10 Site Case Study – Post #3: June 2021 Summary

Summary chart displaying all 10 sites.

Higher level overview:

Overall, things went smooth in June. I was on a vacation for a short while and so were a few of the staff members, but we still kept on trucking nicely.

Kept on building content and links. Guest posts do take time away from writers writing for the 10 sites, but overall, the core strategy is to build content and links, so if I’m doing one or the other, it’s still fine.

Also, we did a number of optimisations, which mainly consisted of dividing content into silos/categories and interlinking them to each other. I’ll explain this more below.

But the overall idea is have topic clusters that are interlinked to increase topical relevancy and decrease the need for external links.

So on to the sites themselves..

Site 1 – Finance Site

Traffic: 1161 (+31)
Earnings: $212 (+55)
Articles Live: 96 (0)
Links: 1 (0)
Start: February 2021 – when I purchased the site.

Did some refreshments, added articles at the end of last month, so the goal for this month was to see if fresh content helps the site, but unfortunately all I still see is a flat line.

Some minor increase in traffic and earnings, but it’s just regular fluctuation and not a continuous increase.

I will keep monitoring it and I’ll only invest back what the site is making, as it doesn’t seem to react to additional content nor links. It might be that the penalty is still weighing on it somewhat.

Luckily, the earnings are rather stable and currently it just seems to be a site I bought for a 30x multiple that is holding steady.

What I’ll do in July: So all in all, I’ll keep doing some minor optimisations and a probably add a few links here and there, but I don’t want to invest too much into this site at the moment. Based on what I see now, some other sites that I have, have more potential.

Site 2 – Tech Gadgets

Traffic: 1011 (+29)
Earnings: $95 (+11)
Articles Live: 53 (0)
Links: 10 (+2)
Start: March 2021.

Did a number of on-page optimisations for the site. This mainly consisted of categorising content into specific topics and creating internal links. I used the smart post grid plugin to create “Related articles” section to the bottom of each article, where it’ll only display articles in the same category.

Also built two links. I decided to keep it as is for a little bit.

Based on my analysis, the site should be able to get significantly more traffic and earnings for the existing amount of links and articles it has. It just needs time and some links 🙂

What I’ll do in July: As I’m seeing better growth in other sites, I’ll focus on those more for now and leave this age more and see how it goes.

Site 3 – Tech Home

Traffic: 250 (-2)
Earnings: $12 (-6)
Articles Live: 44 (+7)
Links: 7 (+4)
Start: January 2021.

Traffic and earnings are somewhat stable. Would like to see faster growth, but the site is still in the sandbox with most of its’ articles. It only has a few keywords in the top 20 positions, most are lower than 40 while being very low competition, which indicates either too little topical relevance or being in sandbox to me.

For this site, I still need to do the topical clustering based interlinking. The clusters themselves are ready, I just need to have the smart post grid feature added and also add internal links with the Link Whisper plugin.

Hopefully, when I get the topical relevance issue sorted and some other optimisations done on it, I’ll see some more growth.

I’ve learned that if your rankings are worse than they should be, in most cases, links won’t help and are just a waste of money. As links are expensive, I want to do all I can to get my rankings higher with on-page strategies and optimisations.

What I’ll do in July: internal links. The site is very near the $2K investment threshold, which I don’t want to go over, so I’ll just do some optimisations and pause content production until I see further potential.

Site 4 – Beauty Products

Traffic: 966 (+299)
Earnings: $53 (+$14)
Articles Live: 20 (+1)
Links: 7 (+7)
Start: March 2021.

This site continues to grow nicely. The earnings are still rather low, but overall, I’m satisfied with the $50/1000 visitors KPI. Once I get the traffic to more than 5K, I’ll add display adds and try to boost it more.

Also, there are many private affiliate deals in this niche that I can go after, but I will take this step once I have more traffic.

At the moment, everything is going well, I’m adding new content and links. Not too many articles were added unfortunately, but we did manage to build 7 new links to the site, which took time away from content production to the site.

What I’ll do in July: keep on building new content. The site still has 50% of its’ allocated budget remaining (ca $1,000) and about 30 articles in the pipeline.

Site 5 – Clothing

Traffic: 402 (+392)
Earnings: $0 (0)
Articles Live: 41 (+6)
Links: 18 (+13)
Start: January 2021.

The clothing site started to get a good amount of traffic at the end of May. There seemed to have been a glitch in the May numbers (I only saw 10 for the month, but now I see that it’s a bit higher)..

Anyways, it seems like it’s starting to get out of the sandbox phase with some specific articles. Most are still in positions 40+ or 100+ so probably still in the sandbox phase.

Overall, I’m very happy with the traffic spike, but there’s still a long way to go 🙂

We did manage to add 6 new articles and 13 new links. The links were mainly obtained through the link insertion strategy.

No earnings, because I don’t have affiliate links set up for this site yet. I’ll try to have them added ASAP.

What I’ll do in July: I will add some links, but I won’t be adding any more content, because the site’s total investment has surpassed $2K. I’m only adding links, because I like the growth of the site and I’ll try to add a little fuel to the fire, where I see that it’ll likely have a good return on investment.

Site 6 – Luxury Items

Traffic: 257 (+142)
Earnings: $54 (+54)
Articles Live: 31 (+9)
Links: 2 (+2)
Start: April 2021.

As you may recall, thanks to the site being an auction domain (I got it from ODYS), it’s showing faster growth. I like the above 100% growth when comparing June to May, but there’s still a long way to go 🙂

Also, I made my first sales this month and the earnings to visitors ratio is too good to be true. I don’t expect it to remain this high, but it was due to the fact that someone just happened to buy an expensive product.

This is one of the perks of promoting expensive items :)..

Managed to add 9 new articles and 2 links. I paused content production for now as the site has surpassed it’s $2,000 investment threshold.

What I’ll do in July: Now I’ll just monitor the traffic changes and do optimisations where I see fit. However, as I’ve told before, I’m very excited about this particular niche, which is why I might add a few articles to the site. Especially to the subcategories that I see are working well.

Site 7 – Yoga Site

Traffic: 609 (+231)
Earnings: $36 (+12)
Articles Live: 62 (+13)
Links: 34 (+19)
Start: February 2021.

It’s lovely to be able to color the above numbers green. 🙂 However, a lot has gone into this site.

While doing keyword research and competitor analysis, I found that in theory, this site and the particular yoga sub-niche has very high potential ROI. So I upped my max investment with this one.

I’m a bit nervous, because I don’t see any specific categories doing well, just some random articles here and there.

My overall strategy is to create content in categories (like 5 per category), interlink them and see which categories outperform. Then invest more into those.

As I’m slowing down or pausing content production for some other sites, this site was able to benefit from it and we managed to add 13 articles and 19 backlinks, which is great :)..

Overall, I like the growth, especially because this site was just started from scratch. I do see that I’m still in the sandbox with most articles, as they’re not even in the top 100.

Hopefully, once I build more internal links and give the site some time, I’ll see continuous progress.

What I’ll do in July: keep adding some content and links. Also do optimisations, improve some articles, add internal links with Link Whisper.

Site 8 – Make-Up Site

Traffic: 2652 (+1374)
Earnings: $55 (+35)
Articles Live: 89 (+5)
Links: 38 (+6)
Start: July 2020.

This site continued to grow nicely until the second part of June, but then something weird happened. I noticed that the page load times increased from 3-4 seconds to 30 seconds on some pages.

This also happened on one of my main traffic generating articles, which caused it to drop from position #2 to pos #100+. I’m still researching the issue, I did some technical changes and my brother is trying to sort this out for me.

The site is very picture heavy, I do use the Smartpixel plugin, but I probably need to take some additional measures to get the speed down to around 2 seconds or less.

I also use Elementor on the site, which is also likely hurting the site’s speed. I will try to find some time and test if using Gutenberg editor on some articles will have a significant impact on my speed ratios.

If it does, I’ll have my VA’s switch all articles from Elementor to Gutenberg.

Speaking of VA-s, the article uploader who I told you about only charging $2/article, now charges $5. It’s a huge increase, but as he does something that took my wife 2-3 hours, I’m still cool with paying the $5.

A few easy wins that I could do with the site is to add additional monetisation methods and display ads. However, due to lack of time, I won’t do it right now. I’ll postpone it till I have at least 10K traffic.

What I’ll do in July: keep on adding new articles and links, this seems to be working right now. Also, I found a competing site with 300 articles and only 100 referring domains that’s getting 300K visits per month in the exact same niche. So there’s huge potential 🙂

Site 9 – Musical Instruments

Traffic: 0 (haven’t added google analytics yet)
Earnings: $0
Articles Live: 32 (+19)
Links: 0
Start: May 2021.

Not much to talk about here yet. The site is still very new. We’re adding a good amount of content and it’s already being picked up by ahrefs.

Now that I’ve started to use auction domains more, I’m happy to see that it seems to be working in terms of cutting down the time needed to start to see results. When starting a site from scratch, I usually saw first traffic on the 6th or 7th month.

What I’ll do in July: keep on adding content. Do some content clustering, assign categories and do internal linking.

Site 10 – Coming soon

I already had a deal in place, but it fell apart when I started doing more thorough due diligence. His earnings didn’t make sense, it seemed to me that he had manipulated the site’s earnings, as it was making way more than I’ve ever seen per 1000 visitors.

When I started asking more thorough questions, he got upset, which was another red flag and we didn’t go through with the sale.

So I’m still on the lookout 🙂

Questions?