Project Tartarus Case Study: Update #3

Well, another month has passed for this case study site, and spoiler alert, it’s still going awesome!

Before we dig in, just a disclaimer – I had an unexpected move back to the US in the last 30 days so I actually did ZERO work on this site.

So, if you’ve ever been curious about what happens when you do nothing on a growing site for a month, then you’re in luck!

In case you forgot, this case study site is on an awesome aged domain I got at Odys. (this link gets you a 100 USD/EUR welcome bonus)

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

• Beginnings
• Update #1
• Update #2

I’m excited to share how it’s going with the site, so 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

Month Four – What Happened

Here we are a month later and traffic for this site is still on an upward trajectory.

So, despite a full month of zero work on the site, all that content I’ve gotten up is still rising in the SERPs and bringing in new traffic.

So, not quite the same jump as in the last month, but still good news since zero new content was added to the site.

This means that I did not meet my goal of 100 posts by years end.

No biggie, I’ll just make up for it next month.

Plenty of new keywords are still popping up for me in Ahrefs, and I’m excited to see this continue trending upward.

Lots of new #1 spots since last time. In fact, when you look at keywords in Ahrefs, the entire first page is all featured snippet positions that this site has snagged.

The big news for this update is that I started monetizing the site with AdSense!

So, the site managed to earn $53.11 since the last update, with around $45 of that being from AdSense.

All in, the site managed to make around $7 RPM for just the ads.

If you’re wondering why I went to AdSense instead of directly to Ezoic, it’s simple – I wanted a baseline RPM from AdSense.

I expect Ezoic RPMs to be better than AdSense, and this way I will know for certain if that is the case.

In fact, I actually just made the switch to Ezoic, so we’ll see how that RPM changes in the next update.

And, on the last day of the month, I actually got a notice from AdSense about an ad serving limit hitting my account for “invalid traffic.”

No idea what that’s about since I’m not doing anything shady.

But hey, now you see what can happen with AdSense even when you’re completely innocent of any wrong doing.

Month Four Summary

Got zero work done on the site due to personal drama, but things continued to trend in the right direction.

Putting AdSense on the site means that I get a teensy bit more to spend since I’m plowing all the income back into the site (for now).

Here’s how the fourth month of this new site looked:

• Traffic: 16K sessions
• New Published Posts: zero
• Total spent this month: $10 for hosting ($4,143.85 to date)
• Per article average cost of outsourced content: $0.00 this month ($42.32 to date)
• Total published words to date: 105,829
• Average word count per article: 1,332
• Income: $53.11 this month ($59.85 to date)
• Links built: 0
• New natural links: 0
• Initial Budget Remaining: $856.15 (plus I’m reinvesting earnings)

So, at the end of month four the next things on my to-do list are to get up lots more content and switch from AdSense to Ezoic (already did that a few days ago).

I’m considering starting to post on Pinterest for the site, but I’m not sure if I really want to start that just yet.

The benefit will be that it will help bring in more traffic. But, the flip side of that is pinning takes me away from content production.

So, I guess I’ll consider starting on Pinterest, but not sure that I’ll actually start it next month.

Questions?

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

Shawna Newman

Hey, I’m Shawna. I make a living working from my laptop in places like London, Sydney, Dubai, Rome, Oslo, Bangkok, Las Vegas, Barcelona, and Amsterdam. I share how I do some of that on this website.