If this isn’t your first time on my site then you’ll be aware that I have ads on this site.
Those ads turn what is essentially a passion project into something that helps support my family.
I make my living from my portfolio of sites and Ezoic has played a big part in making that a possibility.
This is particularly true for this site; Pigeonpedia.com.
Why I Started This Site
As you can probably imagine pigeons aren’t a particularly lucrative niche to get into, however I wanted to build this site because I have a lot of love for pigeons and I felt there weren’t many pure informational sites dedicated exclusively to pigeons.
There are a lot of broader bird-related sites that talk about pigeons and there are quite a few specialist pigeon racing sites about, many of the dedicated pigeon sites online are very old and can be hard to navigate.
I wanted to create a site that was easy to navigate, simple to use and offered clear concise answers to all the questions anyone may ever ask about pigeons, essentially a pigeon wiki – hence the name we settled on of Pigeonpedia.
Monetizing Pigeons
In the past on my other sites I’ve always stayed away from exclusively informational led sites simply because the only way I knew how to monetize a website was through affiliate offers.
In the pigeon niche while there might be a few things that I can promote such as pigeon trackers and pigeon feeders, there certainly aren’t enough things to promote to justify writing hundreds of non-monetized informational articles.
As someone who relies on sites like this for an income it simply wouldn’t have been worth making this site without using ads to monetize it.
My Fears Over Implementing Ads
Yet ads were something I used to avoid like the plague, my reasoning was:
- They’ll slow my site down.
- Users will hate them and never visit my site again.
- They’ll negatively impact my rankings.
- They probably won’t make much money anyway.
How Ezoic Smashed My Expectations
I honestly can’t remember how or where I first heard about Ezoic, possibly in the /r/JustStart subreddit but I can’t say for sure.
Either way, I decided I’d at least give ads a try.
If they harmed my sites then I could remove them and carry on without.
Since installing Ezoic on my sites all of my initial fears have been allayed:
1. My Sites Are Faster Than Ever
Ads slowing down my site were one of the primary concerns that made me hesitant to try ads.
Ezoic is well aware of this concern and earlier this year bought out their groundbreaking Leap technology.
Ezoic says: “Leap is a completely free website performance tool which is designed to be an all-in-one app to diagnose and address each site’s performance.”
Effectively LEAP auto optimizes your site speed to significantly improve it.
Prior to using Ezoic…with no ads at all on the site I was getting a score from Page Speed Insights over around 70/100.
Below you can see my score using LEAP with ads:
It’s far faster than many ad-free sites!
LEAP also helps you improve that your Core Web Vitals scores too.
Core Web Vitals measures:
- Largest Contentful Paint – this measures the time a website takes to fully load the user the largest content on the screen.
- First Input Delay – measures the time from when a user first interacts with your site to the time when the browser is actually able to respond to that interaction (ads can slow this down).
- Cumulative Layout Shift – this measures how much the layout of your page changes as different elements load (such as ads).
All of these factors can be significantly impacted by ads.
Thankfully LEAP has me covered for Core Web Vitals too. Below you can see my LCP score for this site using LEAP:
Leap also recommends various things you can do to further improve overall site speed, below are a few things that I’ve not yet got sorted out on this site:
Sorting these (I’ll get round to it one day) is likely to get my page speed score well into the 90s.
2. Users Love Pigeonpedia
My fears that users would hate the site once they see ads on it, leave and never come back were completely unfounded.
I get emails like this from all over the world every week:
Users love Pigeonpedia and I’ve never had any email saying there are too many ads on the site.
In fact personally, based on my own browsing experience, when I see ads on a site it looks more normal to me than a site with no ads on it.
It reassures me that the site monetizes its traffic in a standard way rather than doing anything dodgy or potentially harmful with my data.
3. Rankings & Traffic Levels Are Better Than Ever
I implemented ads on Pigeonpedia towards the end of 2020, at that point traffic levels were around 8,000 sessions a month.
If implementing ads was really that detrimental to rankings then my traffic wouldn’t have grown beyond 50,000 sessions a month as shown below:
Search engines recognize that website owners need to monetize their content so ads are to be expected having ads on your site certainly isn’t got to hamper their traffic potential.
My total portfolio of sites is getting more traffic combined now than ever before!
If you want to try Ezoic on your site click here (yes it’s an affiliate link) – thanks!
4. Ads Are My Main Form Of Income
Ads now outperform other income forms across my portfolio of sites…and that’s not because my affiliate earns have dropped off a cliff, they haven’t at all.
Below is a breakdown of some recent Pigeonpedia Ezoic earnings:
In fact, implementing Ezoic ads on this site and the other sites in my portfolio was key in increasing my website revenue sufficiently to make it possible for me to leave my job and work on my websites full time.
Using Ads Actually Makes Being A Publisher A Far More Enjoyable Experience
One of the main reasons I recommend using display ads is because doing so makes the experience of being a publisher much more enjoyable.
When I was an affiliate-only publisher all my revenue came from affiliate links, my best-performing articles in terms of revenue were posts like “best pigeon emulator” (not a real product as far as I know).
Creating these kinds of posts is a tedious job, there’s a huge amount of research that needs to be done to write an article like that, then you need to add features like comparison tables and high-quality product images which can be hard to get hold of.
When you monetize with ads you can write interesting, engaging informational articles without worrying about how best to stuff a vaguely related product mention into this article so I can make a few $ out of it.
This has made publishing a significantly more enjoyable experience for me so thank you Ezoic!
If you want to try Ezoic on your site click here (yes it’s an affiliate link) – thanks!
