10 Site Case Study – Post #2 – May 2021 Summary

Here’s a summary chart that I made for easier comparison of the progress made:

Btw, if you’d like me to add any specific metric to this chart, please let me know in the comments below. I will keep updating this thing, but if there’s something important missing, let me know.

Higher level overview

May was a decent month, kept on trucking and managed to find a site for the musical instruments niche. Found it via ODYS and paid $800 for the site.

It had over 200 referring domains, out of which 50 were very relevant to the site I’m going to build on it. That amounts to paying $16 per link, which is dirt cheap 🙂 So I’m happy with the purchase.

One thing that held us back was that our content team is also doing optimisations for the existing sites with more content. They’re working on optimising the on-page with the SurferSEO tool.

It has helped to boost the amount of traffic for my previous sites so we’ll do it with these sites as well.

Also, we’re putting more effort into creating proper silo structures and internal linking. I’m using link whisper for creating internal links, it makes the job a lot easier. Especially when you have a site that has loads of content.

The idea of these optimisations is to reduce the money that we need to spend on backlinks, if our on-page is done well enough.

Now into the details per each site..

Site 1 – Finance Site.

Traffic fluctuated a bit and also lost some rankings. I noticed that we had a number of articles written, but they hadn’t been uploaded. Found out that the editor had forgotten about it.

So we might have suffered a drop due to not having any new content uploaded for over a year. If that was the case, this should be fixed now.

Earnings increased a bit. Some were continuous subscribers from the people that joined last month. I make about $20-30 per subscriber for as long as they stay with the program.

Traffic: 1130 (-121)
Earnings: $157 (+67)
Articles Live: 96 (+3)
Links: 1 (0)
Start: February 2021 – when I purchased the site.

What was done during the month: Did Surfer optimisations for over 5 of the core articles. Also added a lot of internal links with the link whisper plugin. The team added 3 articles, I also did keyword research for some additional articles.

Goals for the next month: I’ll see if the new articles helped to reverse the rankings drop. Also, I’ll keep on adding new content and want to increase the number of links to core pieces of content that used to be the highest earnings. But I don’t want to do so before I’ve seen that the rankings are going to increase again. As soon as I see that, I’ll add more links.

Site 2 – Tech Gadgets

Traffic: 982 (+31)
Earnings: $84 (-21)
Articles Live: 53 (+4)
Links: 8 (0)
Start: March 2021.

What was done during the month: Added some articles and did some internal linking. Traffic increased a bit, revenue fluctuated, but that’s normal. I like that the site is earning quite a lot from the traffic it’s getting. This is due to the average product cost of between $100 – $200.

Goals for the next month: I have to increase the number of articles. Only producing 4 new content pieces is a weak result, I plan to add more in June.

This niche requires some backlinks as well. After doing all the articles that I’ve planned to do, I’ll focus in on the top 3 articles and boost those with backlinks.

Then, when I see that it’s working, I’ll reinvest and grow further.

Site 3 – Tech Home

Slow and steady wins the race. Well, let’s see :). It’s growing slowly. I think it’s not fully out of the sandbox yet. Still has some articles ranking in positions 40+, which to me is an indication of partially being in the sandbox as the keywords aren’t that difficult. Based on my previous experience, once it gets out of the sandbox, the site should see a nice sudden boost (like site 8 did in May, see below).

Traffic: 252 (+78)
Earnings: $18 (+8)
Articles Live: 37 (+1)
Links: 3 (+2)
Start: January 2021.

What was done during the month: Added one new article and two new links.

Goals for the next month: Increase the number of articles, I still have 12 articles in the pipeline to complete my content silos and topical maps.

Site 4 – Beauty

Traffic: 667 (+465)
Earnings: $39 (+27)
Articles Live: 19 (+5)
Links: 0
Start: March 2021.

The site is growing faster than expected. It again proves to me that it’s worth investing into aged auction domains compared to starting sites from 0. It’s always a risk to buy these pre-owned and lived-in domains, but this time, it seems to have been paid off.

A decent number of traffic with no links built, just some content.

What was done during the month: Managed to add 5 articles and did some further keyword research to have a steady pipeline of new articles for my content team.

Goals for the next month: Build out the remaining articles and invest as much to reach the $2,000 limit that I have. Then I’ll do all possible optimisations (internal links, surfer, technical stuff) and see what the site is going to do.

Right now I like how it’s going and I’m very excited about the fast success it’s having.

Site 5 – Clothing

Traffic: 10 (+5)
Earnings: $0 (0)
Articles Live: 35 (0)
Links: 5 (+1)
Start: January 2021.

The site is buried deep into the sandbox.

What was done during the month: As I’ve done more articles than I initially planned, I’m just leaving it be. I did build one link, because I got a very relevant site through link insert outreach for another site so I took it.

Goals for the next month: Total cost for the site has thus far been $1,444. I don’t want to invest any more money into it, but if I find a good link opportunity, I’ll take it.

Site 6 – Luxury Items

I’m guessing the site is still in the sandbox phase, but as it was also purchased from Odys and was an auction domain, it is showing growth much faster. Some articles are already ranking in top 10 while the first articles were uploaded in May.

Haven’t made any sales yet, but that’s OK, as the products cost a lot of money and I’m expecting a smaller conversion rate.

Traffic: 115 (+94)
Earnings: $0 (0)
Articles Live: 22 (+1)
Links: 0
Start: April 2021.

What was done during the month: Since the first overview I did, only one article was added, but the whole 22 articles were added during May, so that’s a great result overall :). I also did keyword research to find keywords for the first 30 articles. While doing the research, I got so excited about this niche that I now have 54 total articles in the pipeline, but I got a good feeling about this niche.

Time will tell if I’m right or not.

Goals for the next month: Add at least 5 new articles + some links, if I find suitable sites to get links from.

Site 7 – Yoga Site

Traffic: 378 (+336)
Earnings: $24 (+21)
Articles Live: 49 (+5)
Links: 15 (+7)
Start: February 2021.

This site has been a pleasant surprise. If you remember from my previous update, I just registered a dropped domain for $10 on Namecheap and it’s traffic numbers are growing nicely.

The traffic is coming to 3-4 articles, the rest are still in the sandbox phase, but it’s nice to see earnings so early in the site’s life cycle.

What was done during the month: Added 5 new articles. Did keyword research for additional articles. I’ve got 29 articles still in the pipeline. Also added 7 links. I’m actively building links for this site, as based on previous research, this niche showed the biggest potential of them all.

Goals for the next month: Build as many new articles as I can and build links to the articles that are already ranking in top 10.

Site 8 – Make-Up Site

The site is starting to move out of the sandbox phase and is now gaining some decent traction. Always great to see that :). One problem that this niche has is that the products cost very little. I was hoping that majority of the sales come from additional products that people buy during the 24 hour cookie window, but we’ll see.

With another one of my sites, I saw that people bought 30% of what I recommended and 70% was everything else. However, they did tend to buy similar products in similar price ranges.

I’m not discouraged by the current low revenue per visitor, I can always find direct deals for more expensive products and focus more on those to up my earnings.

Traffic: 1278 (+786)
Earnings: $20 (+5)
Articles Live: 84 (+5)
Links: 32 (+13)
Start: July 2020.

What was done during the month: 5 more articles were added to the site. My wife did those and it took her 2-3 hours per upload. Now I found someone from Upwork who is doing this for $2 per article.

I also did my keyword research strategies and ordered 30 more articles from a content agency to supplement my team of writers and produce more content than we can otherwise.

Managed to add 13 links, out of which I got 5 through my VA that does HARO requests and 8 via link insertion link building strategy.

Goals for the next month:

Keep adding content and links. This site is growing well and I want to add more wood to the fire. My next target is 150 articles and 100 links. It’ll take me a while to get there, but I’ll keep on going.

Site 9 – Musical Instruments

Traffic: 0
Earnings: $0
Articles Live: 13 (+13)
Links: 0
Start: May 2021.

What was done during the month: I found a site from ODYS.global, registered it and put my favorite theme and a simple logo up. Also, did keyword research for the first 15 articles and already got 13 articles up.

Spent a decent amount of time on this site. It seems to have very high potential, although I’m not personally interested in the niche, which is always a bummer.

Goals for the next month:

Do keyword research to come up with a total of 30 strong keyword ideas. With this site, I’m trying to cluster the topics more tightly. Meaning that I’ll try to cover one subtopic with as many articles as possible. Ideally 10 articles per subtopic.

This should give me higher odds of success while allowing some diversification among the topics.

Site 10 – Coming soon

I’m still hunting for a niche that I’d be interested in going after. I have many ideas, but I want to find an auction domain for the site, don’t really want to build it out from scratch.

So that’s it for the case study update.

Questions?

Let me know if you have any questions at all in regards to the case study or any aspects of it. I try to share as much as I know.