Early Results On My 1st Content Site? Good/Bad?

[timaay]

I've gotten so much out of other case studies here on BuSo, especially from some of the more experienced guys chiming in with advice and tips that I am inspired to share my 1st content site experiment with you all so that hopefully someone else gets something out of it and hopefully i get even more valuable advice as well.

I'm hoping to get some feedback as to whether or not I'm on the right track here and if my results are poor, average, good or better than good for the age of the site and my efforts so far.

Background: I stumbled on BuSo earlier this year and became inspired to start a content site but struggled figuring out the niche, etc... that I wanted to start out in. My background is as an agency owner, very experiened with SEO, website development, paid ads management, influencer marketing, systems/processes, etc... I just do it all for clients and had never created a content/display/affiliate type website myself before.

At anycase I have been a domainer as well and as I was trying to figure out what niche, etc... to jump into and I saw that I had a domain that I had scooped up many years ago that I had done nothing with (except I had some minimal content on it to age it).

The domain was originally registered in 2008 and I think I acquired it back in 2012 or so... It had thousands of backlinks, media mentions, nice brandable name, etc... so I settled on using this domain name. The topic and market that it's history is in seemed perfect for a content site. Huge niche, lots of keywords, plenty of affiliate programs, lots of big players in the niche, etc... Not a niche I would have chosen but what the heck I thought I'd give it a go since I had forgotten about the domain and site so that's what I did I figured I'd test out building a content site with this domain. I launched the site in June of this year 2022 with about 5 articles initially.

Processes: Again, I own an agency with full time employees, etc... so I'm very familiar with systems/processes & SOP's but did not want to utilize any of my team to work on this. Not sure if it's strange or not but I just didn't want any of my team to know i'm doing things on the side, etc... even though it helps keep me sharp on many levels but still I just didn't want to utilize my agency for anything at all and just keep that separate. My point is that I quickly fleshed out a system to hire writers, editors, uploaders, etc... from reading on here and other places online and setup my 'conveyor belt' for pushing out content. I had to find a good team so it took me a couple months to find good writers that were affordable, good editors, uploaders, etc... I found some good people and then flu season hit a couple months ago and so i spun my wheels waiting on people to get back to work after being sick, etc..

It's been slow but I feel like i'm finally ready to scale. I limped along for the first 2.5 months adding a total of like 20 articles or so but now at the middle of the 4th month there is 80 articles on the site. These are unique articles written and researched by real humans following a detailed research and content template I created.

Current Metrics & Team:
Currently my team is 3 writers, 3 editors, one uploader and one content brief creator. All together my team can put together a 1,500 - 2,000 word article for approximately;

1. Content brief - $6
2. Writing: $27
3. Editing: $10
4. Publishing/Formatting/Image Addition: $12

Total: $55 per piece (between 1,500 to 2,000 words and 2 images)

I wouldn't consider the content 'the best of the best' out there but it's definitely good. It's unique, no fluff, answers the underlying question the keyword poses and seems to be performing well in search results so far.

Outside of getting the articles on the website I have a dedicated person doing custom Pinterest graphics and she has the monthly views on Pinterest up to about 120k monthly views (not many clicks at all to the website from Pinterest though, do people ever leave that site?). She's been working on the Pinterest page for like 3 months so far.

All I do is find keywords and give them to my content brief creator who researches and creates a detailed content brief based on a template and research method I created for them. After that i'm not involved and the content gets published to the site following the SOPs' I created without me having to do anything other than help move things from one phase to another (ie... editor requested a rewrite and the writer hasn't responded for a day or two so in that case I jump in and make sure the writer saw the request, etc...).

Again, this is my first time going through this process and the site was launched in June so it's about 4 to 4.5 months old right now.

Here is the search console performance so far;

If the link above doesn't work here's search console stats;

-Almost 5,000 clicks from organic search
-100k impressions
-5% CTR
-Avg position 11.6

Ahref Stats;

-I have some top 5 rankings for keywords in the 1k to 2k volume search terms already
-Ahrefs has me at 712 organic keywords, 2.3k organic traffic, 253 RD's, and 4.5k backlinks

*Again this is since June 2022 so i set search console to last 6 months but the site is only 4.5 months old at this point.

Earnings:

I just put Ezoic ads on it exactly 30 days ago and it earned $30 this first month. Not exactly lighting up the revenue in the early days but it's something I guess.

Questions:

1. Are these really positive results, good results, average results or below average results so far?

2. For an aged domain that i'm using exactly as it was used/aged previously in the past... will this speed up the uptake on gaining new traffic? The previous usage of it was completely legit and not spammy in anyway.

3. I have approximately 80+ articles on the site currently and my system is producing ~50 new articles per month now. I could easily ramp that up but I'm hesitant to until the earnings increase and I know that it's not all for nothing... any thoughts/advice on this?

Again, this is my first time going through this process and the site was launched in June so it's about 4 to 4.5 months old right now so I guess I'm trying to gauge how things are going so far? I'm also happy to answer any questions but again this is my first time going through this process so it's all a learning process.

Thanks!

 

[Zoro]

I think every article needs time to mature but your 5% CTR looks really promising.
And your AP of 11 looks really good aswell.

Have you read the SEO Avalanche Teqnique?

One thing with articles that is good to work towards is the idea to spread the posts to grow in the visitor range you are in.

30 articles at 0-10 visitors tier a month =~ 300 visitors
30 articles at 10-20 visitors tier a month =~ 600 visitors
30 articles at 20-50 visitors tier a month =~ 1,500 visitors
30 articles at 50-100 visitors tier a month =~ 3,000 visitors
30 articles at 100-200 visitors tier a month =~ 6,000 visitors
30 articles at 200-500 visitors tier a month =~ 15,000 visitors

 

[timaay]

Thanks Zoro. Yes I did my first 30-40 articles with low comp low volume keywords and i started ranking for them as soon as they were indexed so I moved up to 500 volume and now targeting over 1,000 word volumes. Occasionally I go for a big boy with 5,000 volume and waiting to see when those posts mature to see if I'm in the running for those types of keywords yet or not.

Any thoughts with timelines using an aged/mature domain name in the same niche as the domain name was previously used? In Ahrefs history of DR for the domain it used to be as high as a 35 back in 2016 but gradually came down as it wasn't being used so i'm hopeful that I can relight the pilot light on it and get it back to being an authority. It sits at DR 7 now.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I think it's great that you got your assembly line team in place at the start, working on keeping the conveyer belt moving. That's a huge roadblock for solopreneurs who've never done it before and get too deep in the weeds later to feel like they can stop and take care of it.

Total: $55 per piece (between 1,500 to 2,000 words and 2 images)

That's really solid. I'm avoiding bringing writers in-house, so with formatting, image finding (many multiples more images than you), and publishing, I'm looking at around $100 per article at around 1500 words in length on average. I'm sure I could shave some off there by having writers, but for the scale I want to reach I don't think it's going to be sensible. I'd rather pay the extra to have them trained well enough by someone else and let someone else manage them and their deliverables.

she has the monthly views on Pinterest up to about 120k monthly views (not many clicks at all to the website from Pinterest though, do people ever leave that site?).

Pinterest changed their algorithm recently and it tanked at least 90% of the people's outbound clicks that I've seen discussing it. The two main issues are that they don't want people clicking out of their site and are working to minimize that, and that they want to be more of a social network (short lived pins like on a newsfeed) rather than a visual search engine (longer lasting traffic). It's been a giant waste of time for me so far, to the point where I've dropped what I'm doing there to a bare minimum during my post-publishing routine.

1. Are these really positive results, good results, average results or below average results so far?

It's a good sign for the 5 month mark, I'd say. You'll really know what's going on by month 12 through 16, I'd say. Things should really start popping off then.

2. For an aged domain that i'm using exactly as it was used/aged previously in the past... will this speed up the uptake on gaining new traffic? The previous usage of it was completely legit and not spammy in anyway.

Maybe. It sounds like you let it sit a long time. If you set up all your 301 redirects and everything, it should help. If you let it all sit unindexed with 404's where juicy links were pointing, I think that Google can come to re-trust those links over time, but not any time soon. I'd give it a full year at least. Hearing that you dropped to DR7 makes it sound like you had 404's. That's how Ahrefs handles it, it seems, by not counting links pointing to dead pages.

3. I have approximately 80+ articles on the site currently and my system is producing ~50 new articles per month now. I could easily ramp that up but I'm hesitant to until the earnings increase and I know that it's not all for nothing... any thoughts/advice on this?

I'm a fan of front-loading a site for a bit so it has a real chance to produce a meaningful income, and then making it pay its own way from there. But if you feel you're doing everything right and you're starting to get feedback from Google that shows they think the same, slowing down at any point is dumb. We're just kicking the can down the road at that point.

50 articles per month is a great number to be at in general. Ramping it up could be greater. I look at a LOT of sites on Ahrefs and since they added the whole "Organic Pages" count that is overlaid on the same graph as "Organic Traffic" I've gained a lot of insight about how and when sites grow. Some of the most successful sites I've seen will ramp up to 1,000 and 2,000 posts (and never slow down after that) before they start getting any traction. Which is to say they come out of the gates swinging with the faith that it'll play out in time, and it does if they're doing everything else right and not sabotaging themselves.

I'd say to go full steam ahead at whatever seems reasonable for you, and expect to wait a solid year or more (from now, not from day one) to reap the benefits. I'm to the point that I feel like whatever seeds I'm planting now, I won't be reaping a harvest for 12 months, especially with how Google is acting these days. That's their best weapon against spammers. And while waiting is the worst thing we can be doing (I mean 'losing momentum'), all we have to do is work and wait. But while waiting we should be working, always planting seeds.

 

[timaay]

@Ryuzaki thank you for all of that especially the tip about Ahrefs 'organic pages' I have not noticed that feature before. It's incredibly helpful to plug competitors into there and see the history and relationship to pages and organic traffic over time. Wow.

Yes there are a lot of 404's that I need to clean up that have sat there over time. I just don't even know where to redirect them as a lot of backlinks that went to internal pages were for interview type content pages where the previous site owner was interviewed, etc... so I guess I just have to create something as similar as possible to the content and redirect it there?

Regarding the writers and team, I found some non-native English speaking writers that put out good content and then hired native English editors to correct any non-native sounding English and sentence structures. Seems to be working for now but the niche is one that can easily be researched and not technical in anyway. I think it would be ALOT harder to operate this way if the subject matter was complicated.

I'll keep this updated with progress and see if fixing all of the 404's helps the DR and traffic.

 

[Philip J. Fry]

50 articles a month at $55/article is $2.700 in spend a month on content. Not that bad. What's the market size you're aiming at? How much do you want to risk? I mean, it is more sane to do marginal growth but if you're sure, you can do more. Also, if you see that the pot is higher, you an invest more too.

Also, how much content is your competitors publishing? Would be interesting to know.

As for 404's, yeah dude, just order cheap 500 word article there and have it reword what was on archive.org but in a unique way so that the LSI matches up. Not that hard.

 

[tziahs]

You are spending a hefty amount of money on content per month, as the previous post mentions. You'll need to carefully see if the earnings are growing up. For instance, you spend $2,700 per month, but you also see if your earnings are going up. I would expect a minimum of 50 percent increase month-on-month.

Open up a spreadsheet and try to create a forecast of your earnings vs. costs. It's perfectly normal to spend a lot of money in the beginning, but you have to at least see some growth in income.

For now, you are doing good! Keep up the good work!

 

[timaay]

50 articles a month at $55/article is $2.700 in spend a month on content. Not that bad. What's the market size you're aiming at? How much do you want to risk? I mean, it is more sane to do marginal growth but if you're sure, you can do more. Also, if you see that the pot is higher, you an invest more too.

Also, how much content is your competitors publishing? Would be interesting to know.

As for 404's, yeah dude, just order cheap 500 word article there and have it reword what was on archive.org but in a unique way so that the LSI matches up. Not that hard.

Market is gigantic... i don't want to narrow it down too much but it's basically a one word market that has a lot of commercial intent.

Competition is publishing less than me for sure. Competition is mostly hobby type individuals... but the advantage they have is that they seem to all be networked and friendly with each other. I can't do that as I'm not the typical stereotype that anyone would think would be the source of this content (my persona is but these people go to conferences, etc... and become friends and my persona can't do that). They seem to be pushing out 4 to 5 per week where I'm pushing out 10+ per week or more at a minimum. Their pieces are more emotional and not targeted specifically to keywords as they don't seem to be too savvy with SEO overall.

Thanks for the info regarding 404's you've inspired me to just deal with it. I know and understand SEO to a high level but for some reason seem to complicate it when it's my own stuff. I get it now, thank you for that Phillip J Fry!

You are spending a hefty amount of money on content per month, as the previous post mentions. You'll need to carefully see if the earnings are growing up. For instance, you spend $2,700 per month, but you also see if your earnings are going up. I would expect a minimum of 50 percent increase month-on-month.

Open up a spreadsheet and try to create a forecast of your earnings vs. costs. It's perfectly normal to spend a lot of money in the beginning, but you have to at least see some growth in income.

For now, you are doing good! Keep up the good work!

Thank you! Yes, i'm spending money on this... I plan to keep it going for the time being. I'm not looking for a few extra bucks in income, i'm looking to build a real brand and an authority site that has major influence in it's respective space. With that being said I don't regret the money spent. Some money will be wasted as I learn, some will be deployed well... I'm just trying to deploy the funds in the best way possible :-)

I guess the reason I've asked for feedback is that i was optimistic but yet still had doubts, as i think we all do. I have the funds but yet don't want to waste my money, time, or efforts. I believe I'm on the right track but only time will tell, right?

I like your thought process of "a minimum of 50 percent increase month-on-month" and will look at that as time goes on. @Ryuzaki gave me a great tip about the Ahrefs graph that shows pages versus organic traffic, and since he mentioned that I've been analyzing competitors like a mad man. What I'm seeing for my site versus many, many, other sites makes me feel good about these early metrics.

There's definitely nuances, algo updates, etc... so i'm trying to truly understand the reasons why the graphs go up and down and I believe that's where the real money is - understanding it all and making educated guesses about what the next best guess is that you should do to move forward.

 

[timaay]

Starting to get some traction with nice growth in December (and continuing so far into Jan).

Income: Up to about $2.50 per day but the RPM is terrible, like $6 bucks or something like that so I'm really looking forward to growing enough to get into mediavine or adthrive. The market RPM should be from my research around $15 or more.

Content: Currently 120 posts live on the site with a lot of 1st page rankings, and some acctual #1 rankings.

Social: I've had Pinterest going for some time but now on FB, Insta, YouTube and Tiktok.

Thoughts: I think i've gotten enough positive signals from Google that I'm ready to go 'all in' now and put some volume to the content production. I'll see a post index and then land on the 1st page next day and stay there which is nice. 4+ months ago i'd see new posts land on page 2 or 3 and then disappear and then come back. Now they land 1st page and stick (for the right keywords of course).

I think my plan here will be to keep my conveyor belt 'as is' around 50 per month and then seek out batches of content from one of the content agencies for comparison purposes. I'll start with 100 articles and get that uploaded separate from what my team is already doing and see if it makes sense to do it that way or ramp up the conveyor belt. For some reason I feel that messing with something that is currently working would be the wrong thing to do. It took me some time to get all the kinks worked out with each team member and ramping that up and adding additional editors/writers into the mix introduces new variables/confusion and questions as well as mistakes, at least that's how i'm looking at it.

So next major task/goal is to get 100 articles completed and uploaded in parallel to what my content team is already doing. I don't have the keywords or briefs prepared as of yet so lots to do!!

 

[MrMedia]

Seems promising. Early days still. Keep going.
I honestly have no idea how or why you guys are spending 55-100 bucks per article at 1500 words. Is it really that research / skill intensive?

 

[timaay]

@MrMedia I used your method of asking them to do a free article and if I liked it, I paid them and hired them. My experience was that I was getting non-native English speakers for the most part, and the good ones were thorough, followed directions, and could write well enough but there was always a non-native English weirdness to their finished piece. So I hired English speaking Editors with the task of "smoothing out" non-native sounding sentence structures, spelling, etc... which obviously adds to the cost.

As you said it's the early days so I I'll keep looking and try to find lower priced quality writers as I agree I think i'm paying a lot for content too.

As a side note, anxiously awaiting your update to the volume content thread! Thanks for chiming in here.

 

[MrMedia]

Makes sense but you’ll find it hard to scale out at that price unless you dump a load of cash in to start up. How will you afford to get to 50k words per week? Know what I mean?

 

[timaay]

I understand. In your experience doesn't offering a writer more work allow them to lower their price? Do you offer them a flat rate (salary) with the expectation of the volume you expect or are you still on Upwork paying them on milestones?

Prior to getting where you are at now when you were doing less content per week were you still able to get good writers at those same rates?

I hadn't thought about it the way you pose the question, i guess to me that would be nice problem to have but yeah my wheels are turning now... thank you.