As promised, here’s another update from my case study website that I’m building to show you the power of great SEO.
It was a great month! We blew past the 10,000 users per month mark in September with 11,487 users in September.
The income went up as well and we’re now over $675. I think this will go up a lot more in October because we had a strange week in September where I don’t think it was tracking sales properly.
After 6 months of work on my part (about 288 hours total) and an investment of just over $6,500, I have a site that would easily sell for $25,000 and is making a decent income and growing. That’s a pretty good return!
If you calculate the value of the site minus the investment, then add the income I’ve earned in the past few months and divide that by the hours I’ve spent, I’ve been making about $70 per hour for my time spent so far on this brand new site. Not bad right?
It’s calculations like those that make SEO work so exciting for new niche sites.
Let’s go over some specifics:
Compared To Last Month:
↑ Traffic is up 46% (11,487 Users)
↑ Website Earnings up 24% ($673 USD)
↑ Rankings 12%
↑ DA25 – DA26
The users per day started peaking around 575 at the end of September, if that continues traffic should be over 15,000 users in October. The cool thing is that I’ve already had a day of 700 users in October, so it’s looking good!
Content & Work (Lifetime)
- Total Posts Published: 134
- Total Links Built: 60 (Do-Follow)
- Total Time Spent: 12 hours/week (Average)
- Total Money Spent: $6,550
As you can see, I’ve spent a lot of money on this site so far. But that doesn’t mean you would have to. I only spent about 4 hours per week on the site through the month of September.
If you were to build a site like this and you didn’t want to invest money in it, then you’d just have to write the posts yourself.
Seeing as I’m publishing 3 posts per week at about 2,000 words on average, that should take about 9 hours of work per week.
Definitely doable for a solo worker without any financial investment into the content! Then you’d spend the same amount of time as me doing the other tasks on the site (4 hours per week at this point).
Earning $673 per month for working 13 hours per week isn’t bad! Especially when you add in the current value of the property if I were to sell. And it will grow from here! I see the site being a $10,000 per month+ site in the next couple of years.
What I Did in September:
September was a pretty hectic month for us because we moved from Portugal to Mexico and it took a lot of planning, then it took us a long time to find a place here and get settled.
This means that the time I spent on the new site in September was pretty low.
Now that the case study is proven (it looks like the site should do over $1,000 in October), I’m going to start doubling down on it.
I’m going to produce a lot more content for low-competition keywords and try to publish every day.
I’m still not working too hard on link building. I think I’ve built 60 links to the site in total and now that it’s ranking I think it will get some natural links as well.I set up an email option popup (using Elementor & Mailchimp) at the end of the month and it got 48 subscribers in 48 days! I guess my lead magnet offer is working!
The great thing is that the Ebook lead magnet also links to my Amazon links, so it should make some extra income.
I started focusing a bit more on YouTube with this niche as well. I’ve found a bit of a gap in the video market and the YouTube Channel for the site is growing quickly. I am always looking for diversification of income streams so this is a pretty good one. I’m also considering a store for the niche, but that’s a whole other business avenue to go down.
My Plans Moving Forward:
As I already have 2 other sites on MediaVine, I would need 25,000 sessions to add this third site in. Currently, I’m more than halfway there, so I’m confident I’ll get there in the next few months. I think ads in this niche could yield high RPMs, so it might be worth about $400-$500 per month in ads at that amount of traffic.
I would look forward to testing that and seeing if it negatively affects Amazon sales.I also definitely want to try other affiliates in my niche. Amazon just converts so well so it’s hard to do proper testing without losing a lot of money and potentially ruining this case study. But I’m going to start testing in the next few months.
As mentioned, I may consider adding a store to the site.
My Recommendations For You:
- Look for diversification: While I love Google traffic to get passive income from a site, it’s always good to keep looking for more avenues of revenue. Consider youtube, selling products and alternative affiliate programs to monetize your site.
- Long Tail Keywords: Find keywords that answer questions that will likely lead to a sale. Also consider other modifiers besides “Best” like “under $X”, “best for X” and “Cheapest” etc.
- Try to bang out more content: Try to publish more. Your posts should be minimum of 1,200 words. If you can quickly write 5 of those with potentially profitable keywords, all within a content pillar web for a larger topic that’s also monetizable, you can start seeing big growth. Even if each keyword seems super small (100 per month volume) they can quickly snowball and add up.
- Turn up your Monetization: Give your site a chance to earn money. What percentage of your posts are ranking for keywords that people will actually buy from (ie: “Best Travel Backpacks”)? If you only have 3-4 of those types of posts, it’s time to write more of them. Just make sure the difficulty of the terms is low.
- Go back on the course: Even though I know this stuff well, I still forget bits and pieces of it. I have created checklists for myself to make sure I keep the same methods for each post and continue to properly interlink new content. If you need a refresher, go back through some parts of the SEO Course!
- Start a niche site: Even if you already have a site, it’s a blast to start a new one. Do some keyword research, think of a niche that can be profitable that has a lot of keywords that can make money and start a new site. Dariece and I are going to be starting another niche site in the next couple of months too! This has been so much fun.
I really hope you guys are enjoying these case studies and finding some useful information and inspiration in them. Not a lot of people are releasing this much info about their niches.
I’m sorry I can’t release the niche, it would just skew the numbers of the case study too much if you all went and checked it out, and also there have been so many bloggers (even established ones) trying to locate and copy the site.
For now, I’m spending a lot of time just writing out these case studies to share with you in hopes that you’ll find a bit of gold and use it on your own businesses!
Thanks for reading!
If you read this far, wow. Thanks! Prove it in the comments below. Tell me if you would be interested if I created a website specific to blogging with these types of case studies for all of our sites, as well as advanced tips for bloggers?
