January is performing slow

January performance so far is not good. If it continues like this I will make around €1000,- this month. Compared with last year January it is still way up, but compared with the average of the last 6 months it is bad… very bad.

January ad revenue

I am not too concerned though. January is normally a slow month. Advertisers are pushing it in December, with January being slow as the follow up month. CPC is really down compared with last month and it started right on the first of January. At the moment I am getting €0,06 – €0,08 on average per click. In good months I am around €0,10 – €0,12. That is a big difference.

Travel niche

Being in the travel niche I know my most busy months are from May till September with my Adsense sites. People don’t book flights or holidays at my site. Well, maybe they do, but not directly through my affiliate offers, they click on Adsense ads. At the moment I am building an affiliate site for the travel niche with a friend of mine. I will do the marketing & SEO, he will do the backend coding. We use a .nl domain for it that I bought for €500,- earlier in 2018. A perfect brandable name that you can easily pronounce.

I talked about starting a site like this before, and I wanted to start it by myself but it just didn’t happen. A few years ago we did another project together and ended up selling it on Flippa for a nice sum, so that was a success. I have confident we can pull this one off as well and our plan is not to sell it, but really build it into a company. I will keep you updated about it once we go live (we plan to go live end of January)

Free AI translation tool

Having one site in French, I hired a translator to translate dutch content into French. Damn, that is expensive for a site that is not really bringing in any revenue (yet). While searching for good translation tools I stumbled upon Deepl.com. This tool is performing really good and uses AI for its translations which means it is constantly improving.

Tech giants Google, Microsoft and Facebook are all applying the lessons of machine learning to translation, but a small company called DeepL has outdone them all and raised the bar for the field.
Its translation tool is just as quick as the outsized competition, but more accurate and nuanced than any we’ve tried.

TechCrunch