Case Study Update – Month 9 Project “s²”

Remember how I said things were about to pop, and then they did?

Well, it happened again, in April.

Yay. 🥳

If you’re not aware, here’s the tl;dr on the site specs:

• Cloudways Vultr hosting from the start
• Ezoic ads from the start
• GeneratePress Theme (basic setup)
• Aged Domain (22 years ripe)

Let’s break down the growth and earnings, shall we?

Google Analytics Traffic

Well, the site came in at just over 41k page views for the month of April. It’s nice to see a big chunk of success at once. Once you’ve been blogging a while, something like this feels like an “overnight” success, even though it was months in the making. The mixture of aged domain and low-competition keywords is definitely paying off.

That’s another 20% increase from last month (which also had a 20% increase). But, as I said, I’ve been targeting mostly low-competition keywords, which are also pretty low search volume. Sure, some end up getting a few thousand PV’s, but on average, it’s between 200-400 per post, so I strongly doubt another 20% boost at this point.

But, I’ll take it if it comes…

Let’s Talk Money

For April, month 9 of this website, the Ezoic earnings were $701.84.

Last month’s earnings were $570.49. That’s a 23% increase. It’s no 300% growth from last month, but I’ve come to learn that expecting continuous growth is a recipe for psychological suffering. This sh*t is dynamic, it ebbs and flows, but hopefully more so in one direction than the other.

Wow, just wow. It’s not something that’s going to get Neil Patel’s attention, but I try to treat this like how in Mario Kart you can race your “ghost” self in time trials.

That was an unnecessarily nerdy way of saying that I’m competing against myself, and right now, I’m winning.

And losing.

Wait, what?

So, What’s the Plan?

I’m currently doing monthly orders of 50k words from PassionPosts. I’ll continue targeting fairly low competition keywords across different categories. Once things are a bit more settled in my life, I plan on writing some content for higher competition keywords and really building out some E.A.T. for the site.

I also want to start getting familiar with Matt Giovanisci’s Carbonate 2.0 WordPress theme in order to utilize it on the new site. I love Carbonate, but it’s a little intimidating. I’m going to test out the new 2.0 version on this site first, and figure out how I want to implement it on the new one.

And, of course, I plan to keep killin’ the game.