Project Tartarus Case Study: Update #17

After being away from getting any meaningful work done on this site for FAR too long, I am happy to say that I was able to get in some quality time on this site.

The focus for me was on content production and I even wrote some of it myself this time around!

Since I didn’t work on it for that period there, I was able to approach things with fresh eyes.

So, let’s see how that neglect worked out for me and if any of the renewed effort is showing up yet.

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

• Beginnings
• Update #1
• Update #2
• Update #3
• Update #4
• Update #5
• Update #6
• Update #7
• Update #8
• Update #9
• Update #10
• Update #11
• Update #12
• Update #13
• Update #14
• Update #15
• Update #16

**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 18 – What Happened?

This update covers the period of March 2022.

Please note that I have changed the reporting period covered to reflect a proper calendar month as the previous method just became too much of a bother.

I came into March ready to really ramp up content production and get back to properly growing this site.

And that’s just what I started doing.

You’ll note that compared to the previous update, the number of monthly sessions is slightly down.

But, when you compare proper calendar months, then it’s actually fine.

To get that traffic heading back up like I want, during March I outsourced 21 new articles for the site via a team of writers that I’ve put together at Writer Access.

And I ended up writing another 20 new articles myself using easy peasy keywords that I found using LowFruits.io.

All of the fresh content added to the site was informational, however I was able to add in a few affiliate links to programs other than Amazon (which is always nice).

The Ahrefs new keywords update that I get by email is showing some changes and a good amount of new keywords overall (though I’m not sure why all the images are broken).

Overall, I’m happy to get back to a content push on this site and equally as happy to see that the site is still responding well to the fresh content.

New articles seem to index within 36 hours, which means that all I need to focus on is getting more content published more often.

In regards to revenue, this site does still have a lower RPM that it did throughout 2021, and I was finally able to do a proper dig into why that is — simply a change in the most trafficked posts.

And why is that? New competition with a stronger domain!

I don’t really want to spend any time or money on building links to this domain though, so I’ll just continue creating content with a focus on topics that bring in a higher RPM.

Month 18 Summary & Thoughts

While things haven’t been moving as quickly as I’d like with this site, at least recently, overall everything is still going in the right direction – and that’s really all the matters at the end of the day.

I’d like to really get some higher RPM posts in my top 10 viewed pages so that the overall income and revenue for this site pops back up.

And I’m confident that the new keyword research that I’ve recently done + the fresh content push will eventually get me back up where I want to be.

I actually am seeing some positive trends in some of the affiliate programs that I’ve been testing, so I may start to work some money content back into rotation in the near future.

Here’s how the 30 day period for this update looked:

• Traffic: 33K sessions (approximately)
• New Published Posts: 40
• Total spent this month: $10 for hosting
• Per article average cost of outsourced content: $48.50 this month
• Total published words to date: 579,494
• Average word count per article (all): 1,187
• Income: $680.55 this month ($8,903.18 to date)
• Links built: 0
• New natural links: 3
• Initial Budget Remaining: $0 (I’m over-budget)

Now, the last 6 months of revenue is an average of $763.67, making a list price at a 35x multiple result in a sales price of around $26,728. Obviously, this is not trending in the right direction, eh?

While I’m not happy about the low RPM and the declining 6-month average, it’s not really something that I’m worried about because I already know what I need to do – create fresh content and do some internal linking to try to reclaim the featured snippets this site recently lost to a new competitor.

The real problem here, which is something that I need to really do some thinking on, is that I never intended to hold this site for more than two years – but with this lower RPM affecting the monthly average, I may need to keep it longer than expected.

So, that is something that I will be thinking about in the next few months.

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.