November was….a month to forget.

In all my years as a web publisher, I’ve never seen such a drastic downturn on websites in tandem like this.

Granted, I’ve cashed out hundreds of thousands of dollars at this point by selling off numerous web properties over the years, but I would be in an absolute panic if this was my only business.

If my wife and I hadn’t already diversified outside of websites 6 months back to earn extra income, I would probably be looking for a job right now.  Thankfully, that’s not the case and our other business is thriving at the moment.

I’m anticipating that December will be a bad month for my sites as well as people are much more focused on the holidays and less focused on starting businesses at the end of the year.

The biggest positive this month: I don’t have a positive this month, there were no highlights.  Maybe the highlight is that I see many people complaining about how bad the SERPS currently are, and this means Google will change them with a new update, but who knows.

The biggest negative this month:  OHP revenue fell 38% and traffic fell 2%.  Need I say more?

Here are the numbers behind my business for the month:

• Revenue: $9,151 (This includes revenue from all sources)
• Expenses : $7,025 (This only includes business expenses. I do not include my own pay, healthcare expenses, or 401k distributions.)
• Net Income: $2,126

I should mention before we begin, if you’re looking to start your own blog, make sure you check out my free IGNITION course today.

Another thing to mention this month is an easter egg in this report that I don’t discuss, which hints at a new business venture.  If you think you see it, comment and let me know!

November was a fun month overall from a personal standpoint.  Our baby girl Saara is getting a little bit older and more independent by day, which is nice to have a bit of a break from the constant needy mentality that infants and young toddlers have. 

We traveled back home to Illinois for the month to visit some friends and family, which was pretty awesome.  Saara got to see everyone, which was great as many folks haven’t really seen her since she was a baby.  My wife/myself are doing great.

I am personally challenging myself to lose 10 lbs, and while I’ve been maintaining this at about 213 lbs, this trip didn’t help as we had Thanksgiving and a WHOLE LOT of other food. 

By the end of December, I’d like to be down to 208, and then in January, I’ll make it a goal to hit 203. Consider this my public accountability statement.

That’s all for the personal update.

The OHP site lost 2% of traffic and earnings dropped by 38%.  As ugly as that is, I think a part of it is because people just aren’t really focused on creating businesses at the moment.  Most folks want to buy gifts for their family and relax during the holidays, so I HOPE this is a reflection of that. I expect more of the same in December as well.

PLAN:  As of now, I’m still publishing 15 articles weekly and diving very deep into content silos that I think make sense for the business.  Early signs are that this is slowly working as I am seeing some traffic increases.  Beyond this, I recently had a third-party help me to create a disavow file to clean up the mess that is my backlink profile.  I’ve submitted that and don’t see much movement yet, but we’ll see on the next couple Google updates if things start to trend upward again.

I’m slowly working to increase the content on this site.  I hired a VA to help me produce it with AI as an assistant, but that hire ultimately sucked, and I needed to fire her a few weeks after bringing her on. 

PLAN:  Now, I have my full-time VA creating content for this site in her spare time and we’ll see if we can get some momentum going.  She’s probably going to be able to publish 3-5 articles per week once we have some other projects finished, which should be in a week or two.  It’ll be fun to see what happens here.

Traffic is down another 13% MoM and earnings are down 8%.  This site will sit, and I will do nothing to it, Google has basically killed it.

PLAN:  No future plans for the site, I just want to let it sit and see what happens.

Another month of growth for site 10.  While revenue fell a bit (which is expected with affiliate income as it’s more volatile), traffic increased 32% MoM which is exciting. 

PLAN:  Continue on with 15 articles per week.  We’re publishing mostly informational content at present and at some point, in the coming months I’m going to focus on optimizing the top 10 articles for more revenue, but I don’t think we’re even close to that point yet. 

Link building continues on this site with HARO and resource link building where I can find the opportunity.  It’s a slow process, but it’s still working nicely.  

This month the site earned $16 and has an RPM of $12.  I haven’t added more content to it, yet, because I don’t’ want to spend time/energy on this one, but it’s good to see a steady revenue trajectory thus far.

PLAN:  For now, I’ll let this site sit.  It is a 100% AI play and considering I have bigger sites doing much more, I don’t want to distract myself.    

Traffic this month increased 7% and earnings increased to $12.  Again, a small site that I’ve built on the side out of curiosity with AI, but we’ll see what the future holds for it.   

PLAN:  Similar to site 11, we’re going to let this sit for now.  I could make some more with AI assisted content, but I just don’t want to distract myself.  

The OneHourProfessor YouTube channel continues to sit.  Subscribers/earnings/views are all falling, and I understand why but still can’t go back to it.   

PLAN: Things still on hold here.