Youtube video transcript
So one of my viewers actually left me a comment. And it’s a really interesting question. All about the ghost town period. How long exactly does it last, but the weird thing is the message disappeared.
Hello, YouTube, and a very special hello to all my subscribers. My name is Phil and welcome to my channel. This is where I document my journey building an online income, but today’s a little bit different because I’m out on holiday with. My dog and my mother-in-law.
Yeah. Don’t ask
.YouTube and a very special hello to all my subscribers and mosquitoes too. And what we’re doing is just having a little weekend away. We’re at a place called Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan. It’s really nice here. And we’ve just been relaxing for a couple of days. But I did get that question all about the ghost town phase. So this is from the moment you start your actual blog or your YouTube channel to when you start getting traffic or perhaps even start making money.
Now everyone measures success in different ways. Some people think this is success.
Personally, I measure it like this: moments where you can spend time with family and friends.
But no matter how you measure success, it’s all the same thing is what you are actually doing.
So I wanted to talk about the ghost town phase and my experience of it, but how do you measure it? So what I’m gonna do is go through all my sites and I’m actually going to document when I hit a hundred page views, 500 page views and a thousand page views, and I’m only gonna measure organic page views, and that’s gonna show when the ghost town is over, that’s how I’m gonna.
I’m also gonna share all my stats from my two YouTube channels. So that way you can measure up against what you are doing with your own sites or YouTube. Now, in order to do this, we need to do a little bit of movie magic, and we’re gonna talk to future Phil who’s on the computer. So over to you. Okay. So here I am back home after my holiday back in Taipei, and we’re looking at the stats.
So just a little bit of advice. If your wife ever tells you to take recording equipment with you on the holiday, make sure you listen to her.
Sorry that I wasn’t mic’d up for most of this video. So what we’re gonna do is look through the three websites that I’ve built following the Project 24 method. And we’re just gonna look at the milestones. So reaching a hundred. Page views total in a month or total overall, cause it’s the same thing.
500 organic page views, a thousand page views. And I’m just gonna show you how many days, how many months it took me to get to that stage just so you can measure up and we’ll look at all three sites like that. So let’s look at site one to begin. Okay. To get to about a hundred organic page views, it took from may the 20th until August the 10th, 2019.
So what’s that? May June, July, August, around three months or so, I’m sure I could figure this out in post production and put how many days up on the screen now. And in total that was 429 users. But that could be a lot of bots and things like that. So that’s how long it took to get to a total of a hundred organic page views.
Okay. For site one, it hit the total organic. Page views for 500 page views that happened on about the 7th of October. So again, I’ll put how many days up that is on the screen there. Now let’s look at a thousand. So on the second, November, 2019, it went over a thousand organic page views, which was less than a month since hitting the 500.
Okay. And so if we just look at site one throughout the whole lifetime, that’s from may the 21st, 2019 to today, which is October the 28th. You can see this is monthly. View and it’s got 90,000 page views overall, and it it had a very long, slow little plateau, but around February, 2020, that’s when it started taking off may a year after I’d started the site, it looked like it was going to really take off and then it suffered a bit of.
A drop and a plateau, but it’s recovering back now. So you can just compare your own site with that, but let’s look at the next site. So this is site two, which is in the wedding niche. Yeah. Yeah.
I can’t catch it.
so starting with site two, let’s just look at the lifetime. So this site is not the best site I’ve got. It’s not doing the best, but it’s, I started it around the end of October 2019. And it’s got about 10,000, 6,000. So it’s got about 10,600 page views in total. And as you can see, it was growing but then it’s dropping off now, but let’s look at those milestones for this site, which isn’t doing that well.
So site two got up to a hundred organic views, much the second again, up and up. How many days that was, cuz I’m really terrible at math. And I can’t do it in my head right now. Let’s look at how long it took to get up to 500 total organic. So site two managed to get to about 500 organic page views around the 6th of April.
So about a month later than after hitting the hundred page views or a hundred organic page views, let’s look for a thousand. So site two actually hit a thousand organic page views in the same month that it hit 500. So on the 29th of April which is actually the day after my birthday. That was probably quite a good present for me at the time.
So it really did double in traffic within a month. This site, the thing I found about the ghost town period is it’s a lot of hard work to keep motivated because you don’t know if everything you’re doing is actually gonna work. So if you don’t pick a niche that you actually enjoy, it’s never gonna work a bit like this guy.
Okay. So let’s look at site three. Let’s just look at the actual traffic, the milestones that we’re talking about today. So site three, hit a hundred organic page views after starting around the same period as site two, the sort of last week. October, 2019, it hit that hundred organic page view milestones on January the 21st, 2020.
It hit 500 organic page views on February the 20. Again, you can see how many days that was. And it hit a thousand organic page views around March the 14th. So a full month before site two. So what we are doing now is just compare the different stats. So when they hit the milestones, how many articles were on.
Each of the sites and also the top five posts. I’m gonna give you the amount of page views that each of those were pulling in both page views and percentages. So let’s have a look at that on screen now. Okay. So I just wanted to put these stats together. So the first bar chart here shows the sites one to.
And when they actually hit a hundred page views, 500 page views and a thousand page views, how many articles did they have? You can see that site one had much more, about 35, 31 for site two and 26 for site three, when they hit a hundred page sheets. And then you can see for 500 and a thousand there, how many actual articles were on the site when they hit that?
The next bar chart just gives you a comparison of how many days it took to get to each point. So you can see that for a hundred page views site one and site three were around the same where site two took a lot longer for 500 page views again, site one and site two, not too far. But obviously site three, did it in less time.
Again, site two took a lot longer and for a thousand page views, it’s almost identical with site three taking the least amount of time and site two, taking the most amount of time next, a couple pie charts that I made up for you guys, which just show the breakdown of the articles. So it’s the top five articles.
And how much traffic they were bringing in overall. So you can see for site one, when it hit a hundred organic page views, the top five articles we’re bringing in about 50% almost exactly 50%. And the other articles were bringing in the other 50% when it hit 500 page views, it was a little bit more, I’d just gone over 50 about 54.
And again, when it hit a thousand page views, the top five articles were bringing in over 60% of the traffic.
And you can compare that to site two where the top five articles we’re bringing in are just short of 90% of the traffic when it hits a hundred page view. Again, over 90% when it hit 500 page views and it’s pretty much the whole traffic when it hit a thousand, which is still the case. Now the top five articles, the top three articles really are bringing in the majority of the traffic with the first article bringing in over 60.
For site three, it looked a lot different with the top five articles, bringing in about 75% of the traffic. When it hit a hundred organic page views at 500 page views, it was more like sort of 80% of the traffic coming from the top five with article one and two kind of having the most traffic. And when it was a thousand page views, it’d gone up a little bit more, but still article one and article two were bringing in the most amount of traffic.
So you can compare that to your own numbers and see if it looks something similar. This is not ideal. Ideally the top five articles shouldn’t bring in more than about 30% of your traffic, because if it does and you’re out ranked, it could be quite dangerous. I also wanted to show you my Google search console.
So what I’ve done is shown you a snapshot of the first six months of the site. Now I had an issue with site one because I started back on about may the 20th, 2019. But for some reason, I’m not able to go that far back, actually on this screen here and show you that. So it’s going back as far as the 28th of June, but it shouldn’t be too far off.
So you can see the site. In that first six months period, it got about 879 clicks. The total impressions were about 33,000. The average click through eight, only about 2.7 and the average position, 37.9. If we look at site two it got just a little bit less in terms of clicks, but a lot less in terms of impressions, but the average click.
But the average click through rate was much higher for this site. And the average position is 31.2 and then three superstar sites, really for the first six months. It got over 3000 clicks, 71,000, nearly 72,000 impressions. The average clickthrough rate was about 4.2 and the average position 18.
And you can see from about the 20th of February there, it started that hockey stick growth. So this site really grew quite quickly. Wow. It’s a pillowcase car. Yeah, you took me. Yeah.
Phil. Can you also move a little bit? Ooh. Okay. So if we turn to YouTube now, and we look at this channel, passive income, Phil, as it’s now called, how long did it take me to get to a hundred subscribers? 500 subscribers, a thousand subscribers. How much did it cost? Take me to get to the first hundred watch hours and the first thousand watch hours.
So let’s look at a few numbers to do with this YouTube channel. And then we’ll look at a second YouTube channel. So I started this channel around the 10th of August. I think that was the first video that went up and I hit a hundred subscribers for this channel around the 17th in November, 2019.
So again, up and up how many days that was there. If we look at 500 subs, how long does that take? So I got up to 500 subs on this channel on the 3rd of June. So it took a while to get up to there another extra 400 or so subs and a thousand subs. So this channel, passive income, hit over a thousand subs on September the 15th.
So you can see that it took less time between 500 and a thousand than it did from 100 to 500. Now let’s look at the watch hours. So this channel hit about a hundred hours of watch time by about September the 10th. So that’s within about a month of starting. It hit 500 hours of watch time by November the 23rd, 2019.
And it hit a thousand hours of watch time by January the 17th, 2020. So in this case with this particular YouTube channel, it seems that the watch hours Came much more easily than the subscribers. So perhaps that’s just my approach or just that’s the way it works in this niche. But let’s look at another YouTube channel just to compare now.
I have to admit that the other YouTube channel isn’t getting the same amount of numbers as this one, but it’s still useful to know because it’s still growing. So here, we’re looking at the YouTube channel that I collaborate with Michael. And it’s all about teaching the S which is an English exam.
So we actually launched this channel back in March of 2020. And it’s about 6,000 nearly 7,000. Views. It’s got about 337 watch time, hours, and we’re up to about 416 ish. Now I have to admit this. This is a strange one because I scheduled a video to go out on the 1st of March, but for some reason I put it up just before December, but the video wasn’t live.
So the stats are a bit strange on this one, but let’s look and see how long it took us to get to the first hundred subs and the first hundred watch hours, cuz obviously that as far as we are in this. So for this YouTube channel, the arts grind, we managed to get up to a hundred subs by about May the fifth, May the fourth.
It was 99 and on May the fifth, it went up to 112, apparently. So overnight we had about 14 people’s sub and I had to meet a lot of those subs coming. Facebook because I was posting a lot of helpful videos and answering people’s questions. So we got a lot of people coming in through that rather than from YouTube search.
And it’s been every 60 days or so we seem to gain another hundred subs. That’s how it’s happening with this particular YouTube channel. We’re in a very competitive niche. Apparently I didn’t realize how competitive it was to begin with, but that’s it. And to get to. A hundred watch hours.
Let’s quickly look at that. So we managed to get up to a hundred watch time by about July the 21st on this particular YouTube channel. We’re getting quite a low view duration, just I think because we are dealing with non-natives and if they hear two native speakers talking depending on the student who’s watching, they get a bit scared and they don’t watch the whole thing.
Unfortu. So for the YouTube channel this is when we hit those milestones and how many videos we actually had up for passive income fill. As you may know, I publish once a week. Sometimes there’s an extra video that gets thrown in not very often. So for the arts grind, we publish twice a week.
And we’ve just started putting up an extra short video a week. so in terms of pizza day or Curry day, I love Curry. I love pizza. We like to make money. So just in case you dunno what we mean by pizza day just means when your website or YouTube channel makes your first $5 and you could buy a slice of pizza or maybe go down to the Curry house and.
Chicken corn or something. It’s just that kind of motivational first dollar or first $5 that shows you that what you’re doing actually does work and it does work. So if you’ve been following my journey, that I’m not making as much money as other people, but it’s really because I haven’t really.
Spent a lot of time on monetization. I’ve only just relied on Amazon. I don’t even have the ads on my site at the moment. It’s something I’m gonna do soon because I’ve got to get off my ass and learn how to do it properly. And luckily, Project 24, they’ve just dropped a brand new course, explaining it step by step.
So even I can understand that, which is great. But let’s look at. The money that I have made throughout. So site one here, you can see this is from last year in Amazon and basically I made pizza day between November and December. But in fact before September I had put on another sort of Amazon tracking code and I did make a little bit of money.
But unfortunately, They kicked me out. The program that time I lost all the data, but I think probably my pizza day would’ve been somewhere between August and November. So I started this site back in may. So we’re looking at I, what about six months possibly to get to pizza day on this site?
Looking at site two? I did put a couple Amazon links on it, but not. And it’s made absolutely no money. But it does look like someone ordered something this month. So maybe finally, I’m gonna make a little bit of money on that particular website site three. So it’s not a very good site for Amazon.
It’s what I would call a service niche. So it’s basically a service. So you need someone to do something for you. And that is what the niche is about. It’s not a hobby. It’s not dirt biking or something. It’s more like a notary kind of service, that kind of thing.
And so it did make a little bit of money actually on pizza day. If you calculate this, it will probably be about October this year, so this one took a full year to reach pizza day just because it’s not really monetized that well, and it’s not really targeted for Amazon. In fact, none of the products are anything connected to the niche.
The other thing in terms of YouTube this actual channel, passive income fill it did actually make some money on Amazon as well. So last year it man managed to get just short of $5. And if we look at this year and so this year you guys kindly bought a few things and it’s made $5 and 56. So that’s pizza day at the very least, but of course I do make money in other ways by recommending the Project 24 course, which I, I’m a member of, and I really.
Do support it. I think it’s a really good course. And I spoke about that in another video where I revealed how much money I managed to make just through that kind of thing. But yeah, so even this YouTube channel made pizza day, but again, it took from probably about I started this channel probably about June June, August, that sort of period.
So it probably took somewhere between four and six months to start making money from Amazon. But probably about three or four months to make money through other affiliate programs. So as you can see from my traffic, it did take a fair while to get up to those 100, 501,000 organic page views, but also the traffic, it increased almost by 50% from month to month.
So if you hang in there, if you keep producing those posts, if you can keep producing those. You will eventually get the traffic that you are looking for. It just takes a bit of determination. However, I don’t think I would’ve managed this. If it was just me. I really found that joining Project 24, which is the course by Income School, really gave me the motivation and the support to keep going for months and months without much happening.
So if this is something that you’re struggling with as well, why not click on the link in the description and you’ll find out more from it. So if you’re a fan of my channel and you’re not a subscriber. Yeah. Why not become one now click that button and the notification bell. And you won’t miss any of my future videos.
I’ll see you in one scene. Bye. British people. Are you okay with driving on the non right side? Yeah, it’s the same thing. Brilliant.