| Month | Posts published | Total posts | Users | Pageviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec | 30 | 123 | 349 | 461 |
| Jan | 14 | 137 | 1,170 | 1,509 |
| Feb (first week) | 2 | 139 | 423 | 511 |
You can see the start of the case study here and all of the updates here. In this case study, we’re taking an expired domain that sat doing nothing for a while up against a low DR competitor who had a lot of traffic.
I was going to wait and publish an update at the end of the month but I’m headed for a break on the beach in Spain so I figured I should update now. Have you tried writing up a case study from the beach? Between the sand and the sun glare on the screen – it’s just not worth the Instagram photo.
The TL;DR of this case study is we’re taking an expired domain up against a low authority competitor in a niche where it’s easy to reproduce content and (somewhat unsurprisingly) the site is growing. Compared to most SEO projects – It’s growing quickly.
I put out a few dozen articles as a proof of concept to see what would happen and the growth almost right away was a clear answer. It takes about half an hour to produce content for the site which is good.
The interesting part is that it takes almost as little time for that content to reach page #1.
I published a bit of content over the first couple of weeks just to get a proof of concept and to see what would happen. The early results were good but the consistent growth means it’s a project worth pushing even further.
This month we’ve been averaging about 50-60 visitors a day. That’s not buying an early retirement anytime soon but only a few weeks ago we were averaging closer to 10 visitors a day. Plus, most of this content still has plenty of time to age in properly and scaling up the content production also means a bonus to topical relevance.
The future plan is as straightforward as the results have been so far. Scale the content production and add some display ads and affiliate offers into the mix. Projects start to get interesting once they can pay for their own growth so that’s the first milestone we’re aiming for.
Given the potential RPM of the niche and the ease of content production, if this growth continues anywhere near this rate it could have a positive cash flow within a couple of months. For an SEO project that isn’t half bad.
I wish all my case studies were this easy. ‘I published a few dozen articles and my traffic went up almost 5x right away‘.