Hello Everyone (VERY LONG CASE STUDY AHEAD) - 355% return in 9 months

Note: I own a 7-figures USD valued portfolio of 41+ content sites that generates 5-6 figures USD a month in passive income.

This is my first time posting in this sub and my goal is to NOT share generic advice but precise numbers, data and highly refined processes so you can also get started with this business yourself or if you already have an existing business, drive huge traffic to it and scale it substantially (get more customers).

I will use a case study to explain the whole process. As most of us are entrepreneurs here, explaining an actual project would be more meaningful.

In this case study I used AI assisted content to grow an existing site from $217/m to $2,836/m in 9 months (NO BACKLINKS) and sold it for $59,000.

ROI of 3 months: 355%

Previous case studies (before I give an overview of the model)

• Amazon Affiliate Content Site: $371/m to $19,263/m in 14 MONTHS - $900K CASE STUDY [AMA]
• Affiliate Website from $267/m to $21,853/m in 19 months (CASE STUDY - Amazon?) [AMA]
• Amazon Affiliate Website from $0 to $7,786/month in 11 months
• Amazon Affiliate Site from $118/m to $3,103/m in 8 MONTHS (SOLD it for $62,000+)

Note: You can check pinned posts on my profile. Do go through the comments as well as a lot of questions are answered in those. However, if you still have any questions, feel free to reach out.

This is an [AMA].

Quick Overview of the Model

Approach: High traffic, niche specific, informative content websites that monetise its traffic through highly automated methods like display ads and affiliate. The same model can be applied to existing businesses to drive traffic and get customers.

Main idea: Make passive income in a highly automated way
Easy to understand analogy

• You have real estate (here you have digital asset like a website)
• You get rental income (here you get ads and affiliate income with no physical hassle, in case you have a business like service, product etc. then you can get customers for that too but if not, it’s alright)
• Real estate has value (this digital asset also has value that can be appreciated with less effort)
• Real estate can be sold (this can be sold too but faster)

IMPORTANT NOTE: Search traffic is the BEST way to reach HUGE target audience and it’s important when it comes to scaling. This essentially means that you can either monetise that via affiliate, display etc. or if you have a business then you can reach a bigger audience to scale.

Overview of this website’s valuation (then and now: Oct. 2022 and June 2023)

• Oct 2022: $217/m
• Valuation: $5,750.5 (26.5x) - set it the same as the multiple it was sold for
• June 2023: $2,836/m
• Traffic and revenue trend: growing fast
• Last 3 months avg: $2,223
• Valuation now: $59,000 (26.5x)
• Description: The domain was registered in 2016, it grew and then the project was left unattended. I decided to grow it again using properly planned AI assisted content.
• Backlink profile: 500+ Referring domains (Ahrefs). Backlinks mean the sites linking back to you. This is important when it comes to ranking.

Summary of Results of This Website - Before and After

Note: If the terms seem technical, do not worry. I will explain them in detail later. Still if you have any questions. Feel free to comment or reach out.

Metric	Oct 2022	June 2023	Difference	Comments
Articles	314	804	+490	AI Assisted content published in 3 months
Traffic	9,394	31,972	+22,578	Organic
Revenue	$217	$2,836	+$2,619	Multiple sources
RPM (revenue/1000 web traffic)	23.09	$88.7	+$65.61	Result of Conversion rate optimisation (CRO). You make changes to the site for better conversions
EEAT (expertise, experience, authority and trust of website)	2 main authors	8 authors	6	Tables, video ads and 11 other fixations
CRO	Nothing	Tables, video ads	Tables, video ads and 11 other fixations

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Month by Month Growth

Month	Revenue	Steps
Sept 2022	NA	Content Plan
Oct 2022	$217	Content Production
Nov 2022	$243	Content production + EEAT authors
Dec 2022	$320	Content production + EEAT authors
Jan 2023	$400	Monitoring
Feb 2023	$223	Content production + EEAT authors
Mar 2023	$2,128	CRO & Fixations
April 2023	$1,609	CRO & Fixations
May 2023	$2,223	Content production + EEAT authors
June 2023	$2,836	CRO and Fixations
Total	$10,199

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What will I share

• Content plan and Website structure
• Content Writing
• Content Uploading, formatting and onsite SEO
• Faster indexing
• Conversion rate optimisation
• Guest Posting
• EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust)
• Costing
• ROI
• The plans moving forward with these sites

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Website Structure and Content Plan

This is probably the most important important part of the whole process. The team spends around a month just to get this right. It’s like defining the direction of the project.

• Description: Complete blueprint of the site’s structure in terms of organisation of categories, subcategories and sorting of articles in each one of them. It also includes the essential pages. The sorted articles target main keyword, relevant entities and similar keywords.

This has to be highly data driven and we look at over 100 variables just to get it right. It’s like beating Google’s algorithm to ensure you have a blueprint for a site that will rank.

It needs to be done right. If there is a mistake, then even if you do everything right - it’s not going to work out and after 8-16 months you will realise that everything went to waste.

Process
For this project, we had a niche selected already so we didn’t need to do a lot of research pertaining to that. We also knew the topic since the website was already getting good traffic on that.

We just validated from Ahrefs, SEMRUSH and manual analysis if it would be worth it to move forward with that topic.

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1. Find entities related to the topic: We used Ahrefs and InLinks to get an idea about the related entities (topics) to create a proper topical relevance. In order to be certain and have a better idea, we used ChatGPT to find relevant entities as well
   > Ahrefs (tool): Enter main keyword in keywords explorer. Check the left pain for popular topics
   > Inlinks (tool): Enter the main keyword, check the entity maps
   > ChatGPT (tool): Ask it to list down the most important and relevant entities in order of their priority
   Based on this info, you can map out the most relevant topics that are semantically associated to your main topic

2. Sorting the entities in topics (categories) and subtopics (subcategories): Based on the information above, cluster them properly. The most relevant ones must be grouped together. Each group must be sorted into its relevant category.
   > Example: Site about cycling.
   > Categories/entities: bicycles, gear and equipment, techniques, safety, routes etc.
   > The subcategories/subentities for let’s say “techniques” would be: Bike handling, pedaling, drafting etc.

3. Extract keywords for each subcategory/subentity: You can do this using Ahrefs or Semrush. Each keyword would be an article. Ensure that you target the similar keywords in one article. For example: how to ride a bicycle and how can I ride a bicycle will be targeted by one article. Make the more important keyword in terms of volume and difficulty as the main keyword and the other one(s) as secondary

4. Define main focus vs secondary focus: Out of all these categories/entities - there will be one that you would want to dominate in every way. So, focus on just that in the start. This will be your main focus. Try to answer ALL the questions pertaining to that. You can extract the questions using Ahrefs.
   > Ahrefs > keywords explorer
   > enter keyword
   > Questions
   > Download the list and cluster the similar ones.
   This will populate your main focus category/entity and will drive most of the traffic. Now, you need to write in other categories/subentities as well. This is not just important, but crucial to complete the topical map loop. In simple words, if you do this Google sees you as a comprehensive source on the topic - otherwise, it ignores you and you don’t get ranked

5. Define the URLs

End result: List of all the entities and sub-entities about the main site topic in the form of categories and subcategories respectively. A complete list of ALL the questions about the main focus and at around 10 questions for each one of the subcategories/subentities that are the secondary focus

Content Writing

So, now that there’s a plan. Content needs to be produced. Pick out a keyword (which is going to be a question) and…

• Answer the question
• Write about 5 relevant entities
• Answer 10 relevant questions
• Write a conclusion
• Keep the format the same for all the articles.

Content Uploading, formatting and onsite SEO

Ensure the following is taken care of:

• H1
• Permalink
• H2s
• H3s
• Lists
• Tables
• Meta description
• Socials description
• Featured image
• 2 images in text
• \Schema
• Relevant YouTube video (if there is)

Note: There are other pointers link internal linking in a semantically relevant way but this should be good to start with.

Faster Indexing

Indexing means Google has read your page. Ranking only after this step has been done. Otherwise, you can’t rank if Google hasn’t read the page. Naturally, this is a slow process. But, we expedite it in multiple ways.

You can use RankMath to quickly index the content. Since, there are a lot of bulk pages you need a reliable method. Now, this method isn’t perfect. But, it’s better than most. Use Google Indexing API and developers tools to get indexed. Rank Math plugin is used.

I don’t want to bore you and write the process here. But, a simple Google search can help you set everything up.

Additionally, whenever you post something - there will be an option to INDEX NOW. Just press that and it would be indexed quite fast.

Conversion rate optimisation

Once you get traffic, try adding tables right after the introduction of an article. These tables would feature a relevant product on Amazon. This step alone increased our earnings significantly. Even though the content is informational and NOT review. This still worked like a charm.

Try checking out the top pages every single day in Google analytics and add the table to each one of them.

Moreover, we used EZOIC video ads as well. That increased the RPM significantly as well.

Both of these steps are highly recommended.

Overall, we implemented over 11 fixations but these two contribute the most towards increasing the RPM so I would suggest you stick to these two in the start.

Guest Posting

We made additional income by selling links on the site as well. However, we were VERY careful about who we offered a backlink to. We didn’t entertain any objectionable links.

Moreover, we didn’t actively reach out to anyone. We had a professional email clearly stated on the website and a particularly designated page for “editorial guidelines”

A lot of people reached out to us because of that. As a matter of fact, the guy who bought the website is in the link selling business and plans to use the site primarily for selling links.

According to him, he can easily make $4000+ from that alone. Just by replying to the prospects who reached out to us. We didn’t allow a lot of people to be published on the site due to strict quality control. However, the new owner is willing to be lenient and cash it out.

EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust)

This is an important ranking factor. You need to prove on the site that your site has authors that are experienced, have expertise, authority and trust.

A lot of people were reaching out to publish on our site and among them were a few established authors as well. We let them publish on our site for free, added them on our official team, connected their socials and shared them on all our socials.

In return, we wanted them to write 3 articles each for us and share everything on all the social profiles.

You can refer to the tables I shared above to check out the months it was implemented. We added a total of 6 writers (credible authors).

Their articles were featured on the homepage and so were their profiles.

Costing

Well, we already had the site and the backlinks on it. Referring domains (backlinks) were already 500+.

We just needed to focus on smart content and content. Here is the summary of the costs involved.

• Articles: 490
• Avg word count per article: 1500
• Total words: 735,000 (approximately)
• Cost per word: 2 cents (includes research, entities, production, quality assurance, uploading, formatting, adding images, featured image, alt texts, onsite SEO, publishing/scheduling etc.)
• Total: $14,700

ROI (Return on investment)

Earning:

• Oct 22 - June 23 Earnings: $10,199
• Sold for: $59,000
• Total: $69,199

Expenses:

• Content: $14,700
• Misc (hosting and others): $500
• Total: $15,200
• ROI over a 9 months period: 355.25%

The plans moving forward

This website was a part of a research and development experiment we did. With AI, we wanted to test new waters and transition more towards automation.

Ideally, we want to use ChatGPT or some other API to produce these articles and bulk publish on the site.

The costs with this approach are going to be much lower and the ROI is much more impressive.

It’s not the the 7-figures projects I created earlier (as you may have checked the older case studies on my profile), but it’s highly scalable.

We plan to refine this model even further, test more and automate everything completely to bring down our costs significantly.

Once we have a model, we are going to scale it to 100s of sites.

The process of my existing 7-figures websites portfolio was quite similar. I tested out a few sites, refined the model and scaled it to over 41 sites.

Now, the fundamentals are the same however, we are using AI in a smarter way to do the same but at a lower cost, with a smaller team and much better returns.

The best thing in my opinion is to run numerous experiments now. Our experimentation was slowed down a lot in the past since we couldn’t write using AI but now it’s much faster.

The costs are 3-6 times lower so when it used to take $50-100k to start, grow and sell a site. Now you can pump 3-6 more sites for the same budget. This is a good news for existing business owners as well who want to grow their brand.

Anyway, I am excited to see the results of more sites.

In the meantime, if you have any questions - feel free to let me know.

Best of luck for everything.

Feel free to ask questions. I’d be happy to help.

This is an AMA.