9 Years to Month 1 Update #4 [Dec. 2021 Results]

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Update #4 – December 2021

…the journey continues.

This update is late, I know. I said I was busy at work, and that was true. The owner of the company I work for (my boss) decided he wanted to sell about 2 years ago. I’ve been working with a very small group of people and some business brokers to get a sale. We’ve been through 3 prospective buyers and the last one finally decided to do a deal. The initial closing date was set for the end of December (for tax reasons). But, because of the holidays, we weren’t able to meet that deadline.

As of today, the company will officially be sold. It works out to be a good deal for me (equity), but it was hell on my schedule – which means my side hustles have suffered for the last three or four months (really the last year as we’ve gone through the due diligence process 3 times!).

Now that the bulk of the work is done, I’ll have some time to dig back into my site(s). I say that, but I’m currently sitting in my office on a Saturday wrapping up the last bits of paperwork and numbers – knowing that the coming weeks will probably be crazy as we all try and play nice together.


TL: DR; & Summary

I’m focusing on one of my “simmer sites” that I’ve had for over 9 years. I’ll primarily outsource content for the first year – with a goal of 400 articles by next September. 80% of content will be informational & 20% will be affiliate content. The end goal is 1500 articles at the end of year three. The “Finish Line” for this project is a valuation of $1M.

December 2021: I published a total of 5 articles, had my first $1 day and got just over 1600 pageviews. I’m disappointed in the TAT of WordAgents and having a hard time not jumping to something else… I explain my plans to keep me on task.


So, with excuses out of the way, let’s get into what happened for December, give a preview of January and chat about accountability going forward. On that theme, here’s the first change I want to make:

What I’m changing with my journal for 2022 – Weekly Updates:

I need more accountability and doing monthly updates isn’t quite enough. I feel the urge to publish content and get things ordered as the end of the month comes up, partly because I know I have these updates, but it’s usually a story of “too-little-too-late”. To fix this I’m going to do weekly updates starting in February 2022.

I ran the numbers in the beginning, and I know what must be done: to make progress I should publish two articles each day and place orders for three.

If I order 5 days a week and publish 6 days a week I should reach my goal by September (400 published articles) and have a good flow of content (the conveyor belt will be working).

I just need to actually do it… and I think weekly accountability updates will help.

The weekly updates will only show progress on the stuff I can control like the number of articles posted, number of articles ordered and backlinks purchased/acquired.

I’ll keep milestone & traffic updates limited to a monthly schedule.

We’ll see how it goes – but for now, here are the results for December 2021 (I’ll try and get my January 2022 update out later this week).

Results for December:

  • Pre-Published: 2
    • Published: 6
    • Published Words: 5,386
    • Pageviews: 1610
    • Revenue: $13.68
    • RPM: $8.50
    • Ordered Content: 20
    • Content Banked: 83K Words
      • WordAgents: ~53,000 words
      • WriterAccess: ~30,000 words
    • Expenses: $987 (total budget is $20K)
    • Valuation: -$9.5K @37X (still negative)

Milestones Reached:

  • One-Day Revenue: $1.02/day (over $1 milestone)

What happened this month:

Content was ordered but never delivered/started. I ordered content from WriterAccess and WordAgents in the middle of December. It takes more time to order from WriterAccess so I only ordered 5 articles. They were delivered by the end of the month.

But my order of 44 articles from WordAgents sat until the 17th of January before the first one was picked up (almost exactly one month). I think they were overloaded from Black Friday deals (or something).

Sadly, only 20 of those were for this case study site. I gave into my urges and ordered some content for my other aged site.

Since my other aged domain site is taking off, I’m changing my goals just a bit:

  • Focus on two sites instead of one – I’ll publish 10 articles/month on the aged site, so I feel like I’m working on it. I won’t update all the time, but I will if something interesting happens.
  • The content will get an image and posted immediately but I won’t go through it like I am with the case study site.
  • I’m also going to buy some AI written content for 3 new sites (100 articles each) and let them sit for a few months to see if any of them gain traction (it’s a distraction, I know, but I do want to have a few more sites simmering while I focus on these two for the next 2-3 years).

As you can see from the image, impressions and clicks are continuing to grow with this site. I’m happy with the progress and it seems like there’s a good upward trend. I hope that November 30th was the last day that this site didn’t get any clicks according to GSC.

One nice thing is the site was picked up around the 4th of December in Google Discover and has been getting more and more impressions & clicks there as well. The data on which article(s) are getting picked up is still blank, so I don’t know what’s working. I do need to go through and update titles and interlinking in April (to make titles more appealing to click). The site could use it.

Because of all the ups and downs on the normal GSC chart, it’s hard to tell how much progress the site is making. I exported all the data, put it in a pivot table and created the chart above so it shows MONTHLY impressions and clicks. The upward trend is clear in this view (and the slight downward trend in position is also a positive).

I’m happy with the progress so far. But I need to publish a lot more content if I want to see the results I’m expecting by September.

Goals for Next Month:

  • Published Articles: 70
  • (Preview): Because of the slow turnaround from WordAgents last month, I have over 40 articles that were ordered and just delivered. I need to get them all published today to count for January (probably won’t happen! Haha)
    • I’ll order 30ish in the next few days then get into a routine of ordering 2-3 each day from both WriterAccess and WordAgents until my banked words are all used up. After April I plan on hiring some writers directly for this project.

QUESTION:

When do you give up on content? (Like, if after a year you’re still on page 4-5 in the SERPS should you give up on it?)

  • Should you try and resurrect if you still believe in it?