefited from using mobile apps.

“What are the top 10 industries that can benefit from using mobile apps”.

Now ChatGPT has covered industries that we have not touched on in our blog topics. This can be really helpful to expand your website’s content reach and fits well for programmatic SEO, which we will come into later.

Then you can split the main ideas into sub-ideas to follow a top-down design before finding out low competitive keywords for each sub-category you can cover on your blog.

When I ask ChatGPT, “Can you provide ideas of categories related to app in Food and hospitality industry,” it gives me the type of apps we can talk about in the food and hospitality industry.

2. Upgrade existing content:

People are hyped about using ChatGPT to generate tons of content, but we overlook that one of the most impactful ways to utilize this AI tool is to enhance the existing content and tailor it to a specific audience. 

We have previously discussed how to find content for upgrades, how it can help you stay in the competition, and how many SEO agencies leverage this strategy to boost site traffic and overall conversion without crafting content from scratch. 

ChatGPT has incredible potential to elevate what you already have because you are providing enough input for it to play with and use its intelligence to upgrade the overall output quality.

You can ask ChatGPT to upgrade certain phrases on your posts: “explain the following for better understanding: [paste the text].”

Here’s what I get.

In this instance, the AI statement may appear disconnected from the prior discussion; however, utilizing ChatGPT as your helper, you can experiment with various approaches to arrive at a clearer and more comprehensive explanation.

3. Accelerating content creation while reducing expenses

Copywriting is the most obvious way of using Chat GPT in digital marketing. Using the typical Chat Open AI website, you can produce tons of content which should significantly reduce your content production cost.

If you can go one step ahead, you have the resources to leverage Open AI API and generate a large number of contents (on a scale of 200+) in just a couple of hours. If you cover an average of 1000 words per article, that is more than 2,00,000 words. 

There are several options for accomplishing this task. On WordPress, you can install a plugin to generate content and send it to post draft automatically. You can utilize the API to generate multiple pieces of content simultaneously using a spreadsheet for a more innovative approach.

Here’s a basic illustration of using OpenAI API and Google Excel to broaden your content ideas and establish the fundamental components of a comprehensive content collection.

4. Writing cold emails enquiring about backlinks

Backlinks still play a crucial role in search engine optimization (SEO) and can significantly boost a website’s performance in search engine result pages (SERP). Backlinks from reputable and authoritative websites serve as a vote of confidence in your website. 

This can add credibility and trustworthiness to your pages in the eyes of both search engines and users.

Although you can’t generate backlinks 🙂 like you generate content using ChatGPT, there’s a way this AI tool will significantly reduce your work creating cold emails. You can use Semrush Link Building Tool to collect prospects and their email address before running your OpenAI API to generate multiple outreach templates for different purposes.

5. Generate content FAQs

FAQs are an important aspect of SEO. FAQs often include relevant keywords that can help improve a website’s ranking for those keywords. A well-designed FAQ section is a way to provide quick answers to common questions related to your topics. 

In addition, by providing concise and clear answers to common questions, a website may be more likely to appear as a featured snippet in search results. They help expand your content cover, and that may increase the overall authority and credibility of the web pages.

Creating FAQs with chat GPT is fun. You don’t have to dig for questions as the tool gets you the question with a near-perfect answer. You can just ask ChatGPT to create FAQs about certain topics or keywords, and it will come up with a bunch of those. All you have to do is select the ones that make sense to the page contents.

6. Easy to Execute Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO involves the creation of large numbers of pages for a website using a standardized template and a data set. The pages appear to have been created individually, but they are generated using a systematic process.

The primary advantage of ranking for a large number of smaller keywords with less competition and search volume, rather than relying on a few big keywords. 

This strategy reduces the risk of significantly dropping website traffic if Google changes the ranking for your major keywords. The strategy is similar to a long-tail approach, and it’s like spreading out eggs across many baskets, making it less vulnerable to changes in ranking.

Now, one of the main issues in Programmatic SEO is that most parts of the content remain the same because it’s a template and variable-based approach. That’s a major content duplication issue. 

So by harnessing ChatGPT’s content creation ability, you can generate unique content across the variable matrix just by following what we did to generate the email outreach template.

Once your content machine setup is ready, you have a couple of things to take care of:

1. Make sure your website’s content is helpful and original.
2. Check that your website is listed in Google Search Console.
3. Ensure that each page on your site has unique content.
4. Build a valid XML sitemap to help search engines index your site’s pages.
5. Interlink various pages on your site to create a strong internal linking structure.

The most important part?

It is important for you to use ChatGPT ethically and responsibly, ensuring the information provided is accurate and up-to-date. 

Overall, incorporating ChatGPT into a content marketing strategy has the potential to increase your efficiency and enhance the quality of content.

Similar posts:

1. How do you find out contents that need updating
2. 5 Best AI Content Generators Reviewed – Can Google Detect AI-Generated Content?
3. WriteSonic Examples – Can Google Detect WriteSonic Content

Regular ideation and creation of new blog content form a strong content marketing approach. But what about poor-performing and outdated articles on your site? 

Revamping old content can boost your strategy and is a step worth taking. Not every article will drive organic traffic. For every successful post, there may be many others hidden deep in your blog in need of improvement. 

These articles deserve your attention. Revising old articles provides an opportunity to optimize and make them more appealing, which could lead to higher search engine rankings and more traffic. This also diversifies your strategy, rather than relying solely on creating new content.

Having outdated or poorly written content on your website can have a negative effect on your brand’s reputation. When you neglect the quality of your content, it sends a message that you do not value your audience. 

This lack of consideration can then lead to decreased traffic, fewer clicks, and reduced social media engagement. 

A well-crafted, up-to-date, and relevant content strategy is crucial for maintaining a positive image for your brand and connecting with your target audience.

Does updating content help SEO?

The freshness of content has been an important factor in determining the ranking of a website on Google’s search results since 2011. 

We all know Google uses various factors, including the date when a document was created, to determine the ranking of search results, which suggests that the date of creation or date of modification of a document is one of the factors considered using by Google algorithm when ranking search results.

The latest and updated information is given more weight by search engines, causing older content to decline in rank gradually. Revising and refreshing outdated pieces conveys to search engines that your content is current, accurate, and relevant. 

Moreover, search engines regularly alter their algorithms, and updating your content ensures you adapt to any on-page SEO modifications that may otherwise negatively affect your performance.

Less time investment, better result: revising an outdated article on your website much is quicker than creating a new one and would probably be able to turn it into top-quality content with an increased possibility of driving organic traffic. 

I don’t mean to say that you should stop creating new content altogether, but allocating time to both activities has the potential to achieve results with less effort.

Again, if audience engagement with your content is a metric Google uses to identify content that has a better impact or probably covers more comprehensive information about a topic, then updating your old content could be the most effective way to improve engagement other than improving site performance, designs, etc. 

Therefore, you can definitely say updating older content positively impacts SEO.

What is your ideal strategy for updating content on a website?

Revising old content can still be labor-intensive, especially for established websites. So you need the plan to identify content that is worth updating and make the best use of your time. Then you will have to figure out exactly what improvement a piece of content needs to perform better in SERP.

So here’s what we do when we are executing a plan to upgrade the content on a certain website.

1. Conduct a quick win content audit

The goal is to identify those contents that are close to being ranked high on search engines. The objective is to find and make slight improvements to the content to increase its ranking and make it more visible to users on search engines.

These are contents you have published previously and doing really great in the SERP by ranking multiple keywords but have not really ranked in the top #1 or #3 positions as you would have loved to.

So a quick win audit will help you find these moderately ranking contents. You can do such audits via Ahrefs by checking the organic keyword’s position for your website. But there’s another way I would like to include here:

For this method; you will need your site connected to the Google search console. If you have not done yet, check this guide. After a new connection, you might have to wait a couple of days for GSC to pull data from your site and populate their search performance dashboard.

For others who already have the search console collecting data for your site, open Google search console > go to search results.

Then make sure the search type is selected as web and the query tab is selected just below the performance graph.

Now, if you enable the average position filter it gives you the most updated avg. SERP position data for the queries in all countries. You don’t have to look at the overall average position number but look at the position data for each query to get an idea of pages that are ranking for those queries.

Here, what we want to do is add a filter to positions where the position value is greater than 3. This will give you all the keywords with an average ranking below 3 and then you have a list of high-performing keywords to optimize for where your pages are between position 3 and 15 or you can pick 20 as the range to consider content as closely ranking.

Now you have a set of keywords with average ranking data for a particular date range, but you don’t know if your pages are likely to rank even higher in the coming days without needing an update.

So it would be better for you to compare a particular date range, for example, the current 28 days’ data to the previous 28 days’ data, which should provide you with the direction of ranking those pages for particular keywords.

As long as the position difference is in (-) means that your page has improved its position in SERP. Sometimes when the position in the previous day range is 0 means the page was not indexed for that particular query. 

Thus you can filter and analyze pages that are ranking between 3 to 20 positions for top query and are not improving or losing their rank; you can select those pages to your update queue. 

Again, you will have to consider the amount of traffic these keyword brings in so you can enable the click and impression stats to see if a particular page is worth updating for the given query or not. You can always play with these data to collect your most update-worthy pages for the next batch.

2 – Find out contents that used to do well

In this method, the goal is to concentrate efforts on finding out and enhancing content that previously performed well in search engine rankings. 

Content performance may stop its growth and start declining over time as search engines it’s no longer provide relevant information or competing content on the same topic has surpassed it. This is termed Content Decay, as it refers to the decline in ranking and decrease in traffic for a specific keyword.

You can find and analyze these contents by using a two-step method. First, you will have to identify such content via Google analytics >  Behavior > Site Content > All Pages report. 

Once you find the content that has dropped in terms of pageview performance from a previous period (In the example above, I’m using just the previous 30 days, but you should be covering at least a year or two based on the content’s age)

Now that you have the set of low-performing or decaying content, you can use the page URL and inspect it on Ahrefs to find out the organic keyword’s performance and consider whether to update that certain page. 

What to focus on when you are updating content?

The process of updating content begins by identifying which content needs improvement. 

After this, a plan of action needs to be formulated to execute these updates. I would follow these 5 steps to create a better piece of content:

1. Make sure to check that the content remains relevant to the user’s search query and meets their expectations. It’s important that the content’s purpose and focus match the user’s intent behind the original search. This ensures that the updated content continues to provide value and meet the target audience’s needs.
2. As part of updating the content, you should include more in-depth and comprehensive information and details about the topic. The aim is to provide a complete and thorough understanding of the subject matter to the reader, making it a valuable resource for them. This will increase the relevance and usefulness of the content, potentially boosting its search engine rankings.
3. You should be focusing on improving the content in a way that makes it unique and noticeable. The goal is to make the content stand out among similar content on the same topic, making it more appealing and attractive to the reader. This can be achieved through various techniques, such as using visuals, adding interactive elements, or providing a unique perspective on the topic.
4. Next, you should focus on updating the content to reflect current information and removing any information that is no longer accurate. This step helps maintain the accuracy and relevance of the content, which could positively impact its search engine rankings.

Once your new content is ready, you can publish and share the document on social platforms by letting them know that you have newly updated content on a particular topic that is highly searched on search engines that might be worth looking into.

This is an overview of the strategy I personally follow to update the content from time to time, and it has been a promising tool for the overall growth of my primary website portfolio.

As your website grows in terms of traffic and popularity, it can become a valuable asset for generating revenue. 

One way to monetize your website is through advertising. One of the most popular ways to do this is through Adsense, a program offered by Google that allows you to place ads on your website and earn money for each click or impression. 

However, as your website continues to grow, you may want to consider using a more advanced ad networks provider such as Ezoic, Mediavine, or Adthrive.

Ezoic, in particular, offers several advantages over other ad networks. For example, Ezoic provides more control over the ads displayed on your website, allowing you to optimize the ad experience for your users. 

Ezoic offers a highly valuable reporting system that provides detailed insights into your ad performance and revenue. I’m more attracted to using Ezoic for my website portfolio. This can help you make data-driven decisions about how to optimize your ad strategy.

These are kinds of information you must have read on many pages, but not many have discussed Ezoic’s direct ad order feature and how you can use this tool to improve your website revenue. 

What is direct ad order?

The Direct Ads feature of Ezoic allows you to integrate any ad orders you have directly sold into Ezoic’s ad testing system. This enables you to negotiate your own deals with advertisers and has their ads displayed on your website directly. 

What this means is if your typical EPMV on Ezoic and overall revenue is lower than expected, you can reach out to advertisers or competitors to get a better CPM which is what amount an advertiser pays you for every 1,000 impressions on an ad.

Does direct ad order boost your EPMV and revenue?

The outcome of direct selling will depend on the terms of the deal you have secured. When executed effectively, it has the potential to boost your ad RPM and revenue significantly. But obviously,  the primary motivation for choosing direct selling should be to increase revenue.

For example, if your website’s average EPMV is $5 (which only you know) and you find an advertiser who is ready to pay you  8-10 CPM, which will boost the average EPMV record and ad revenue that will be counted as ad mediation on Ezoic dashboard.

This means you will still be earning your regular revenue with Ezoic (sometimes, with direct ads, the Ezoic ad revenue might lose some impressions) + the additional revenue you have just secured from the advertiser. 

Does Ezoic’s payment cover direct ad revenue?

Now not to confuse, Ezoic will just display your ad performance on their dashboard and analytics but will not be responsible for any payment as Ezoic is reporting the information you have imputed on their direct ad order tool. You should receive the payment from the advertiser directly.

Here’s what Ezoic insider has to say about direct ads payment:

How do you prepare to run direct ads on your site?

To begin with, it’s essential to know the amount of monthly traffic your website receives. Traffic and impressions are closely linked, and it’s one of the first things an advertiser checks before launching a campaign. 

If your website receives more than 50,000 monthly visitors, direct ad sales can be a beneficial revenue stream for you.

Another important factor to consider is the type of content on your website. Certain niches, such as finance and medicine, tend to generate higher ad revenue than others. 

It’s essential to identify the niche of your content and research the market to understand what could kind of deal would be beneficial for you.

Securing a direct ad deal requires effort in finding advertisers, communicating with them, and successfully selling a campaign. Once a deal is secured, you will need a system to track ad clicks and impressions. 

However, Ezoic’s direct ad tool can simplify this process and save you a lot of time. Here’s what the overview of Ezoic direct order campaigning looks like:

1. Start with a Media Kit

A media kit is a webpage that provides information about your website’s traffic and audience to potential advertisers. 

It typically includes data such as the number of monthly visitors, the demographics of your audience, and the types of content on your website. By presenting this information using numbers and percentages, it gives advertisers an idea of the potential reach of your website. 

In order to make it effective, it is important to keep your media kit publicly accessible, make it visually presentable, and ensure that all the information is accurate and factual. 

This can help potential advertisers understand the value of advertising on your website and decide whether to advertise with you.

You can customize your media kit in your own way, but the goal is to represent the most important data advertisers are looking for: this one could be a good example – 

2. You will also need a rate card

The rate card represents the price you have set for all the ad placements available on your site has to offer. 

For an advertiser to be able to consider your ad inventory, the rate card will help them to align their budget with your expectation. You can consider selling high-viewability ad positions like your sticky sidebars and footer ads, or you can sell all ad placements with distinct ad rates.

A clean and straightforward rate list makes things easier for advertisers. You can add demographic price rates too because Ezoic direct ad order tool will let you select particular countries if needed.

3. Wrap your requirements with a spec sheet & and a payment solution

Usually, you are more than fine without ad spec requirements (such as ad type, sizes, and performance in terms of loading speed) for the advertisers. Being precise with these will help you run the ad campaign more smoother than without.

You can also add any specific requirements for third-party ad tags, flash or rich media, and more.

When you have completed your ad order kit, the next step is to secure a dependable payment solution. 

How to find advertisers?

Once you’ve crafted a compelling traffic presentation and ad requirements guidelines to make your website an attractive destination for advertisers, the question remains, how do you connect with them and vice versa?

There are multiple ways you can look into finding opportunities for direct ad orders:

1. One good way to start with is to go direct; you will need to identify advertisers who are already bidding on your inventory and would be a suitable match for your direct campaign. Once you’ve compiled a list, reach out to them and present your pitch.
2. Another way is to outsource media sales. If you lack the resources for outreach but have the financial means, consider utilizing services that can provide leads for direct ad sales, such as Winmo, MediaRadar, AdMall, and more.
3. Identifying brands, products, and services that are featured on your or a competitor’s website is another great idea. Then you can contact the advertiser or agency decision-maker directly to discuss promotional opportunities.
4. You can also look at Thalamus.co Marketplace, where you can find both current and new campaigns that are put out directly by advertisers or agencies. Be sure to check it regularly.
5. Networking and attending industry events can also be a great way to connect with potential advertisers and agencies.
6. Research and find out what are the brands, products, and services that are trending in the market and reach out to them as well.

How to set up your direct ads?

Once an advertiser expresses interest in your website and a mutually beneficial revenue agreement is reached, you can begin to establish your direct ad campaign through Ezoic.

To do that: 

Step 1: On your Ezoic dashboard > click on Ezoic ads.

Step 2: On the left menu, select ad sales > then turn on direct ad orders.

Step 3: After turning on the direct ad order tool, create an ad order by clicking on “add direct ad order”.

Step 5: Follow the Ezoic guide and complete your order creation process.

Step 6 [important]: Once the order is created, you will need to add ad creatives (basically works like a trigger to link with your existing placeholder to run direct ads) and assign them to the location of your site as agreed.

Step 7:  While creating your ad creative, make sure the size and tags are correctly assigned. Once done, save your creative, and your ad order should be marked as ready. 

Come back to direct ad orders in the next couple of hours; you should notice the ad status will change to delivering. You will receive the served impressions and click status on those ads and track daily revenue on your Ezoic dashboard. (please note Ezoic only calculate your revenue based on the ad served, you should collect the payment from the advertiser directly)

If your direct ad’s CPM is higher than the typical Ezoic ePMV for your site, then you should notice a better overall ePMV on your site, and ad performance can be analyzed on the Ezoic BDA tool.

Summing up:

Running direct ads on your site is not a cakewalk; however, if you approach it the right way, you can make some good money with this monetization strategy. That being said, most website owners still prefer programmatic ads because of their hands-free nature. This article intends that it’s worth going for direct ads only when you have a deal that pays better than your current programmatic ads.

You can run your campaigning, analyze the revenue and RPM in the bigger picture, and then consider the approach that makes you the most money if the effort is worth it.

Managing a website portfolio can be a rewarding and lucrative endeavor, but it also requires careful planning and ongoing maintenance to ensure the success of each site. Sharing income reports with others can provide valuable insights and help identify improvement areas.

By regularly monitoring traffic and revenue, staying up-to-date with industry trends and best practices, and continually seeking ways to optimize and grow each site in the portfolio, website owners can maximize the potential for financial success and build a sustainable, long-term business.

In this income report series, we aim to share our growth journey and the key factors that have contributed to our success. We will also share the minor details we focus on each month to improve the overall growth of our portfolio. Our goal is to provide inspiration and guidance for building your own AI-driven website portfolio at a lower cost

1. Traffic & Earning Overview

During the month of December, the portfolio sites saw a substantial drop in search traffic, which followed a similar rate of traffic drop (7494 visits) during the transition from October to November. This decrease in traffic largely occurred on websites that rely heavily on AI content.

Based on our data, we believe the AI content isn’t the sole reason for this traffic drop. In fact, the decline in SERP ranking for a couple of sites in the portfolio indicates we need to update those contents that were used to drive a major part of the traffic on prominent sites.

How do we know content updates should get our content back on track?

We had always believed that with a well-planned content production strategy and expert guidance, we could create highly optimized content at a low cost for multiple AI-driven websites that compete on SERPs. When we noticed that some keywords on one of our well-maintained sites were losing their positions, we decided to update the top-performing content that was driving traffic.

Just three weeks later, we have already seen some positive results. Most of the updated content has recovered its keyword position and the traffic it had lost. In fact, our overall monthly traffic on those sites is even better now. I will later highlight the two sites that we were able to recover from the traffic and pageview loss, as well as the corresponding recovery in revenue.

While this strategy may not be effective for all sites in the portfolio, we are confident that we can execute it successfully in the first quarter of 2023.

Could this be a seasonal traffic drop?

It is difficult to determine whether or not the traffic drop mentioned is seasonal. There could be a number of factors at play, such as changes in search algorithms, competition from other websites, shifts in consumer behavior, and whether people are looking for the topics at the same frequency they previously did.

The compassion between December traffic of 2021 and 2022 shares common traffic frequency, although it’s difficult to conclude, given we have many more new pages (than 2021) on the sites responsible for driving traffic. What I would like to note is that the comparison between 2021 and 2022 December traffic shares a sudden drop in traffic despite the sites were making some growth in the previous months.

I do not think the traffic drop mentioned is necessarily a seasonal occurrence. We have recently been able to recover SERP positions and traffic on a couple of sites, suggesting that other factors may be at play than this being a seasonal occurrence. The comparison might have produced different results if we had recovered these rankings and traffic for most of our sites in the portfolio (which is too good to ask for in just a month).

That being said, let’s get into the traffic and pageview stats of the portfolio:

The overall traffic for the portfolio declined by 10.93% in December, with a total of 61,045 visitors compared to 68,539 in the previous month. In addition, there was a noticeable decrease of 11.68% in page views, with 71,221 page views in December compared to 80,643 in November.

It is worth noting that these numbers represent the entire portfolio, and it is possible that some websites within the portfolio may have experienced different levels of traffic change. One site in the portfolio saw the highest individual increase in traffic, with a gain of 106.04%. This website has received significant content updates. The greatest individual loss in traffic among the websites in the portfolio was -46.24%.

It looks like the revenue for a particular portfolio in December was $578.55, which is a decrease of 19.16% compared to the previous month’s revenue of $715.68. The ePMV, or estimated pageview value, also decreased by 12.02% from the previous month. This decrease in ePMV contributed to the overall drop in revenue of $137.13 from the previous month.

The average ePMV for the portfolio in December was $7.59, where $17.03 is the max for a particular site, and an average of $1.23 is the lowest ePMV for a site in the portfolio.

Let’s compare the portfolio data at the same time of the previous year (Dec 2022 vs. Dec 2021): 

1. Total Visits (-9.78%)
2. Pageviews (-15.16%)
3. Revenue (+10.81%) 
4. ePMV(+22.82%)

2. Traffic Overview By Site

It looks like the traffic data for a portfolio of websites showed mixed results for the month of December. For most of the sites, traffic was lower than in November, but five sites saw an increase in traffic. This is, by the way, better than what we could achieve in November, as there was no update on the contents.

As I mentioned above, some sites had significant updates during the month of November, and that luckily paid off during the end of 2022. So some sites recovering from the decline add a positive sign to the portfolio, while we still need to work on content maintenance for other sites in the portfolio, and excited to see how that works out.

Here are December traffic data collected via Ezoic BDA: (compared to November 2022). The marked sites are those that heavily undergone content updates during November (still going on), and we are getting some positive output on those keywords ranking + traffic.

In December, the portfolio of websites recorded a total of 61,045 visits. The most popular site in the portfolio saw a decrease in traffic of -14.42%, with a total of 26,327 visits compared to the previous month’s total of 30,762 visits. This translates to approximately 4,435 fewer visits for the most popular site. Meanwhile, the site with the least number of visits in the portfolio received 106 visits.

In addition to the decrease in visits, we also saw a decrease in pageviews, with a total of 9,422 fewer page views than the previous month. The site with the highest number of pageviews in the portfolio in November had a total of 30,228 page views, which is a 16.29% decrease from the number of page views received in November. The site with the lowest number of page views within the portfolio received 109 page views.

As mentioned, the revenue for December is similar to that of November, with a 19.16% drop. The individual records show that fewer sections of the sites within the portfolio have experienced positive growth in terms of ePMV so does in overall revenue while other sites have a comparatively lower ePMV & revenue than the previous month.

The overall revenue statistics are directly proportional to the December pageview statistics, resulting in a total drop in revenue for the portfolio by $137.13, with a total of $578.55 compared to $715.68 in November 2022.

The highest individual revenue recorded was $327.66 in December, accompanied by an 11.58% decline in revenue compared to the previous month. The ePMV for this site was $12.45, which is 11.58% less than in November 2022. The average ePMV across all sites in the portfolio in December was $7.59, compared to $8.63 in November 2022.

The highest ePMV for a site in the portfolio has decreased to $17.31, up from the previous highest of $23.31. That’s a 25.74% decline in ePMV. We have the Ezoic AI taking care of ad placement optimization, so there’s nothing we have changed recently. The fluctuation in ePMV has the influence of lots of factors; let alone, depending on the time of year, the average site in any country may see a 3x difference in their EPMV due to seasonal fluctuations alone.

I also keep an eye on the “ad revenue index by Ezoic” which is a tool that allows you to see how changes in the overall ad index (which is a measure of the performance of ads in a particular network or market) affect the ad revenue of different sites in the network. This can help you determine whether a fluctuation in the overall ad index is impacting all sites in the network, or if it is specific to your own sites.

By looking at changes in the ad revenue index for your own sites, you can see whether a drop in ad revenue is due to changes in the overall market, or if it is specific to your own sites. This can be useful for identifying potential problems or opportunities for improvement in your own ad strategy.

So when I look at the December 2022 ad index data, it seems like there’s a decline in the global ad revenue index. Our site is obviously no exception to that, reflecting a lower revenue than in previous months.

In the ad index below, you can see during 1st fortnight of December 2022, the ad revenue index was above average and then started to decline dramatically and continues to decline until January. The red-marked section indicates the global December ad revenue status for all ezoic sites. And then, I looked at the Ezoic revenue analytics, which pretty much indicates a similar story.

And then, I looked at the Ezoic revenue analytics, which pretty much indicates a similar story. So it’s ideal for recording a lower portfolio eMPV and overall site revenue considering the global ad index status.

4. Expense

With the decline in overall revenue, your net profit is marginal when we have to cover the editor, writer, and AI copywriter tool costs to run the Ai content system. The portfolio overall had a great month despite the drop in Ezoic revenue; the affiliate commissions and revenue from sites that are not focused on Ezoic keep on coming, which makes it exciting as well as optimistic that with the Ezoic revenue back on track, the overall revenue growth of the portfolio would continue to increase.

In terms of Ezoic, though, the December revenue is slightly better (7.34% profit) than what we have invested in production and tools. It’s still amazing to look at how much content we have produced and updated during the month and sorrowed a significant revenue loss on Ezoic but still be able to stay on the profit side, which would be a worst-case scenario for the month of December in the whole 2022 year.

The introduction of Open AI to the AI Writer team and them finding it compatible & efficient to work with has greatly influenced the AI copywriter expanses we earlier had with this project, it turns out to be a savior for the month of December if we consider only Ezoic revenue for the portfolio.

Here’s what the portfolio December total expanse compared to revenue generated with Ezoic Ad revenue (again, this data excludes other revenue sources & expanses for sites that do not run Ezoic) looks like:

Ezoic PnL (Key data for December 2022):

1. Total expenses: $539.00
2. Total Revenue: $578.55
3. Profit (with Ezoic revenue): $39.55
4. % of profit Ezoic revenue brings in: 7.34%

5. Changes & Focus

In December, we noticed the drop in traffic and had to go through multiple checks to find out possible reasons behind the traffic and revenue drop. We typically tend to be more concerned with declines in performance than improvements. Here are some of the key factors we looked at and could be useful for yours:

#1. Traffic drops with revenue decline (which was our case)

Google often updates its search algorithms to improve the quality and relevance of the search results in its returns to users. These updates can have significant effects on the visibility and ranking of websites in Google’s search results. It is not uncommon for Google to make multiple updates to its algorithms in a given year. Some of these updates may be minor and go unnoticed, while others can significantly impact the ranking of websites.

#2. Algorithm updates and impact

We noticed Semrush flagging some high activity days in the previous months, which is where exactly one of our major sites started to lose a major part of its traffic. Recently in December 2022, there could be another update that we haven’t noticed a huge impact on, but that is when some of our updated site contents started to recover their positions.

We also dug into some of the high-traffic landing page data and analyzed the traffic ratio with the previous month. Certain sites have many landing pages that lost their highest positions, while some other sites (surprisingly, where we have worked on updating the contents) have many new keywords in the SERP + have many high-traffic keywords that recovered their rankings.

This has motivated us to work on content updates, and we believe improving the content quality should be able to help the sites recover their lost traffic to a certain point.

#3. Page layout change and impact on ad revenue

We are also aware of the impact that changes in theme and design would have the impact on ad revenue, which stands true for some of our sites in the portfolio… and we had to recheck the ad placeholders and their revenue records and compare them to the record of couple months ago, just to ensure we have not messed up with the recent design updates.

#4. Open AI and content plan + Niche IQ to produce content

We have mentioned Niche IQ in the previous monthly report. Topics is a very helpful tool for discovering relevant content ideas for our websites. It also provides all the necessary keyword research information, simplifying our keyword research process. Normally, we have to spend a lot of time finding new batches of keywords, but Topics make it much easier for us.

Now that the keywords are shorted out, the AI writers can pick their assigned keywords and research the topic before planning their content structure and then use OpenAI to create an article that has quality, offers the solution to people, and well optimized for SEO to try and do best in SERP, at a significantly lower cost.

This could be a content creation workflow to help AI writers sync with the procedure instantly. (just a demo)

Conclusion:

Overall, our website portfolio had a successful month of December, with total earnings of $1,661. This represents an approximate 7% increase compared to the previous month in total. Most of our income came from affiliate revenue, which accounted for ~60% of total earnings. Advertising brought in ~ 30% of total earnings.

You can clearly see traffic to our websites declined significantly in December compared to the previous month. Since most part of our site traffic is organic search traffic, our traffic status heavily relies on SERP performance and ranking activities on Google.

Looking ahead, we plan to continue optimizing our websites for search engines, expanding our affiliate marketing efforts, and introducing new products to drive further revenue growth. We are confident that with these strategies in place, we will be able to maintain and build upon the success we have seen this summer.