We’re already 1/3 in July so it’s time for the monthly report of Project Alpha and Beta for June.
In June, I moved to Chiang Mai. I took a couple of days to find a condo, find a good coworking space, see what the nightlife has to offer here and connect with some people in the affiliate SEO community.
Most of my working time was dedicated to client work. Because of the client work and the move to Chiang Mai, I didn’t have that much time to dedicate to my affiliate sites as I’d liked to. But it does provide me some cash that I can invest in content and linkbuilding now.
So, let’s dive in the results for June 2020!
Project Alpha
Content
Goals for June were to write and publish 6 money pages + write and publish 8 supporting/informational articles.
These goals were not achieved. And that’s exactly the reason why I started OnlineHustleIncome. To make myself accountable for goals that are not achieved. It’s easy to say that I didn’t have time because of other work. But I really really have to prioritise these projects more.
Anyway, all I managed to do was write and publish 1 informational article myself. I hired a copywriter to write a 6000+ words money page and published the page.
In terms of content, very little has been added but I’m glad to say that for the first 10 days in July, I already have more content published.
Links
On the linkbuilding part, I got a few more directory links. So far, an evolution like this with a few links every month looks like a good approach to me.
I did add/optimize some internal links, on older posts as well. So this should let incoming link juice spread around the website a little more.
Rankings
As you can see in the graph above, I’m starting to rank for some more keywords. As the domain will hit the one year mark any time soon, the age will definitely help to rank for more keywords soon.
Slowly, I’m getting a few top 3 positions by now.
Traffic
After seeing the rankings graph, you probably expected the traffic to be up again. However, I had less visitors in June than I had in May. I have 2 reasonable explanations for this:
- Corona – as the world in the Netherlands returned a little more to (the new) normal again, it only makes sense this niche got less visitors even though rankings have remained stable or got better
- Seasonality – even without Corona changing the behaviour of everyone in the world, this niche has less search volume in the summer months anyway.
And for the first days of July, things are looking a lot better already. So I’m hoping to report a nice incline in visitors next month.
Revenue
Last month, this site made it’s first sale. And I probably was happy too soon. Because a few days after writing the monthly report for may, the sale got rejected. Hence, no commission was earned.
As far as June goes, no new sale was made.
Concluding, this site has not given me any returns yet so far.
Goals for next month
In my opinion goals should be ambitious. If you manage to achieve your goals every time, you’re probably not setting the bar high enough. So even though I didn’t manage to achieve my goals last month, that won’t hold me back to set ambitious goals for July.
- Publish 6 new money pages
- Publish 6 supporting/informational articles
- Get 5 guest posts
- Get 15 link directory links
- Update/optimize 4 older articles
I still want to create the lead magnet. But I’d rather wait a little more to do that. First I want to analyze better what kind of content is working best. I’d like my lead magnet to be very relevant to the content my visitors are looking for.
Project Beta
Content
I didn’t publish any new content for Project Beta.
What I noticed is that not all content has been indexed yet. I’m seeing that Google has problems indexing new content since COVID-19 hit the world. I’m seeing indexing problems with Project Alpha and other sites as well.
These indexing problems have been reported on various SEO news sites as well so I’m confident that these problems will be solved as soon as Google gets it’s shit together again.
However, because most of the content not being indexed yet, I’m a little more hesitant to publish a shitload of content to this site. If the new content doesn’t get crawled/indexed, there’s little value in adding more content in my opinion.
Links
In June, I bought 3 guest posts. In total, this set me back €382. Not the cheapest guest posts obviously but I’m confident this will start to move the needle just a little bit.
Next to the guest posts I got myself a few directory links, and did some blog commenting. Most of these links haven’t been picked up by Ahrefs just yet.
Rankings
For the few pages that have been indexed already, I got my first rankings keywords in June. A good start and hoping to see this evolution to become the start of an upward trend.
There are no top 3 or even top 10 rankings to report just yet, but those should start to be dripping in anytime soon.
Traffic
Since I did a test with paid traffic before, I’ve only included organic visitors in the graph above.
I seem to slowly get my first real organic visitors. Let’s hope that the other content gets indexed soon, so the amount of organic visitors starts rising soon.
Revenue
With this amount of (organic) visitors, it won’t surprise you that I don’t have any revenue to report.
Well, I actually did get 2 sales for a total of €4,95 in commission. But I attribute these sales to the paid traffic.
Goals for next month
I believe this site just needs some more time to get more traction. I do want to drip a little more content and do some linkbuilding through directories but I’m hesitant to invest cash on guest posts.
These guest posts don’t come cheap and I rather see a little more traffic/revenue before heavily investing in this project any more. It’s all about keeping a right balance, right? 😉
So these are my goals for project beta:
- 2 informational/supporting posts
- 2 product review posts
- 2 money pages
- 5 directory links
- do some design tweaks and double check if every page is monetized with affiliate links on every page
That’s it for this month.
Take care guys!