August 2018 Income Report: Google Medic 👨‍⚕️ Update, Bye-Bye HostGator 🐊, GoogleDocs automation 🤖

August was a calm month without any surprises despite the news that shook the SEO industry. It was a productive time for me and I finally could pause, stop, think, and plan a bit.

Google Medic 👨‍⚕️ update: Are my websites affected?

As you probably heard already, at the beginning of August, Google rolled a global SEO update. It was dubbed as “Medic” due to the websites it affected the most.

These sites are in the “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) niches. The YMYL is a reference that is used by Google in their quality rater’s guidelines and represents health, fitness, and finance niches.

If you need to read more, here’s more info.

While many websites seem to get affected, my sites seem to not take any hit.

Horse 🐎 Website is one that is the closest to the dangerous topics. However, its rankings have been stable while the traffic has been even growing:

Still, I would not want to invest my time and money into a potentially dying niche. I think I will put its revival on pause for at least a month and see how the things are going.

While it is not exactly in one of the affected niches, it is somehow close to it.

How Google Medic 👨‍⚕️ can change niche website business

I think this update is significant in many ways.

Here are two of the most important areas from my point of view.

👉 First of all, Google now seems to care much more than before about authors’ reputation across the web.

Authors who have got a good reputation in their industry will help the websites they write for to rank better. This means more work and less money for us, niche webmasters. We would either need to build such a reputation (might not be possible if it requires a college degree!) or find writers who already have it. Clearly, the writers with a good reputation will cost more 💰

It’s a bit scary to see how some websites that are interesting and helpful for readers, lose ranking due to the fact their writers do not have proper degrees 👩‍🎓 👨‍🎓

For example, I read TheSimpleDollar.com and the advice I took from them affected my personal finances very positively. After the Medic 👨‍⚕️ Update, their ranking dropped by 30% 😭

via searchengineland.com

👉 Second, it seems that the niche website opportunities are somehow shrinking. It means the competition will grow.

Before, tons of niche website entrepreneurs would pick up a fitness niche, a personal finance niche, or a nutrition one. Now, they will, probably, stay away from them – as did Spencer Haws for its Niche Site Project 4.

Does it mean making niche websites is becoming more competitive?

I think it is 😿

Cutting expenses: Bye-bye HostGator 🐊

In August, I finally proceeded with my plans to cut the expenses.

I started with an obvious one, which was getting rid of one out of two hostings I use for regular (non-PBN) websites.

For the last 3 years, I had two hostings for my non-PBN websites: HostGator 🐊 and Bluehost 🔵.

1 hosting way too many!

I wanted to migrate off HostGator 🐊 for a long time and finally, this time came in August 🙂

Why I move away from HostGator 🐊?

My experience with them was not super good.

I had troubles with the support and their docs are hard to read. I do not like the outdated customer portal design as well as how the portals are organized. They have two different places to log in, one for the portal with billing and another one for the actual hosting functionality and CPanel. I am tired of being confused where to do what.

So I am moving to BlueHost 🔵 for hosting.

Bluehost 🔵 seems to be only just slightly better than HostGator 🐊 since it’s the same company after all. But I like their UX better. Also, I already have 6 websites with them (versus only 2 with HostGator 🐊).

In addition to that, I am transferring all the domains I had on Hostgator 🐊 (two) to NameCheap.

NameCheap is (as its name suggests) cheaper for about $2 per year per domain ($12.98 vs $15) 🤑 and overall, it is more convenient to manage all domains in one place.

Hosting change is going relatively smooth and so far, it took me about the 7-8h total for 2 websites. The website code is already moved and even tested. It did require some error fixing and changing the PHP code to accommodate the new hosting. My coding skills definitely came in handy 👩‍🔧 😉

The migration should finish on Sep 5 after the domains will have been transferred to NameCheap. Hopefully, there will be no downtime for this blog!

GoogleDocs automation 🤖

In August, I was writing macros in Google Docs 🙂

It’s all about efficiency and productivity!

I have a task of processing a big list of websites for an outreach.

The processing actions were very simple: Remove rows with DR in a certain range and also remove the websites that have particular names. Doing it manually is very easy and not long… until you start talking about hundreds of websites 😱

Offloading it to VA would be also very easy but again, not very efficient and quite costly in terms of per hour pay.

So I unleashed my programming skills yet again 👩‍🔧 and wrote a few macros that did the filtering and some other actions I used to do manually.

It took me a few hours.

It was a bit long since macros are infamous for being cumbersome to develop when you need something a bit more complicated than just simple add-delete. But the result, of course, was worth it. Now I simply need to do a couple of clicks and watch the screen changing and getting what I need! 👍👍👍

Do you guys use macros to process your website data?

Elephant 🐘 Website pivoting mistakes 😳

As you guys already know, I am pivoting Mother Elephant 🐘 Website from what it was before to a different niche.

The pivoting has been going on for a while and I have to admit it does not seem to be super successful 😩

In August, I finally got some time to plan it more carefully to understand where to go 🚵

Looks like I made a mistake and went way too broad… Also, I did not have a good structure in place/mind and it made the technical part of the pivot weak and flawed. Good thing it is possible to fix it. Now, in hindsight, I regret wasting money and resources on doing it in an unprepared way.

Oh well.

I like planning and I do it quite a lot. However, in this case, I sacrificed planning for the short-term goal of building links. Only to realize later that building links need that planning too! 🤦

On my defend, I had been losing ranking due to a lack of backlinks so I jumped into it and got overwhelmed by the amount of work. I decided to first find a VA to help me with day-to-day activities and this itself was very time demanding and distracting. By the time I figured out all these variables and overcame the obstacles, I already went a long road without having a clear planning and paying attention to where to go.

Yes, I did build links but not all of them helped me to propel my website into a good focused direction 🌠🌠🌠

Because of that, I wasted money and time…

Oh well.

How could I do it better? I should have read a particular chapter of the AuthorityNiche course I bought last year earlier and be firm when setting up the niche! Staying in the niche (when it makes sense) seems to be one of the vital things in our industry.

This is how I learn. It comes from mistakes and not from the successes.

Elephant 🐘 Website guestographics and other outreaches

Guest posting is going on well and is now in a pretty much background mode.

As of the other outreaches, I have one active one in place and one I paused ⏸️ Also, I never started guestographic outreach as planned.

With the pivoting that takes a new turn as I mentioned above, I need to think better about outreach and the goals.

Also, I need the pages I will link to be in place first!

So for now, it’s on pause ⏸️

Horse 🐎 Website revival

As I mentioned above, I have put Horse 🐎 Website revival on pause for now.

Google Medic 👨‍⚕️ update has not affected it (yet?)

If anything, its traffic keeps growing. As I already showed it to you above, here’s the comparison of the Aug traffic with July one:

And here’s how the website has been doing for the last 2 years:

Again, the work I put into it was minimal.

The traffic went down at the beginning of the year because of a few competitors that emerged into the playing field. However, they seemed to not last long because they used black hat link 🎩 building techniques that involved other websites’ hacking.

Well, black hat 🎩 strategies do not work in a long-term and these guys eventually went down and let my website rise again. Without me doing anything 😝

I am glad my website is growing yet again.

Is building websites 🏗️ like building muscles 💪?

One of my relatively recent passions is a bodybuilding 💪

I run 🏃‍♀️, cycle 🚴‍♀️, and weight-lift 🏋️‍♀️ about 3-4 times a week. My goal is to become lean, strong, and keep my head cool 😎 This requires a good food regime,  discipline, and patience. So easy to injure yourself or be sluggish!

There are many guidelines about fitness and bodybuilding out there but when you start, you need to figure out what works for you.

And I think there are similarities between bodybuilding 💪 and niche website building 🏗️

You can find tons of courses and guides on how to grow your websites right. But you still need to figure out what works for you and your particular niche. It also requires a discipline and patience.

Here’s a bit less obvious analogy.

For a website, content is the food 🍲 you put in its mouth and backlinks are the exercises 🏋️ you do to grow its muscles and body. Wrong food would make your website fat and bloated and slow down your progress. Incorrect (bad) exercises will damage your website’s body and prevent it from growing as well.

When I think it this way (and when I work on my own body), it really helps me to get into a proper mindset and take some stuff about my niche websites better.

What do you think guys? 🙂

Personal life 👩

Took a week vacation, went so fast! The weather in Montreal was hot in August and reached 30+C again.

Growing my body and hitting hard on fitness!

In August, I saw how a fisherman caught a sturgeon in the St-Lawrence river! I was pretty impressed, I had no idea our river has sturgeons!

Apart from it, nothing remarkable happened that month except for the fact that the last month om my full-time employment (September) is coming soon!

Ok, now let’s go back to the business! ‍

Expenses➖

In August, the expenses were lower than in July thanks to careful planning.

One of the new expenses I got may become recurring; it is a subscription to the Hunter 🏹 tool. Hunter 🏹 is a GoogleDoc add-on for email scraping. It’s been already the second month in a row I ran out of their free quota of 100 calls and this time, I bought a month subscription.

Let’s look at the expense numbers in the details.

Income➕

The income in August got a bit up compared to July thanks to Horse 🐎 Website doing strong and Elephant 🐘 Website recovering a bit.

Let’s look at the income numbers in the details.

Totals 💵

Here are my totals for August 2018.

Total income $907.31 minus total expenses $540.40 makes a net profit of $366.91.

Here is the chart with my revenue vs expenses history for the last 13 months. I use 13-month timeline instead of the 12-month one in order to show you how the current month performed compared to the last year.

September 2018 Plans 📅

In September 2018, my focus will be to try to not freak out since it’s the last month on my full-time employment!

I will also hopefully figure out the Elephant Website pivoting up to a degree when I can resume taking the actions.

should stay the same as for August.

For Horse 🐎 Website, I will put it on pause to see how it is going in the after-Medic 👨‍⚕️ update by Google.

As of my LOC blog, I will need to write the early report! That will be “fun” to do… I am sooooooooo behind my yearly goals! :-\

And since I am not sure about my posting schedule… you should stay tuned by subscribing to my emails!