Just over 30 days ago, we launched an authority site case study to document the ROI of adding content to existing niche sites and authority sites vs the ROI of building out fresh sites from scratch.
I gave an update nearly two weeks ago on how two of our sites where performing, and today have another update with two more weeks of earnings to be revealed!
I’ve also calculated how much earnings the new content added to sites to this point needs to earn by the 90 day mark for us to achieve our goal of paying the content off within 90 days of adding it.
Let’s take a look!
Site A – Finance Niche
| Week Commencing | Pages added | Unique Visits | Traffic increase week on week | Traffic increase – last 4 weeks | Earnings from new content | Notes |
| 28th May | no | 190 | NA | NA | NA | Top KW pos 11 |
| 4th June | no | 195 | 103% | NA | NA | Top KW pos 9 |
| 11th June | no | 260 | 133% | NA | NA | Top KW pos 10 |
| 18th June | no | 365 | 140% | 192% | NA | Top KW pos 10 |
| 25th June | no | 419 | 115% | 215% | NA | Top KW pos 3 |
| 2nd July | no | 312 | 74% | 120% | NA | Top KW pos 5 |
| 9th July | 21 | 323 | 104% | 88% | $0.00 | Top KW pos 5 |
| 16th July | 27 | 407 | 126% | 97% | $10.85 | Top KW pos 8 |
| 23rd July | 12 | 410 | 101% | 131% | $29.00 | Top KW pos 8 |
| 30th July | 13 | 397 | 97% | 123% | $38.45 | Top KW pos 8 |
| 6th August | 7 | 486 | 122% | 119% | $107.40 | Top KW pos 4 |
- 80 articles added to the site in total
- Total earnings from new content added = $186 or $2.33 per article
- Earnings on new content added has increased each week
- Traffic is increasing at a nice rate, up almost 50% since we started adding content just over 30 days ago
- One particular page that was added accounted for over $70 of earnings last week alone. It’s not yet ranking higher than page 3 for any decent keywords > could be a great earning page!
- Overall earnings in the last 7 days for the site has been $444.80, with page RPM of $475.22!
Site B – Automotive Niche
| Week Commencing | Pages added | Unique Visits | Traffic increase week on week | Traffic increase – last 4 weeks | Earnings from new content | Notes |
| May 28th | no | 82 | NA | NA | NA | Main KW pos 30 |
| 4th June | no | 102 | 124% | NA | NA | Main KW pos 30 |
| 11th June | no | 104 | 102% | NA | NA | Main KW pos 29 |
| 18th June | no | 145 | 139% | 177% | NA | Main KW pos 29 |
| 25th June | no | 85 | 59% | 83% | NA | Main KW pos 22 |
| 2nd July | no | 101 | 119% | 97% | NA | Main KW pos 20 |
| 9th July | 24 | 135 | 134% | 93% | NA | Main KW pos 19 |
| 16th July | 5 | 215 | 159% | 253% | $4.99 | Main KW pos 19 |
| 23rd July | 3 | 222 | 103% | 220% | $39.64 | Main KW pos 16 |
| 30th July | 15 | 238 | 107% | 176% | $20.58 | Main KW pos 15 |
| 6th August | 0 | 236 | 99% | 110% | $26.40 | Main KW pos 14 |
- 47 articles added to the site in total
- Total earnings from new content added = $92 or $1.96 per article
- Earnings on new content added is stagnant
- Traffic is stagnant also, though quite a few articles were not correctly added to the site’s navigation menu and not linked to from other pages internally, which may explain the mediocre traffic/earnings result.
- Overall earnings in the last 7 days for the site has been $52.55, with page RPM of $175.74
Notes on the above tables:
- “Week Commencing” > is not a Monday, in case you were wondering. I started compiling the data on a Wednesday so stuck with that for now.
- Pages added > pages ranged from 750-2500 word count
- Unique visits > as it sounds, number of unique visits for the site over the 7 day period
- Traffic increase week on week > compares traffic from a week to the preceding week
- Traffic increase last 4 weeks > compares traffic from a week to the traffic in the week 4 weeks prior
- Earnings from new content > total 7 day earnings from any content added since the 9th July
- Notes > Anything important that could explain the results of skew data. For now, I’m highlighting the ranking of the main KWs for the sites.
How do we know if this is a success?
We’ll continue to add content to both sites, however now that we are just over 30 days through the case study, I will only be tracking the earnings on all pages added to this point in order to measure how we are tracking against our goal to have the content have paid itself off by the 90 day mark.
The content is written largely by Interns as part of their training, however for the sake of the case study, we were going to price the content at $10 per 1000 words (iWriter 4+ star price). Upon reflection, we should make that $15 per 1000 words because the articles are higher quality than the iWriter 4+ star articles.
Earnings required by 6th October (90 days since first content added)
- For site A, 80 articles x 1250 words average = $1500.00 ($1314 to go)
- For site B, 47 articles x 1250 words average = $881.25 ($789.25 to go)
Overall, things are going well. We weren’t expecting much earnings at all to this point, so looks like we’re on track to reach our goal of paying off the content within 90 days!
silviu says:
do you do also offsite seo for these websites? I mean you point links from PBNs to them to help with ranking?
GregNunan says:
We link build the authority sites as normal. But haven’t been link building the new content just so we can get an idea of how the new content would rank without any links.
thebrain says:
Hey Greg,
When you say “We link build the authority sites as normal.” can you give a little more detail – is this primarily PBNs.?
Just found you guys – lovin the podcasts over here in Australia
GregNunan says:
Hey Chris, see this article for what i meant by “as normal”. Thanks for the feedback. We’re loving doing the podcast!
silviu says:
how competitive are keywords?
GregNunan says:
We always target low to medium competition KWs. Our KW research process looks at a number of factors in the serps and ultimately tells us if there are 50% or more pages ranking for a given KW that we can beat.