Everyone in the NoHatDigital team has been busy this week launching the August Private Training Course and the booked-out Internship but we’ve also been busy working on experiments since last week’s update. We’ll provide an in-depth look at how the experiments are shaping up next week.
For today’s update, we’re going to provide another update on our experiment that tests the ROI of adding content to existing sites because the two sites we are case studying are both taking off, with one 5 week old article on Site A delivering over $200 earnings in the last 7 days!
As with the previous update, I’ve provided all the latest data in tables and then summarized total earnings required for us to hit our earnings target and mark this experiment as a pass!
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 | 119% | 156% | $107.40 | Top KW pos 4 |
| 13th August | 0 | 575 | 140% | 178% | $148.05 | Top KW pos 5 |
| 20th August | 0 | 640 | 161% | 157% | $270.88 | Top KW pos 5 |
- 80 articles added to the site in total
- Total earnings from new content added = $605.00 or $7.56 per article
- Earnings on new content added has increased each week
- Traffic is rising sharply as a result of long tail keyword traffic (no new big keywords ranking on page 1 and the best ranking keyword is steady at position 5 in Google)
- One stellar page generated over $200 in earnings in the last 7 days (we’re now targeting the same keyword on another site)
- Overall earnings in the last 7 days for the site has jumped to $599.51, with a very strong page RPM of $465.24.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 28th May | no | 82 | NA | NA | NA | Top KW pos 30 |
| 4th June | no | 102 | 124% | NA | NA | Top KW pos 30 |
| 11th June | no | 104 | 102% | NA | NA | Top KW pos 29 |
| 18th June | no | 145 | 139% | 177% | NA | Top KW pos 29 |
| 25th June | no | 85 | 59% | 83% | NA | Top KW pos 22 |
| 2nd July | no | 101 | 119% | 97% | NA | Top KW pos 20 |
| 9th July | 24 | 135 | 134% | 93% | $4.99 | Top KW pos 19 |
| 16th July | 5 | 215 | 159% | 253% | $4.99 | Top KW pos 19 |
| 23rd July | 3 | 222 | 103% | 220% | $39.64 | Top KW pos 16 |
| 30th July | 15 | 238 | 107% | 176% | $20.58 | Top KW pos 15 |
| 6th August | 0 | 236 | 110% | 234% | $26.40 | Top KW pos 14 |
| 13th August | 0 | 271 | 122% | 116% | $35.65 | Top KW pos 26 |
| 20th August | 0 | 331 | 139% | 154% | $49.07 | Top KW pos 18 |
- 47 articles added to the site in total
- Total earnings from new content added = $176 or $3.74 per article
- Earnings on new content added has increased in each of the past 4 weeks
- Traffic is on the up also, despite the main target keyword on the site bouncing back to page during the past two weeks (long tail keywords are delivering all the new traffic)
- Overall earnings in the last 7 days for the site has been $57.29, with page RPM of $101.76
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 case study is a success?
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 are basing the cost of articles on $15 per 1000 words (decent quality writer cost).
Earnings required by 6th October (90 days since first content added)
- For site A, 80 articles x 1250 words average = $1500.00 ($895 to go)
- For site B, 47 articles x 1250 words average = $881.25 ($705.25 to go)
Site A is flying and on current weekly earnings pace will reach the 90 earnings target easily. Site B is on the up, but weekly earnings over the remaining 6 weeks need to be double their current level on average > might be a close call!
Jim says:
Hi Greg,
Thanks for the 90 day ROI analysis/tracking.
It will be interesting to see how the cash-flow (New Content Earnings) trends over the next 6 weeks now that you have loaded the 80/47 articles and have stopped adding new content. Will be curious how the “crest” of the rising cash-flow tide and the “trail-off” of the spike play out… height and duration of the rise will be fascinating… also will be curious what the chart looks like post 90 days for the 2nd 90 days.
I am going to create a comparable chart of AB Running Total Earnings / Estimated Content Cost (to show visual ROI trend line over time comparing Site A with Site B). This will help to illustrate (visually) the ROI over time and provide a visual “break even” trend. Sort of like watching the waves rise and roll along the shore at the beach. A “cash tide” without the seagulls.
Thanks again for sharing your results.
-Jim
GregNunan says:
Awesome! I suspect that Site A will continue to rise for the next 6 weeks and then beyond at a similar rate as we’re still only ranking page 3 and beyond for any keywords with decent search volume.
Jim says:
Hi Greg,
Here’s a copy of the run rate ROI %. (Site A is 1st column / Site B is 2nd column)
I tried to cut/paste my line chart graphics from Excel into my comment, but wouldn’t let me. Maybe you can create the graphics for the readers.
Interesting to see how Site B took off quicker (from a ROI % perspective) but then Site A bolted on week 5.
Hope it’s helpful…
-Jim
0% 1%
1% 1%
3% 6%
5% 8%
12% 11%
22% 15%
40% 21%
GregNunan says:
Thanks Jim! Much appreciated. Might need your help when it comes time to wrap up the case study!
Jim says:
Hi Greg,
Glad to.
I’m a numbers cruncher by trade, so glad to contribute.
What would be fascinating would be to track your 80/47 article ROI % as the Content Return trends over the next 120 days… and then (as a 2nd experiment) you add an additional 40 articles to each site on day 180 and see how a 2nd wave of content rolls via ROI %.
I’m in the process of building 1,000 niche sites (currently at 120 over the past 2 months) and have an investor that would co-fund buying content if we had a trend line as a benchmark on a ROI perspective for content acquisition.
So, this experiment is EXTREMELY timely for me to follow…
Thanks for sharing your data and glad to crunch anything for you. Feel free to email me if you need any number crunching on one of your experiments. I can’t post graphics in the comments, but I’ll email you back any graphs I create and you can possibly add them to future blog updates.
-Jim
GregNunan says:
Pumping out the sites! The thing that’s in our favor for these sites is the high RPMs. I’ll start tracking a few lower RPM sites that we’re adding content to also. Will reach out in a few weeks and we might be able to put an epic umber crunch post together if you’re keen. Thanks for the offer!
Stefan says:
Hello, very interesting Case-Study!
My question is, how do you track which earnings came from which piece of content. I ask because I also would like to set up a similar test on one of my projects ;)
Thanks a lot for the look inside, always a pleasure!
GregNunan says:
Tracking by adding URL channels in Adsense which gives you all the statistics and earnings for each URL you add.
Stefan says:
Thank you very much! I didn’t know it is that esay ;)
Jim says:
Hi Greg,
Another topic that we should discuss when considering ROI…
Most of our conversation has been ROI related to INCOME. For example, so far you have a 40% return on Site A based on $600 of income from your 80 article investment of $1,500.
Okay… but part of the conversation we should also be having is ROI related to EQUITY. For example, you have increased your equity value of Site A by $ 3,500 from your 80 article investment of $1,500. A 233% return on your 80 article investment based on a 3 month increased run rate of $175/month (due to the 80 articles you recently added). $175 x 20X = $3,500 of increased value if you flip the site today. That is the REAL investment play here.
When I mentioned I was in the process of building 1,000 niche sites, I’m not interested in the 950 sites that make $5/month of income… I’m interested in the 50 sites that make $300/month that I can flip for 20X ($300,000).
An investor will typically focus on capital gains, not income, as there is a lower tax rate in the US for capital gains than there is for an income tax rate.
Food for thought…
-Jim
Brett says:
I may have overlooked this, but for the “Top Keyword Position” column, is this the kw that the home page of the site is targeting or is it involved with the new content?
And as for the keywords for the new content, are you focusing on a certain amount of searches per month keywords, or are merely writing for information. (AKA solving a problem instead of looking for certain keywords).
Also, I sent you an email a few days ago regarding my account for the September internship, and I haven’t heard a reply, I know you guys are slammed with the August internship starting up, but get back to me when you can.
Thanks,
Brett
GregNunan says:
Hey Brett,
The top keyword column is to indicate the ranking of the keyword with highest LMS or potential earnings. Obviously if that keyword jumps up it will result in higher traffic. So we put it there to help explain any traffic spike that was not a result of the extra content that has been added.
The content added was 95% SEOd article targeting decent LMS/high potential earning KWs. We still haven’t added as much content like that as we could. After we have exhausted all the top KWs, we’ll look to add content based on user experience.
I’ll fwd your details to our team handling Internship on-boarding now.
Alex says:
Great case study and I’m currently trying something similar, i.e. building up an authority site and instead of dissecting a group of keywords and having 500 word articles for each, I put up 2000-3000 word articles and try to cover all of them at once.
However, I must be doing something wrong and hopefully someone can help me shed some light on this. Despite even building a few high PR links slowly to some of these huge articles, I see in my ranktracker (and in webmastertools) that exactly the keywords I’m targeting sit somewhere on page 150+, whereas other keywords I’m not targeting directly, or longtails seem to do pretty well, i.e. page 3-5.
This smells a bit like overoptimization to me, though this is a brand domain and I already massively tried to reduce the amount of keywords within such an article (70x the keyword in a 3k word article should be alright?)…any ideas what else could it be that I’m doing wrong?
Thanks!
GregNunan says:
Hey Alex,
we teach this in our Internships and Private Training courses. On-page SEO is huge and with the right structure you can get decent traffic off of long tail alone PLUS rank for multiple short tail KWs in time all on the one page. Just give it time.
Alex says:
Thanks for the quick reply Greg. Yep, already signed up, paid and got confirmation for the internship at the end of September. Will have to wait for now with posting new articles or else they will most likely go to waste and trigger some kind of penalty it seems.
Any idea if these problems go away again for articles already posted once their onpage issues are “corrected”?
GregNunan says:
So long as you’re not over-optimized in terms of KW mentions (keep it under 1% per KW), targeting multiple KWs on the same page should not trigger a penalty. Get the content up though, you can always change it but having it age a bit will be helpful.
Alex says:
Thanks Greg. Sorry to be a pain with this one but just to clarify, assuming I put up a piece of content now and for some reason it is overoptimized and gets a penalty. When I change the parts that caused the penalty (like keyword density too high) after a month, you think the penalty will get removed? Or will the penalty stay and I pretty much “wasted” that article since it is never going to rank anymore?
This is a biggie for me because I just spent $500 on these huge articles so I have to be sure any potential penalty is possible to get removed, assuming it was caused by onpage overoptimization. Thanks, your advice is much appreciated.
GregNunan says:
Nope, no lasting penalty. Just reduce the optimization and it’ll be fine. You’ve certainly not wasted $s on the article. Might take a month, might take less. But if it’s a new site (under 4 months old) it’s perfectly normal to not be ranking.
Alex says:
Great to hear that, thanks a lot. Will get to work then. It’s an aged domain so maybe that plays a role as well why stuff doesn’t rank here…not sure yet. And others in the niche that rank on the first page get away with double the keyword density I currently have, odd. Either way, will get to work and get these articles aged :) Looking forward to the internship, cheers.