I’ve been quiet for a few reasons, but part of running a case study is being accountable and showing up – so here is a brief update on how my site is going.
Here is a brief overview of the last three months:
- The site made a total of $8,457.88
- Traffic is climbing, mostly due to a seasonal upswing
- I’ve been posting around one article a day
Here is a brief breakdown of what’s been going on:
Contents
Traffic and Earnings Stats for 2022
| Month | # Articles | Pageviews | Mediavine ($) | Amazon ($) | Other Affiliate ($) | Total ($) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 22 | 33 | 118,705 | 1,843.71 | 44.04 | 500.54 | 2,388.29 |
| Feb 22 | 43 | 82,264 | 1,655.44 | 38.35 | 565.37 | 2,259.16 |
| Mar 22 | 40 | 102,742 | 2,374.71 | 86.29 | 488.57 | 2,949.57 |
| Apr 22 | 30 | 119,278 | 2,704.69 | 99.63 | 444.83 | 3,249.15 |
| Total to Date* | 770 | 2,288,803 | 35,256.36 | 1,739.33 | 4,847.73 | 52,182.22 |
*This is the total from Jan 2020 when I started the site to date.
Traffic For Feb – Apr 2022
You may remember from my last update that I lost all of my snippets in Nov (a lot of sites did). I still don’t know why, and nothing has changed, I’m still snippet less.
Still, it’s had a smaller impact than I would have expected. I think this is due to the fact that my rankings were not harmed outside of losing my snippets.
I’m still #1 just below the snippet for all the queries I used to have a snippet for, and my post is usually more relevant to the search query and has a better title, so I’m getting clicks.
I’m also seeing an increase in impressions and clicks due to this niche coming into season.
Earnings for Feb – Apr 2022
I still haven’t added any more Amazon links for as long as I can remember, but earnings are going up a little due to the increase in traffic.
Display ads were always the goal of the site and Mediavine is coming in clutch with RPMs around $30 on good days.
I’m seeing $100+ days again, been a while since I was getting triple figures on a regular basis, so happy with that.
The Plan Going Forward
I said in the last update that I was going to go into cruise control mode and write one post a day spending about an hour a day on the site, and that’s what I’ve been doing.
Some days I get carried away and write a few posts because I work better when I’m focusing on one site at a time and writing up a batch of articles, but overall I’m sticking to the one hour/post a day goal.
Feel free to let me know how you are all getting on – as always, happy to answer any questions!
Image credits – Photo by Simon Hrozian on Unsplash
Great to see that it’s recovering. I’ve also made about 25 affiliate sites using Ai content, as my previous site still is climbing up slowly which was a 100% ai-based site.
However, I don’t just plaster ai content without editing or giving it a read, I read and edit it to make it almost similar to the quality that I’d personally write, so that’s probably the reason my site hasn’t noticed any drops in any Google updates.
25 sites! Wow, that’s a lot to keep on top of.
AI content is a hot topic right now, would love to hear how that all works out for you. As long as you’re maintaining quality, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.
Good luck!
Hey Umar, just out of curiosity what AI content generator tool do you use and do you find it useful? With 25 sites sounds like a handy tool.
I used Jasper before, but right now I’m using WordHero. Any GPT-3 based tool would do for me.
Thanks for getting back to me. Yah i tried jasper before was not happy with the results. Also tried copyAi same experience.
I ended up writing myself 🙂
I will check out WordHero to see if it’s any different
Yes, for the best content I’ll have to write myself as well. But I’ll settle for good enough content for now until I really have to write myself.
Another nice update. It’s good to see the traffic and earnings of the site going up again.
At present, I have 370 published contents on my website.
My plan is to publish 600 contents on the website before the year runs out.
My website has about 4,000 page views at present, but I believe the traffic will increase if I keep working on the website throughout the year.
Phil, is there a special style of writing contents that attracts backlinks naturally other than doing thorough research?
I am asking, because my website attracts few backlinks. I hope to hear from you soon. Thanks
Hi Kayode
Love your worth ethic, that’s a lot of content and it’s sure to work out.
There are certain types of content that attract more links, yes, things like statistics, infographics, personal stories, etc. but for me, I think just consistently ranking really well for low comp KWs does the trick.
When someone is looking for a source to cite (link to), they usually pick the article ranking #1 for their chosen term. I’m pretty sure that’s how I’ve picked up most of my quality links.
Phil, I need your advice on this.
I’ve three websites at the moment, website A is has 530 posts, while website B and C has 35 articles each.
Website A with 530 posts bring about 4800 pageviews per day, while the others bring 120 and 230 page views per day.
Right now I feel like abandoning the website A with 530 articles and and focus on the other two and bring them to 170 articles each. But my mind is telling me not to do that.
So I’m planning to make a writing time table and allocate 10 days to each of the websites, but I think it will slow the pace which I want to grow the website B and C.
So if you were to be me, what will you do.
Hi Kennedy
That’s a good problem to have, sounds like you’ve got a growing portfolio.
I’m working on 3 sites right now and just dividing my time between all three. I like doing this as traffic will go up and down across the sites so it’s nice to have more than one to rely on.
Personally, I would just divide your time equally and grow all three sites. No two sites are equal, you never know if one of your other sites will grow super quick.
Oh thanks for the reply and advice.
Hi Phil
Your website is doing good as always so good luck to u in the next months.
How was your Google console CTR (%) in the first months ?
For example, is it normal to have only 1 click with 50 impressions on google console for 1 day ?
Hi Mehdi
Yes, mine started off similar to that, the impressions are for lower ranking KWs, as they climb the clicks will climb, don’t worry!
Hi Phil
I just find out about these case study. What an inspirational blog!.
I have a question about my abandoned 5 year niche blog . Its have 550 article and steady 3k PV without any update for years. Based on analytic only 30 articles received traffic past 12 month. Should I deleted all zero traffic article and write new content focused on long tail/easy keyword? Thanks
Hey, Reza, thanks!
I would definitely start working on that site again if I were you, I wouldn’t worry about deleting the posts that aren’t bringing in any traffic, just start targeting low comp KWs and you have a little headstart there.
Thx Phill. Its been 2 month and I silently following your suggestions. I update 15+ old blog post and add 20+ articles (half informational and half affiliate) and now my traffic 4X and the revenue increased to more than 200%.
Wow, I love to hear that!
Hi Phil,
Good to see your revenue growing up. I wish I was such a prolific writer!
I have just passed the 100 mark published articles with a mix of outsource content and self written ones.
I have a quick question for you with regards to articles hub or sub topical relevancy. I mean how do you interlink related articles?
Let’s say i have articles A,B,C that are related and I would like to interlink.
Would you do A–>B–>C (meaning article A links to article B which in turns links to article C)
or would you use a kind of mesh interlink such as A–>B,C then B–>A, C and C–>A, B? Here article A links to articles B and C, then B links to A and C with C linking back to A and B.
Your take?
Thank you.
Hey IamB
100 posts is awesome, it gets a little easier and quicker all the time to write and publish, right?
I just interlink all and any relevant posts. I never interlink unrelated posts, just posts that are genuinely related and should be of interest to the reader. Interlinking is important, so always link up older articles but I don’t overthink it too much.
Hey Phil, thanks for getting back to me. Yes it gets easier once you cranked out so many articles 🙂
I still struggle with wordcount on some of my articles because there are low kw questions requiring straight answers. No fluff.
Funny enough these articles still rank 🙂
Will see how they perform once they age. I may need to go back and update them.
Hi Phil,
Love reading your blog! always checking in when there is a new post. Thanks for sharing!
Did the new google update affect your website in any way?
Just wondering, as I have started a site a couple of months ago in a similar fashion ( 4 months, 100 posts)
Hey Gordon, thanks!
The update seems to have given my site a little bump up in rankings/traffic, so no complaints there!
Good luck with your site!
Hi Phil,
Do you still feel like focusing on fewer sites?
I noticed all my smaller sites are down and my big sites got nice gains with the update.
I feel like only focusing on one and building my others when I can outsource content.
Cheers
Hi Jay
Yes, I do. I’m in the process of trying to sell some of my sites right now, I think there are bigger gains for me if I just focus on one site full-time.
If I were to outsource, I could keep the other sites on autopilot, of course, that’s also a great idea.
Hi Phil!
I have a question want to ask you. How do you do internal linking and siloing? I would be very grateful if you let me know!
Hi Ezzra, I literally just link to relevant posts as I go along. I don’t silo as such or overthink it, if I have another post that’s related to the one I’m writing, I’ll add a link to the older post. I don’t even go into older posts and update them with new links.
Hi Phil,
I’m late to the party, just found your site a couple of days ago.
Just want to say thanks for laying out so clearly what strategies you use, I think this will be a big help to me building my site.
I presently have a couple of sites, one I bought almost 2 years back before I knew anything. It tanked back in Dec 20, then came back in April 21, then tanked again in December 21. Big learning lesson for me!
I’m just about to hit 100 articles on my newer site (18 months), with a total of 185,000 words. Been finding it hard going to produce content as many topics require plenty of research, and outsourcing has helped.
I think the type of articles I’ve produced has helped me to attract natural backlinks, I’m about a Moz DA20 after 18 months with no link building.
As for traffic, I was approaching 15k/month, but the latest update has cooled it by about 20%, and you could almost draw a straight line through the daily traffic from the update onward. So much for the idea that Google favors quality writing, seems there are other more important factors to them that they don’t share with us!
Now I’m going to try your method of pumping out lower word count, low search volume articles and see how this works out over a few months.
I’ll be keeping an eye on your future updates with great interest.
Hi Phil,
Just started blogging april this year for residual income purpose and i must say your casestudy has really helped with. currently the i started writing content with your strategy and all those content are ranking in top 5 within a week and my taffic has grown and am having 94 content currently published trying to upload at least 2 content a day .
Also am having an average of 60 users a day
The only issue i have is this am in the education niche and my major traffic is from india but i would like to rank for top tire countries. is there any strategy for that.
Thank you
Hi Ibn
Sounds like it’s going really well. A lot of people with educational sites say the same thing about Indian or Filipino traffic, I see them pivot into US-specific KWs like “best colleges in Los Angeles”, “jobs for med grads in Los Angeles” etc, maybe you can find some KWs that are location specific??