#4 - 500% Traffic Increase Overnight

Monday morning again… It’s hard to believe this is the fourth issue of the newsletter already.

Here’s what we are going to cover in today’s issue…

1. Traffic Increased 500% overnight on my aged domain

2. Horrible RPMs

3. Building an AI Content Workflow

Usually, I would give you a complete rundown of site stats but I’m going to leave that as a once-a-month update from here on out. If anything significant happens I’ll include it in the newsletter.

Luckily for you, something significant did happen this week.

500% Traffic Increase On The Aged Domain

This is an aged domain I received from Odys Global back in February 2022. Initially, I loaded the domain with 100 articles and it was slowly growing until it got hit with an update and lost most of its traffic.

Eventually, the domain did come back and the traffic continued to grow over the next few months. I didn’t add any new content as I wanted to see if the update reversal would last.

It has been around 6 months since the update reversed and the domain was clearly growing nicely with the initial 100 articles.

So, on Friday I finally got around to firing up 3 articles produced by myself. They indexed on page 1 within 1-2 hours and the traffic started rolling in.

On new sites, you simply don’t have this ability. It can take weeks or months for new posts to index. When that’s the case it is impossible to go after trending topics as the trend will be over by the time your article gets posted.

However, it looks like this site is finally in Googles good books. We can index instantly and go after popular trending topics in the niche.

Now, this traffic level will likely be a peak as the trend dies down but it gives me the confidence to move forward and push hard on this domain.

When you see momentum like this, you have to focus in on it. I’ve already got one writer on board for the project and I will be trying to pump out 2-3 articles per day.

These are much shorter articles than the affiliate site which takes me 1-2 days to produce a 4000-word article. These are quick 700-800 word articles that can be pumped out in half an hour.

I’m very interested in where this goes in the next month. I think we’re in a great position to take this site to 100k page views per month within the next 3-4 months, providing that google doesn’t hit us with an update.

As I will be focusing on fresh trending content with some evergreen content I think the site will be better insulated from AI content for the time being.

While traffic is great, RPMs are not… Let’s talk about it!

Horrible RPMs On This Site

I know it’s February but the RPMs on this site are something else. Initially, I thought it was due to simply not having enough traffic to optimize.

However, after a couple of months on Ezoic the site has a $1-2 RPM. I have produced content similar to this before and usually see around a $20 RPM.

This combined with the insane amount of ads ezoic is showing on the page seems bizarre to me.

I’m going to leave the ads on for now and see if they optimize over the next week now that we have decent traffic.

Even if we could get a $10 RPM from now until Mediavine/Adthrive that would tie us over and give us some money for content.

I just need to get my head down and pump out content until we reach Mediavine levels.

AI Content Workflow

Currently, I am trying to work out the best AI content workflow for the new AI site I started.

I have been toying with using a google Spreadsheet combined with the ChatGPT API. I use this to generate the content and then use WP Import to import the articles to WP in bulk.

The problem I am running into is formatting. I don’t want simple text articles. Each section of the article should be split into a 30/70 column with image on the left and text on the right.

Currently, I am trying to figure out how to create a template so I can upload the articles in a ready-to-publish state.

Without being able to upload in this template format it’s literally quicker just to copy and paste from chatGPT into a pre-created templated.

If anyone knows how to create detailed WP All Import templates please let me know. Once we get that moving we should be able to scale content on this site fast.

Wrapping Up

That’s all for this week! Some nice progress was made and I now have a site we can instantly start pushing content on in high volume.

Chat soon,
James

P.S. I set up a website tear-down service. Want me to look over your website and provide you with a 15-20 minute video of changes I would make, click here.