Website Case Study #1 – End of the First Month (July 2021)

Traffic

First month: 6,346 sessions (+25.46%)
Initial: 5,058 sessions

I don’t expect to see a huge increase in traffic for at least several months, but sessions are up since last month so that’s a good sign.

Earnings

First month: $41.77 USD (-45.6%)
Initial: $76.79 USD

I’m not too worried about the decrease in conversions this month. Earnings will go up as I continue to add content and improve my rankings in the SERPs.

As you may or may not know, Amazon has continuously decreased the amount of money affiliates earn using their program.

Eventually I will be looking to apply to other affiliate programs.

For the time being I will stick with Amazon until I am satisfied with the traffic I am getting to the website and then make the switch.

What I’ve Done This Month

It’s difficult to find time to work on the website with full-time work and other commitments on the side.

Regardless, I have accomplished quite a bit at the end of the first month.

• Site redesign – I have switched themes and am currently using the paid version of OceanWP. In the past I have used Astra, but I’m keen to see how everything goes with this theme. It’s fast, lightweight, and allows you to customise practically anything.
• Improve ‘About Us’ page – I have added content to the about us page to showcase the different authors and add credibility to the website. 
• Create social media accounts – I have added several social media accounts. Namely Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pintrest, Tumblr, and YouTube. 
• Fixed up essential pages – I have fixed and added several essential pages, such as a privacy policy and disclosure page.

Increased Speed of Website

Page speed is important for any website as poor load times can have a negative effect on bounce rate, average time on page, and conversion rates. 

It is really important to improve the speed of your website.

Google has stated that site speed is one of the primary signals used by Google to rank certain pages. 

Ultimately, page speed affects user experience.

With the help of two plugins I have been able to reduce the speed of my website substantially. 

I could have improved my scores even more, but there are certain plugins that I am unable to get rid of at the moment as some pages depend on them. Furthermore, I didn’t want to risk breaking my site for a very slight improvement in speed.

The two plugins I used were:

• WP Rocket
• Imagify

And here are the results of tweaking these two plugins.

Before

GTMetrix:

Pingdom:

Google Pagespeed Insights:

Mobile

Desktop

After

GTMetrix:

Pingdom:

Google Pagespeed Insights:

Mobile

Desktop

Content

I have been outsourcing most of the content on the website.

Thankfully, I have found a few good writers on UpWork, which is quite surprising because the quality is usually pretty bad (from my past experience using the website).

This month I have added 18 articles, which amounts to 29,430 words of content and cost a grand total of $445.75 USD.

This means the average word count of each article is 1,635.

Next month I will try to beat this amount to give myself a bit of a challenge.

I will continue to add content until I have 100 articles on the website. Once that has been achieved I will start focusing a bit more on backlinks.

80% of my time will be spent trying to get high-quality backlinks.

At the moment content is king, and I don’t currently have enough content on the site to bother trying to score some backlinks.

Tracking

A bunch of my articles are already ranking thanks to purchasing an aged domain.

Buying an aged domain prevents your website from being stuck in the Google sandbox, which can cause your website to not rank for many months.

I use SERPROBOT to keep track of all my keywords and see how well my pages are ranking.

Here is a snapshot of how my newly produced articles are ranking this month:

Some of my articles are already ranking in the top 10 results in Google, so I’m pretty happy about that.

SERPROBOT is a good option if you are looking for a cheap and easy-to-use keyword tracker that is easy to get started with and use.

Playlist of the Month

This is a little off topic, but I’ve been playing this video on repeat over the past month.

If you’re into wave/electronic music you should check it out.

This playlist is a banger.

Conclusion

That concludes my first month with this new website.

Overall, I am happy with the progress of the website and how much content I have been able to produce last month.

If you are on the fence about starting your own website then I suggest you dive in and get started already.

The best time to start was yesterday, the second best time to start is now.

Thanks for checking out my case study this month.

I will be back next month to give you another update. Hopefully things start trending up and we can see a nice increase in traffic.

Until next time!