🤡 Lorem Ipsum Adventures Continue

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How’d you spend your weekend?

I got free tickets to this digital art thingie on The Strip here in Vegas (free via the local newsletter cause we’re “press”) that I checked out on Saturday afternoon.

Then I spent some time on Sunday spinning up new “fake” ecommerce sites to test more Google theories. I say “fake” cause they’re just POD stores for the purpose of getting classified as an ecomm when it’s really a content site.

More on that in a moment.

But first, I’ve got another sponsor today. So, give ‘em a click to check out their offer and get entered to win ALL the ads earnings for the month.

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Update On That Lorem Ipsum “Ecomm” Site

I’ve mentioned this site to you a few times in the last month or so.

Quick recap - it has some content that I copied from one of my “pure spam” deindexed sites and I used the Kadence Pro AI Starter site thingie (love this!) to spin up a site that appears to sell products.

And I never did any editing of the theme template…so it’s all lorem ipsum text, buttons that go nowhere, a non-working shop and check out, and a collection of fake “featured in” images on the homepage.

Side note: Yesterday I tested the Astra Pro AI Starter site they offer and it’s good, but I still think Kadence is better.

Anyways, I was curious how the site would do with the Spam update and such so I’ve been watching the analytics like crazy - while not changing a thing.

It did drop a wee bit from the all-time highs, but it’s still doing better than it should be.

So, I’m currently using Cuppa to spin up some new content for it (costing me an average of $0.13 per article). And I’ll get those published sometime soon and see how Google responds.

Google is so damn broken right now that it will probably soar like crazy. And that’s infuriating.

Anyways, for comparison, I took some different content from that same Pure Spam site and spun up a similar site but did this one as a service-based business.

Did this on the same day a few months back. And, crickets. Just like 5 total pages indexed and zero traction for it. 🤷‍♀️

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Week 13 of Newsletter Life Starts Now

Today marks week #13 of doing a local newsletter on Beehiiv.

We’re currently just a few subscribers over 2,500 (as of this morning).

You’ll notice that our subscriber growth has stalled a bit compared to previous updates, but that’s just due to me stopping one ad and then getting another ad into learning mode by accident.

In terms of monetization, we actually sold a one-year premium subscription for the newsletter at a sale price of $50.

And we’re up to $12.20 in Boosts money…but I truly HATE Boosts as a revenue stream. At least for this newsletter.

Last Monday I told you about a new email boost we got approved for - that drove 5 subscribers to that newsletter and they verified only ONE of them.

This is why I hate Beehiiv Boosts for monetization.

Though it seems like it’d be a great way to grow your own subscribers since you can get away with only approving 20% of them, apparently.

This seriously seems like such a scam.

Reminder: I'm writing updates about my local newsletter on Twitter here and doing a more detailed case study in my private forum.

Next Time…

We’ll take a look at how the Beehiiv Ads earning for this newsletter are going for the month (remember I’ll be giving those earnings away!).

And, if you’ve got something else you wanna hear about, just let me know.

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. ConvertKit has a free newsletter plan now for up to 10,000 subscribers, while Beehiiv only gives you 2,500 subs for free. Something to think about if you wanna test the newsletter waters.

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