3K Post Case Study – January 2021

I am lazy. I don’t want to work. But I definitely want to earn a good living for my family.

After trying a lot of gimmicks in the early part of my career, as my hair greyed and my arteries thickened, I realized that the online world is the closest I will come to the concept of passive or residual income.

I absolutely adore the idea of creating something that will keep producing money after I have stopped working on it. And niche sites were my path to Nirvana.

Niche Site Journey

I have found more success buying existing businesses rather than starting them from scratch. That is what I did with niche sites.

TL;DR

I bought an existing website from Motion Invest, loaded it with content, and scaled it up.

Full Version

I bought a small niche site from Motion Invest. It did under $100 in May 2020. I published a lot of content on the website. I followed basic on-page optimization techniques, heavily used Link Whisper for internal linking and December 2020 revenue was just over $5000.

Both, the revenue and the traffic saw a steady growth since launch and they continue to show a positive uptick. The numbers below are in USD.

Monthly revenue (USD)

During this time, I also launched a content and infographic generating agency for other website owners. I had developed the processes and knew the pains, so I thought I am well suited to the task.

So our story begins in January 2021

My Goals Going Forward

I want to continue publishing at scale on my main website. The site is at 623 posts right now. I plan to get it up to 1500 posts by June 2021 and 3000 posts by the end of 2021.

I feel if I keep publishing good content, traffic will be a natural result of that.

My Content Publishing Method

I have a very automated content publishing method. At the start of the month, I do keyword research and I give my content team a list of topics that they have to write on. This is the same team that runs my content agency.

They produce the articles, post them to WordPress, add images and publish. After some time, I go back and do the internal linking with Link Whisper and some optimization.

January 2021 in a Nutshell

In terms of publishing, January was a little slow for us. We put out 68 posts.

The revenue was $4120. This was less than that of December as December had an impact of the shopping season.

The traffic for the month was a little over 57 thousand sessions. For the first time, the site consistently breached 2000 daily visitors. And the traffic, in general, is trending up, so that is a good sign.

I experimented with adding YouTube videos to the site. The results were mixed. But when I peeled back the layers, I found that if relevant videos are added, the time spent on the page goes up (obviously, people are clicking and watching a part of the video).

I am not sure how that impacts SEO, but logic tells me that the Google Gods wouldn’t mind people staying longer on the site.

Activities and Accomplishments

January was largely spent fine-tuning my content publishing systems. The content agency grew rapidly as we put out quality content for others, so some of the writing resources were directed towards that. This means that I need to hire and train more writers, which is in the plans for the coming months.

What is Working?

Publishing quality content at scale is showing good results for the site. I am making sure that the content we put out meets our quality standards and provides value to the readers.

I have not focussed on doing a lot of on-page SEO in terms of adding keywords. I have found that it tends to crimp my writers’ style. I’d rather they craft great content than be straight-jacketed in a particular SEO approach.

Not to say that the likes of Market Muse or Page Optimizer Pro don’t have their roles. They do and I have subscriptions to all of them. My strategy is to let the published posts sit and marinate in the Google juices. Once they start seeing some traffic, I go back and edit them using Frase or Page Optimizer Pro.

What is not Working?

Keyword Research

Keyword research is working for me, but at my scale, I need keywords sprouting from a firehose. I need to find a way to do keyword research at scale. I have recently tried Ben Adler’s Keyword Chef and found it to be promising.

Clustering

Despite using Link Whisper, I do not think I am on top of the game when it comes to clustering. I am exploring ClusterAI to see if I can get help at scale when it comes to clustering.

Link Building

I have not done much link building to the site. I have used some services for white hat link building but frankly, I was underwhelmed by their performance. This is something that I need to learn and implement in-house to have the best control.

On the Horizon

Mediavine

This is something that I am most excited about. The site has just broken into the threshold of Mediavine and setting up ads on the site is going to be my top priority in the coming months. I expect that to add 1000-1500 dollars to the revenue once things stabilize.

Link Building

I am training a VA to help me with link building. She will start with responding to HARO emails. I have done a bit of that myself and found HARO links hard to get but the highest DR links that I can manage. Check out the HARO Service by Shawna Newman here. Or my course if you want to do it yourself.

Scaling Content

I am going to beef up my content writing team to keep publishing content at scale. My content agency also needs more writers as the demand for quality content keeps growing. I am currently publishing a million words a month for my sites and those of my clients. I want to scale it up to two million by June 2021.

Plans for the Next Quarter

I have built up a solid base from which I plan to launch other businesses to diversify my sources of revenue. The content publishing agency is one.

I have partnered with people where I invest and guide them and they run my websites. We sell and split the profits.

It is a win-win. My partners get to learn and earn at the same time. I get to work with motivated people to scale my sites. I am also planning to launch an e-commerce store in the coming quarter in partnership with someone who I have coached to build his online business.

Parting Thoughts

My niche sites are now my primary source of revenue. Something that started as a side hustle has become the core of my business.

With COVID impacting our lives in ways we haven’t even started to realize, there has been a fundamental shift in people’s behavior. There is a much greater acceptance of the online medium, be it meeting people virtually or shopping online. I want to catch this trend and ride it into this decade.