As promised I’m going to update everyone on this blog with the progress of my new site. I built this site as a side-hustle, but also to use it as a case study to show the effectiveness of the methods in our Blogging Nomads Course. I’m doing nothing that isn’t taught in the course and I’m following the course to a tee when building this site.
SO, HOW’S IT GOING?
Overall, I’m extremely happy with the site so far. My efforts are paying off for sure. I mentioned last month that the goal with a new site should be compounding growth and I’m seeing that with this new site.
Traffic was up more than double in July and income was up nearly 10X which is fantastic. I’m really excited to see where this new site goes.I’ve included a lot of information below to hopefully shed some light on this case study and how I’ve been achieving what I have been with the site.
Currently, the site is only a little more than 4 months old and it’s on a very good trajectory, earning growing income, and the daily active users at the end of July compared to the start of June are up nearly 10X.
This is very promising for the growth of this new site going into August and beyond.Next month I’ll focus less on new content and more on building links and off-page SEO.
Here are the numbers:
Compared To Last Month:
↑ Traffic is up 236% (3,950 Users)
↑ Website Earnings up 692% ($131 USD)
↑ Rankings 63.9%
↓ DA24 – DA22
Totals:
- The site earned a total of $131 USD From affiliates in July
- Traffic is up to 3,950 Users Per Month
- Users Per Day Peaking at 240 at the end of the month (7,200 users per month if it continues)
Content & Work (Lifetime)
- Total Posts Published: 106
- Total Links Built: 44 (Do Follow)
- Total Time Spent: 15 hours/week (Average)
- Total Money Spent: $4,390
What I did in July: In July I continued focusing mainly on creating content until I had over 100 posts live on the site. Because I’m also running 2 other websites, I decided to spend money hiring writers for this site from the very beginning.
If you were to write all of these posts yourself, then you’d definitely have to work more than my 15 hours per week, but if you aren’t running 2 other sites and aren’t also working a full-time job, this wouldn’t be overly difficult to achieve.
Around the end of July, I started working more on building links through mainly guest posts, collabs, features, podcasts, and outreach and saw immediate results.
I also spent some time going back on old posts and saw immediate results from that as well.
I updated 3 of my biggest posts and added around 1,000 words and re-published them and traffic went up as much as 200% on those posts. I’ll be working on updating old content more in the near future as it’s clear that Google is giving a lot of weight to up-to-date content in 2020.
What I’m finding with building new sites is that 100 posts seems to be a sweet spot. I don’t have very many links built to this site, but as soon as I had 100 relevant great posts, Google started sending me traffic.
I think at that point, the Algorithms start to see you as an authority.
My recommendations to you:
- Set a publication challenge for yourself. Find some great keywords of 100-300 search volume that can be potentially lucrative and then try to publish 3 posts per week for the next month, with 2 of those posts in the month being pillar content.
- Then try to build 10+ links into that Pillar Web of Content
- Then go back on 2 of your older posts that are getting the most traffic and update them with 1,000+ words and update the date to be recent (republish)
I hope this helps to inspire you all and show you just how possible it is to quickly grow a new site using the methods in the course.Most SEOs and Bloggers would preach that it takes 6 months to a year to earn any money from a blog, but using the SEO in the course, I was able to achieve income after 3 months and the site is growing rapidly, with decent income after 4 months.
Keep doing keyword research. Keep posting in the pillar web format and keep building links!
The next update will be in a month or so 
Happy blogging,
Nick
