Project Tartarus Case Study: Update #12 | Skipblast

Project Tartarus Case Study: Update #12

Another month down, and a bit of a shake up with the traffic due to the recent brand safety issues I had.

Not ideal, but it is what it is.

If this is your first time here, the I suggest catching up on the old updates first:

Ready? Okay, let’s dive in!

**And as always, I’m an affiliate marketer and this post probably contains affiliate links, meaning I will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on my links

Contents show

Month 13 – What Happened?

Well, after some small delays, I got my first batch of content back from Niche Website Builders (discount here).

If you recall, I ordered the $700 monthly content subscription package at 10,000 words monthly.

And, I asked them to focus on only buying guides for me.

With the package that I bought, it works out to just five posts per month.

So, a slow easing into affiliate content primarily because I’m not sure how the domain will act since it’s got 400+ pieces of purely informational content.

I also spent the period STILL waiting to hear if this site resolved the brand safety issues – guess those premium ad networks were a bit backed up, eh?

Unfortunately, that traffic drop I was expecting after deleting that top performing content in the previous month actually showed up this month.

Tartarus analytics

Oof, what a drop. That’s around 3K sessions gone just like that.

We’ll just file this experience under “lesson learned” and hopefully not make that mistake again in the future.

For those of you interested, here’s what the weekly email from Ahrefs on new keywords looked like at the end of this 30-day period:

Ahrefs new keywords

Unfortunately, that new content from Niche Website Builders didn’t get published until the very last day of this period, so no update yet on how it is ranking.

For me, my overall content production for this site slowed considerably both due to me waiting to see how the NWB content looked and because I went on a 10-day road trip.

I managed to get up 12 new info posts on the site, all outsourced.

This site is still monetized with Ezoic, a couple of Amazon links, and some other affiliate programs that I’m testing.

Managed to get in a few sales from third-party affiliate programs, which is great to see since the pay out is better than Amazon.

Since the last update, this site earned $876.25 (in September 2021).

So, that’s an increase of around $63, though the effects of the traffic drop are not yet fully visible in that income.

Hopefully the other affiliate programs continue to perform and mitigate the damages of that lost traffic.

This income came from:

  • Ezoic
  • Amazon
  • Third-party affiliate program

sept epmv

The EPMV is still on an upward trend for this 30-day period compared to the previous month, but this was the end of the quarter and that means it will drop in the next update.

In regards to backlinks, I just want to remind you that I’m not planning on doing any link building for this site anytime in the near future.

That’s the whole reason for buying an aged domain from Odys.

So, something really interesting DID happen with this site during this period.

A news station ran an article that went viral and had included a link to one of the informational posts on this site.

So far, a total of 48 new referring domains have linked to this one post and sites like Yahoo picked it up as well.

The average DR of the 48 referring domains is DR47, but plenty of them are DR70+, so that it pretty exciting.

And I expect that these new links will continue to pour in as the story is still making the rounds online.

flTLgXO

Month 13 Summary & Thoughts

It’s unfortunate that I didn’t have more time to get content up this period to counteract the traffic drop that I knew was coming.

But overall, I think that getting any amount of fresh content published is considered a move in the right direction.

Here’s how the last 30 days of this site looked:

  • Traffic: 36K sessions (approximately)
  • New Published Posts: 12 (outsourced at Writer Access – note I’m not counting the NWB content until next month since it published at the last minute of this period)
  • Total spent this month: $10 for hosting and $840.15 for content ($19.734.32 to date)
  • Per article average cost of outsourced content: $70.01 this month ($47.47 to date)
  • Total published words to date: 472,355
  • Average word count per article (all): 1,180
  • Income: $876.25 this month ($4,321.14 to date)
  • Links built: 0
  • New natural links: 48
  • Initial Budget Remaining: $0 (I’m over-budget)

Now, the last 6 months of revenue is an average of $599.35, making a list price at a 35x multiple result in a sales price of around $21,000

I’m not interested in selling the site right now, but it’s nice to see that I if did that I could make all my money spent back with a teensy amount of profit.

Questions?

Did you miss how this case study started? Get caught up from the beginning here.

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