[Case Study] How We Generated $99k/Month in Ad Income in Under 3 Years

It’s been a while since we’ve done a case study on our websites and earnings, but we wanted to let you know that we smashed our previous record in November 2022 by earning almost $100k in just one month! See the details below.

To give you some context on our earnings, the first amount is from AdThrive for our largest website. The second amount is from Primis, a video ad provider, and this is only for our first website (our other websites don’t earn much with Primis, and some are on AdThrive video. The other AdThrive earnings are for our other three websites.

All of these earnings are from November 2022, which is our best month so far.

We used to have two more websites. One of them we sold in 2021 for around $80k, and the other one was smaller so we sold it directly to the buyer for around $12k. We can also share with you the niches that we sold. One was farming/gardening, and the other one was related to soccer.

Summary: How We Did It?

Before we dive into the traffic and revenue numbers, let me give you a brief overview of our approach.

Proper keyword research is by far the most important aspect of building websites.

Whenever we create a new site, we spend days, if not weeks, researching the niche and coming up with a long list of target keywords.

For each keyword, we analyze the competition, determine the optimal article length, choose the article title to optimize the CTR, and make additional notes/subheadings for our writers to use.

After we compile our list of keywords, the writing begins. We believe (and our case studies have confirmed) that publishing a LOT of content on a particular subject helps Google recognize you as an authority in the niche, which can lead to better (and potentially faster) rankings.

As for the motivation behind building websites, it’s a combination of our love for the niche and the desire to make money. We wanted to see if we could go after a large number of low-competition keywords, write articles quickly, see them rank quickly, and monetize the site with ads.

The goal was to reach over $1000 in monthly revenue quickly to make it sustainable, all without any link-building in the beginning. Just by producing a lot of high-quality content.

As you can see, we achieved our goal.

Now let’s take a look at some analytics and website earnings.

Analytics & Earnings from our sites

Here are some analytics from four of our websites.

Site 1

We’ll start by showing you data from our largest website over almost three years. It has had ups and downs, but it has consistently gotten good numbers. We’re also considering expanding our presence on social media because until now, we’ve only relied on search traffic and sometimes Google Discover.

This is the website we love in a niche we’re passionate about. That’s why we’ve invested so much time and money into building it. It has over 6,000 articles and we put a lot of effort into keyword research for it, which is crucial for its growth.

Here are its earnings, most come from AdThrive, but also one nice part from Primis Video.

Site 2

Our second website is about the same age as our first one. The main reason it hasn’t grown as much is that we’ve written significantly fewer articles for it – about 500-600.

Despite this, it still brings in good money and we still publish new articles on it from time to time or update old ones when they drop in rankings.

Here are its earnings.

Site 3

Our third website is the one we purchased in July 2022. We’ve put a lot of work into it because it’s in a niche that we’re passionate about. It doesn’t have as much potential as our first website, but we still love it. It’s an older site, but when we bought it, it had almost no traffic. In about six months, we were able to get it to earn more than $6k in a single month.

Black Friday was a big factor in these earnings, but it’s still really exciting to see these numbers from a website that we bought for around $50 and wasn’t making any money at all.

We’re consistently writing new articles for it and currently have around 500-600 articles on it. We hope that the next year will be even better for the website, once Google updates return to normal.

Site 4

This is also a website that we purchased in a niche we’re passionate about. The site is more than 10 years old and we paid $10k for it. We bought the site at the end of September.

We had hoped it would perform better since it’s an old site with already high-quality articles, but it hasn’t had huge growth even though we’re writing a lot of new content. The most likely reason is that the previous owner didn’t write on it for about a year and a half, so it may take some time for Google to recognize that we’re actively publishing new content.

Even so, as you can see from the earnings, the site will pay for itself in less than a year – actually, a lot less than a year. And with earnings like this, we could even sell it for at least $30k now.

Site 5

Now I’d like to show you one of the websites we started about four months ago. The first article was published on September 13. Here is its analytics.

As you can see, in around over four months the site has started to grow really well. This isn’t something that often happens with new websites – not for us or for our clients. Google tends to wait and make sure a website is legitimate before it starts ranking it. We usually expect it to take about a year for a website to earn Google’s trust. However, we were lucky with this one and it started growing strong a lot earlier.

We haven’t started monetizing this site yet and probably won’t until it gets around 30-50k page views per month. We believe that ads can slow a website’s growth in the beginning (but that might just be our imagination). In any case, it wouldn’t bring in much money so we don’t want to risk it.

We haven’t done anything special with this site. We just did a lot of keyword research, wrote around 200 articles, and formatted it like we usually do, with our original images.

What else are we working on?

We’re currently working on four new websites, one of which I showed you earlier. We started all three of them at around the same time in September.

They don’t have much progress yet because Google takes some time to release new websites from its sandbox (kind of like a filter for new sites).

However, we’re writing a lot of articles for them and expect them to start showing some good numbers by the end of summer 2023.

We’d like to invite you to follow our progress and start building your own websites with our content writing service. There are other content writing services out there, but we don’t believe any of them can show you good results from their own websites. That’s why you should choose the one that really knows what it’s doing.

If you’d like to learn more, you can check out our blog for examples of our writing, our portfolio to see the original images we’ve created for our clients, and our prices. If you have any questions, you can send us a message at [email protected].

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