As promised, I’m keeping up with monthly case studies for my new website that I started in April of 2020. You might notice that it says “Month 7” again this month. That’s because I realized I had my dates wrong. The site was started mid-March but my first post actually went up April 1st, so this case study is now starting from when any blog case study should start, after the first post is published.
The great news this month is that I reached my year-end goal already and it’s only month 7! When I started this site, I said that if it reached $1,500 per month after one year, I’d be very happy with it.
I follow some of the top niche-site builders online and they also claim this to be their ultimate goal. To have reached it in just 7 months using strategic SEO and content creation makes me extremely excited. I’m really happy with how this site is doing so far!
Anyways, let’s dive into the numbers…
Traffic = 22,356
Amazon Earnings = $1,591
At this point the site is worth around $55,000 – $60,000 in resale value. I also just missed the threshold for a second site on MediaVine Ad Network in October. I fully expect to see this pass the threshold in November and I’ll be able to turn on ads.
I’ll have to test ads a lot on the site because currently, about 75% of my pages are Amazon affiliate posts, so I’ll have to see how badly the ads affect the Amazon sales.
Compared To Last Month:
↑ Traffic is up 63% (22,356 Sessions)
↑ Website Earnings up 135% ($1,591 USD)
↑ Rankings 22%
✓ DA26 – DA26
The users per day on the site started peaking around 850 users (950 sessions) per day last month. If that continues into November (as it has been every month so far), I could be over 28,500 sessions by the end of the month.
Content & Work (Lifetime)
- Total Posts Published: 151
- Total Links Built: 61 (Do-Follow)
- Total Time Spent: 9 hours/week (Average)
- Total Money Spent: $7,346
The spending on this site is still going up, but that’s because of the potential I see in it. I know a lot of you see these numbers and think “yeah ok if you spend a bunch of money on a website you can see big wins like this”, but that’s not the case.
You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars to earn $1,500 per month from a website this quickly.
I’m currently running 4 websites and an SEO course that takes up the majority of my time. I’ve only been working about 9 hours per week on average for the lifetime of this site and in October, I only worked on it about 4 hours per week.
As I’ve said before, almost all of the investments I’ve made to this site is into content writing, so you’d have to spend the time writing 3 posts per week. At 2,000 words average that should take you around 6-10 extra hours per week max, bringing your total up to 19. Very doable and still a great wage for the hours spent, especially considering the resale value of the web property.
What I Did in October:
October was a great month for the sites traffic. I completely stopped my link building efforts, which may or may not have been a good idea, but for now I just don’t have the time to do manual outreach and link building teams are a bit expensive for the new site.
I did hire a new editor and project manager for the website, so I’ve been able to spend more of my time on doing proper keyword research for the site, interlinking the pillar webs and working on the YouTube Channel (my main diversification method so far).
The reason I hired a someone to take over much of the backend work for the site is that Dariece and I started another niche website together and we’ve been working on that.
Dariece has been amazing during this pandemic. She’s kept Goats On The Road and our other websites doing very well, and has allowed me to follow this passion project of mine all the way into fruition. Now she wants to be a part of the niche site building, so we’ve started one together!
As you can imagine, this is taking up a lot of my time, so I see a lot fewer hours going into this blog, but with a project manager it should still be able to grow in the same way it was when I was full-time with it.
It’s kind of like watching your baby grow up and go to college. It’s sad to let it go, but it’s the only way to really allow it to become what it is destined to become (that ended up sounding cheesier than I thought).
Because we have a new editor for the site and because it’s growing quite quickly and earning enough money, I decided to up the publication calendar to 5 posts per week (it was at 3 for the past couple of months). When I started the site I was publishing 1 post per day, then I slowed to 3 per week, and now back up to 5. I’m hoping this will give me some opportunities to rank for what I call “Green Pasture Keywords”, or keywords with decent volume (200+) and very low difficulty (less than 19).
My Plans Moving Forward:
I’m really hoping that the site keeps growing. There’s a massive Google Core Algorithm Update coming in November, so I’m hoping that because I’ve done 100% white hat SEO for this site (and all of our sites), that it will prosper rather than suffer, but these days post-Penguin Google is about as predictable as post-global warming weather. We will see.
I’m going to continue to publish 5 posts per week for a while and hopefully I’ll have more time to spend doing better keyword research, creating better templates for my writers (which in turn become better articles) and work on interlinking.
I still may hire a white hat link building team for the site one day, but with the new niche blog getting a lot of investment currently, I’ll wait until the revenue from this blog can cover those costs.
My Recommendations For You:
- Consider Hiring Writers: I know this is a scary prospect, but if your site is earning enough to cover your expenses and a bit extra, I’d recommend spending that extra on content. You know the saying, new businesses should reinvest 100% of profits back into themselves if they can. Check Upwork and search the platform for writers in your niche. I’ve found that $35 / 2,000 words is a sweet spot for most niches. Find experts that speak your blog’s language as their first language. After hiring them, be really picky for the first few articles, then once they understand your format and style, you will barely have to do any editing down the road. Try to publish 5 posts per week minimum with writers. If you’re doing it all yourself, try to do 3 posts per week. All SEO keyword researched for relatively easy terms.
- Use the Dif-To-DA Ratio: I mentioned this in a post earlier this month. When looking at KeySearch, you should always look at more than just the difficulty (as explained in the SEO Course), but at first glance you can use the Dif-To-DA Ratio. If your blog is under a 20DA, then try to find keywords that are 20 or less difficulty. Even if you’re a DA3 now, you can still go for a 19 DIF, because you can grow your DA and rank later, but don’t try for too much higher than that.
- Find Unicorns: I also talked about this in the group earlier this month and it’s pure gold, so if you missed that post scroll down and find it in the group. Unicorns are other websites listed in the top 10 of Google that have no business being there. They have low DA and very few (or no) “Auth” links built to their post. When you see that, go into the “Content Assistant” tab and check things like the word count they used, keywords they used etc. Then check their actual post for things they did differently. Is their keyword density higher? Did they embed videos? Is their keyword the only one in the title? Unicorns have helped me really boost my traffic for this new site.
- Boost Your Speed: Currently my niche site loads in under a second on most pages and gets scores of 95-100 on both mobile and desktop. This is likely having a very positive effect on my user dwell-time and thus, likely my SEO as well. I mentioned it earlier in the group, but use the link below to get 10% off NitroPack and see similar speed results for your own site. After clicking the link, you can test your current site using their tools, and before you even pay it’ll show you how fast the plugin will get your site. And that’s just a starting point. In my experience, once you pay and contact support, they can usually get your score much higher.
Get NitroPack: https://nitropack.io/#WSZTUG (10% Goat10 coupon automatically applied)
I hope you guys enjoyed this case study and it gave you a bit of inspiration for your own blog. I’m handing you all the information you need to take your blog to the next level, the key is to give your blog the time and commitment that it deserves. I’m 100% confident that these methods work and I’ve proved it with this new site. I’m so confident that we’re doing it all over again with yet another niche website. Start taking your blog seriously! I want to see you posting case studies of your own success like this 😀
If you read this far… wow! I’m impressed. As always I’ve left an easter egg question down here for the few people who read this far. My question is, how many posts per week do you publish right now, and how many would you like to publish? If you’re not even close to your publication goal, what is holding you back and do you think there’s some way you could get there?
Cheers and thanks for reading!
Nick
