[CASE STUDY] How We Built a 12-Month-Old Site to $6195 a Month!

Update: We have updated the case study so that you can see how the site has grown over the last 45 days. Spoiler alert: the growth is huge!

Let’s get into the case study!

One of our sites just made $6195 in one month!

The interesting part?

The site is just 12 months old! We started the site in the last days of July 2020.

Since then, we have published more than 800 articles on the site, but about 70% of them are less than six months old.

A year later, in the last 30 days, the site made $6195 with AdThrive!

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 do 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 this site?

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 9 months later, we got the site to AdThrive, and in the first 30 days saw more than double what we expected.

In the process of finding the topics to write about, we used methods taught by Jim&Ricky from Income School and Morten, founder of the Passive Income Geek course.

Update (45 days after the last screenshot):

The site’s growth in the last 45 days was really good.

The revenue in the last 45 days went from $2147 to $6195 in just 45 days.

Number of Articles Published

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

We aimed to write roughly two articles per day.

Meaning, in a year, we would write more than 800 articles (I believe we will write even more than that, especially now when we see amazing results).

The 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

That is a lot of content.

You are probably wondering how things played out through months.

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

Traffic Growth

Despite the impressive numbers the site is pulling, its growth is even more impressive.

Here is the month by month comparison of the site’s pageviews:

Here is how the traffic on Google Search Console looked:

And here is how the traffic on Google Search Console looks now:

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 gives 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.

It grew for more than 210,000 pageviews in a month! I mean, this is just crazy!

The reason for such high growth in new users and pageviews is that we still have more than 70% of articles less than six months old!

This site had 428,470 pageviews in the last 30 days, and it is only 12 months old!

The majority of the traffic is from the US:

This leads us to the probably most interesting part for you…

… monetization and revenue. 🙂

Revenue Overview

The main goal for this site was to monetize it with ads.

Although there are some Amazon links there, the focus is not on selling affiliate products.

Once the site reached 100k pageviews per month, we monetized it with AdThrive.

In the last 30 days, the site made $6195.

Here is the whole history of the site earnings on AdThrive:

The RPM is currently $14.53 on average, and the earnings are steadily increasing every day.

Taking the time of the year and time on AdThrive into consideration, the RPM should be increasing in the upcoming months.

What We Learned

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!

We have another case study, of a site 14 months old, with fewer articles, visitors and page views, but still earns more than $2500 a month. So feel free to check it out.

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After reading this case study, are you interested in learning more about how we did it first hand?

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