[CASE STUDY] 21 Months Journey to $25k/Month Only from Ads (Without Link Building)

We just made $25,011 only from ads in one month, across four websites!

The interesting part?

We have done it in 21 months! We started our first site in the last days of 2019 when things were still normal in the world.

Since then, we have published a lot of articles, about 3000 articles in total across all three websites.

A year and a half later, in the last 30 days, those three sites made $25,011 with AdThrive alone (no affiliates at all)!

* Site #4 has been on the AdThrive for only 18 days

Here is how we did it…

Summary: How We Did It?

Before we move on to the traffic and revenue numbers, let me give a quick summary of the approach we took.

Proper keyword research is by far the most important thing when it comes to building websites.

Whenever we build a site, we spend days, if not weeks, simply researching the niche and coming up with a long list of keywords to go after.

For every keyword, we:

• analyze the competition,
• calculate the optimal article size,
• choose the article title to optimize the CTR,
• and make some additional notes/subheadings for our writers to use.

After we make the keyword list to go after, the writing starts.

We believe (and our case studies confirm this) that publishing A LOT of content on the subject helps Google identify you as an authority in the niche.

This will lead to better (and maybe even faster) rankings.

Idea and Motivation

So, what was the motivation behind starting to build websites?

Love for the niche and money, of course. 🙂

But the idea was to get to more than $1000 in monthly revenue fast so that it could be sustainable…

… and without any link building in the beginning…

… just with producing a LOT of quality content.

We wanted to see if we can go after a ton of keywords with low competition, write the articles fast, see them rank quickly, and monetize the site with the ads.

About 20 months later…, well you can see our results below from AdThrive.

Site #1

This is our third, newest, and biggest site.

It is ‘only’ 17 months old! And I say only because to get to $18k in 17 months is really not an easy task.

This site is growing just crazy. Check out its monthly earnings and pageviews on the image below.

Again, in the beginning, low competition keywords, then when Google recognized us, we started writing on everything.

As you will see, more than half of its posts are less than 6 months old and still need to start ranking.

Site #2

Here is our second site.

It is 19 months old and it is bringing over $4400 per month, and constantly growing from month to month.

We pushed a lot of content here, and still are, so we did put in some amount of money, but in about 3 months it paid off.

Again, low competition keywords at first until we got some authority, after that, a lot of content on all keywords in this niche. I have to say we are becoming one of the bigger authorities in this space.

We expect a lot of growth in the next few months, and especially as the pandemic starts to calm down.

Site #3

This is the first niche site we started in late 2019. As it was our first one, we made a lot of mistakes on it.

Still, after we learned a lot through our other sites and working with a lot of clients, we managed to make this site start ranking.

How we did it, well only with targeting low competition keywords done by the same keyword research we offer to our clients.

As you can see, we just brought it on AdThrive and it is already earning pretty nice.

Site #4

This is one of the newer sites we started, in 2020.

There are around ‘only’ 130 articles on it, and we don’t expect much from it, because we don’t really work a lot on it.

How we did it, well only with targeting low competition keywords done by the same keyword research we offer to our clients.

As you can see, we just brought it on AdThrive and it is already earning pretty nice.

Number of Articles Published

As previously mentioned, the idea was to publish a lot of content.

Site #1

The third site was created on June 29, 2020, and in the first few months, we published around 30 articles, all written by me.

Even though the quality was not the best, and I am not a native writer, some of those articles still bring the most pageviews.

In August 2020 (about 30 days later), we decided to give the articles to our writers to start producing a lot of content and see how it will work out.

Here are the numbers of articles published on the site month by month:

Month	Articles Published
July 2020	30
August 2020	54
September 2020	52
October 2020	59
November 2020	64
December 2020	65
January 2021	73
February 2021	82
March 2021	84
April 2021	93
May 2021	108
June 2021	127
July 2021	183
August 2021	297
September 2021	356

Site #2

The second site was created in February 2020, and in the first few months, we published just ten articles and wanted to give up on the case study.

The reason for that is we were writing the articles ourselves, and we just didn’t have the time to do it.

Two months later, in April 2020, we decided to give the articles to our writers to start producing a lot of content and see how it will work out.

Here are the numbers of articles published on the site month by month:

Month	Articles Published
April 2020	28
May 2020	83
June 2020	34
July 2020	18
August 2020	21
September 2020	18
October 2020	25
November 2020	21
December 2020	17
January 2021	73
February 2021	11
March 2021	12
April 2021	6
May 2021	13
June 2021	24
July 2021	22
August 2021	31
September 2021	35

Site #3

The first site we made doesn’t have that much content. The first 100 are a big miss. First and most importantly in terms of wrong keyword research. In our defense, it was our first website built this way, without link building.

Here are the numbers of articles published on the site month by month:

Month	Articles Published
January 2020	30
February 2020	30
March 2020	15
April 2020	15
May 2020	10
June 2020	0
July 2020	0
August 2020	0
September 2020	0
October 2020	0
November 2020	0
December 2020	0
January 2021	17
February 2021	20
March 2021	14
April 2021	24
May 2021	19
June 2021	16
July 2021	19
August 2021	24
September 2021	16

That is a lot of content.

You are probably wondering how things played out through the months.

Let’s take a look at the traffic growth of the sites.

Traffic Numbers

Take a look at the numbers these three sites are pulling.

Site #1

This site actually started to rank pretty fast.

We could see some happenings around 3-4 months.

Nothing major, but still very nice to see, and it gave us more reason to continue working on it.

After that, the large amount of content we wrote started to kick off…

… and it is growing rapidly.

More and more articles are starting to rank high, and the numbers are just increasing.

Take a look at its curve.

It grew for more than 200,000 pageviews in the last sixty days! I mean, this is just crazy!

The reason for such high growth in new users and pageviews is that we still have more than 50% of articles less than six months old!

This site had 942,384 pageviews in the last 30 days, and it is only 16 months old!

The majority of the traffic is from the US:

Let’s take a look at our second site.

Site #2

The first 6-7 months are a ghost town… as it usually is.

After that, the large amount of content we wrote started to kick off…

… and it is growing rapidly.

More and more articles are starting to rank high, and the numbers are just increasing.

It took us a year to get to 100k pageviews per month. Pretty awesome! 😀

The majority of the traffic is from the US:

Let’s take a look at our third site.

Site #3

This site took a very long time to get to some decent numbers.

As I already said, we made bad keyword research, and no writing in the world can save it if you don’t find topics that a new site can rank for. At least not without link building (and this site has no link building whatsoever – we will have to start working on HARO for it).

That said, all the new keywords we found, started ranking pretty fast because it looks like its age has brought it out of the Google sandbox.

Now, even the old keywords are starting to rank, but again, bad keyword research, those don’t have expected search volume. Still, it brings sites overall authority in the niche.

Take a look at its growth curve. It really does look nice, even though the numbers are nowhere near like the next two sites.

What We Learned and What The Future Holds

There are ways to build a good passive income without the site being the affiliate one, or building links.

Writing a lot of content and targeting the right keywords can bring a lot of traffic which can be monetized really nicely with ads…

… and this case study shows that!

All four of our sites are growing pretty fast as can see above, and that is really nice to see.

But, what also makes us happy is our fifth site, which we just applied for the AdThrive (it just reached 30k page views)!

We expect to see it on AdThrive in a matter of days!

We will update our case study with the fight site and with more info on the growth of the old ones. Stay tuned! 😀