Project 24 Case Study: Month 13


Youtube video transcript

Has there been another big Google update? Has someone just stolen all of my top ranking or has the lockdown bubble burst? This is what I’m gonna try and find out today, but looking into my stats and I’m gonna share everything with you. So no go anywhere. Hello, YouTube and a very special hello to all my subscribers, my name’s Phil, and welcome to my channel.

So this is where I just document my journey, trying to build an online income. If you’re joining me for the first time, why not become a subscriber. So before we start talking about my progress with my. Three websites. I just wanna say thank you to everyone. I commented on my last video. I’m back from my very short break, my short honeymoon.

We went to some really cool islands just off the coast of China and yeah, it was really nice to hear all the sport. Thank you very much to everyone that did leave a comment. Okay. In case you are joining me for the first time, I have got three sites that I run at the moment and they all follow the Project 24 method.

So this is a cool set up by Jim Harmer and Ricky Kesler over at Income School. If you don’t know anything about that, why not check out the link in the description. It will take you to a webinar which explains everything about it. But basically the course just takes you through step by step building websites, YouTube channels, and trying to build an online.

So I’ve built these three sites. And my oldest one is now about 13 months old and the other two sites, a little bit younger. They’re about eight months old. So what I want to do is to try and get to the bottom of a bit of an issue I’ve had with sight. One, so traffic is down and I’m not really sure. So what we’re gonna do is jump into the computer and we’re gonna look at all the stats for the three websites as well as my new YouTube channel.

It’s not that new, but , let’s share it anyway. Okay. We’re in the computer here. As I mentioned before, I’m currently operating three different websites based on the Project 24 method. And to be honest, I’m a little bit behind in some of the things I’ve meant to be doing. Today what I want to do is actually talk, focus mainly on site one, because I’ve had a bit of a hit there in terms of traffic.

So quickly, what I’m gonna do is talk about site two and. Three, to be honest, I haven’t really done much in terms of content. I’ve been a little bit lazy in those respects, but those two websites are still growing. Site three in particular is growing pretty quickly. So we’re gonna look at that then I’m gonna go into site one because I really wanna show.

All of the stats in detail, we’re gonna be looking at the Google analytics. We’re gonna be looking at the Google search console quite a lot to see what’s been happening. And I also wanna share my YouTube channel, which I operate with a colleague of mine, which is in the English teaching ESL kind of a field.

And I just wanna give you a bit of an insight into what we are doing there. So let’s jump in, look at the site. So site two is a wedding niche. And to be honest I just haven’t touched it in months. It’s one that I rushed a little bit in terms of search analysis. Again, I think when I have a bit more time, I could come back to this cuz it is still growing slowly.

So nothing’s really changed since my last update, still only 34 posts. And you can see that split between the response post, which is around the 15 hundred word kind of limit there. And that’s really too. Give a straightforward answer to a fairly straightforward query of low competition.

Staple posts a little bit longer, maybe around the 2,500 word mark and pillar post about 3,500. These should be. The things that are propping up your business, they should be the really significant queries within your niche. And also you’re gonna put a lot more research and time and effort into these ones.

So when I give the word limits, it’s not really, you must meet, hit that limit and that. The only thing you’ve gotta do. It’s how in depth you need to get to answer that actual query. That’s why they had different word lengths. Okay. So those are all the stats for site two.

Why don’t we have a look at the Google analytics. Okay. So as you can see here for the month of June I got 1,305 page views, and it’s getting about 94, 90 5% organic traffic. It is growing. It’s, as I said, I haven’t done anything to it probably in the best part of three or four months, haven’t touched it.

And if we just compare the growth from this month to the month before may, so it’s, it grew about 11%. That’s not too bad. You can just see, okay. There’s an extra day in May compared to June, but okay. It’s still growing, but I haven’t really touched it.  It’s just one of those things where it wasn’t something.

I was really that interested in it. It just made sense because I was getting married last year and I was meant to have another wedding ceremony this year, but it got postponed because of the pandemic. Maybe I can come back to it, but it’s not the top of my list, but if it carries on growing slowly, maybe it will turn into something.

Let’s have a look at the Google search console. Okay. We can see here that in the last month of June, I got 1.1, two clicks. So 1000, 120, the total impressions you can see there. 9.78. The click through rate I’m getting is 11% so it’s not too bad. And the average position is about 16, 17.

I do have to say that this site is being pretty much propped up by two posts. It’s something crazy like two posts. Each of them is getting like 45% of the traffic. As soon as I get out of that, obviously the traffic will go. But as I. Yeah, it’s just, it’s not my priority right now.

I’ve got too much happening and this is just definitely on the back burner. Something maybe for the future. Okay. So site three, now this is the thing that gives me hope. So again, I haven’t done anything to site three. For a couple months I’ve just been very distracted. So it’s still got those 50 posts published and about 16 draft posts. I need to go back through and edit. The reason I haven’t done that is because I did have a bit of an issue with one of my writers.

And if I’m totally honest with you just going back and editing them just makes me a little bit. . But I’m gonna talk about this in another video, probably next. It’s just something I’ve been putting off because I know it’s gonna make me feel a little bit frustrated, but still I should just get on and do it.

I know. And you can see 26 response posts here. 16 staple posts, eight pillar posts. And you can see how much I’ve actually paid writers to do that for me, cuz this was totally outsourced. But if we look at the stats, it is quite. Okay. Remember this site I set up at the end of October.

So it’s June so well, that’s. Eight months, nine, nine months or so. And it’s got 9,639 page views. And you can see that 89% of the traffic is organic. I had this interesting little bump in direct traffic from the middle of June. So the 22nd of June there. I’m not really sure what that was.

I have a feeling maybe Google was testing something. Some, maybe some bot traffic. I’m not sure, but if we compare the month of June to the previous month, we went from 6,494 page views in the month of may to 9,639 in the month of June. So that’s a 48 bump. And again, most of that is organic traffic, so that’s really quite impressive.

The only thing here perhaps is my average time on page has gone down, but I think that’s something to do with the direct traffic there. I think that wasn’t the human traffic, I don’t think. So this really gives me faith. The only issue is that with site two and site three, I haven’t really monetized them much.

They’re not actually bringing in any money. But that’s something that I should be able to do fairly quickly to optimize that, to actually get it going. But just remember that figure is 9,639. Okay. So if we were to look at the Google search consult for site three. Okay. Here’s the month of June, the Google search consult for site three, and you can see I’ve got about 7,000 clicks.

I got 175 thousand impressions. The click through rate is 4%, so it’s a lot lower than if we quickly look about site two is 11%. And the average position is about 14 0.5. Now here, this site isn’t precarious, it’s not propped up on one or two posts. I think there’s maybe one post that brings in about 20% and it’s apart from that, it’s pretty spread out.

So I’m quite confident that this is gonna be much more stable than site two, which could quite easily lose all its traffic tomorrow. If it gets out. Okay. So that was site two and site three. And as I said, nothing really has changed in se in terms of the content production, but you can see that site three is doing quite well.

And I really wanna get onto site one. This is the big issue I’ve got at the moment. Okay. So site one, this is the oldest site I’ve got. It’s 13 months old. So I started it on the 21st of May, 2019. And you can see that in the last month I got 10,630 page views. And so organic page views 9,000 and 78.

Now, if you watched my last update, I was getting over 12,000 page views. So I’ve obviously lost the best part of 2000 page views. And I wasn’t really sure why. But if you look at the traffic, it’s just plateaued. I was getting really crazy growth since about January and now it’s just plateaued and I’m not really a hundred percent sure why?

So that’s why I want to look at the data now. So if we compare that to the last. As I said, I got 12,164 page views in may. And so I’ve lost 12% page views, obviously not what you want to see. And it got me a little bit worried now. I wasn’t sure.  is it was because I put Ezoic onto my website in may. Did that kill my traffic or did it make it plateau?

Was there some sort of update that I’ve been affected by? Was it that someone had been out ranking on most of my page? The pages that I’m ranking the queries I’m ranking for, I should say what’s happening. Is it something to do with the pandemic? The lockdown. I wanted to jump into all the numbers and that’s what we’re gonna do right now.

Okay. So I hope you, I hope that you like figures because you’re gonna get a lot of numbers here. And I’m hoping that just by going through this with you, Talking about it aloud, I’m gonna understand what’s been happening. So I spent a bit of time this morning making the figures a little bit easier to digest, a little bit pretty or perhaps to look at, but let’s just look at the Google search console.

So all I did was to go up to where it says export. And I exported all the data into a Google sheet and it gives you everything. So you get your queries. So all the information by query by page country, et cetera. So I got all this into a Google sheet and. What I did was to use a bit of conditional formatting just to highlight it, to make it easy for me to see.

So you can see that all the green means that it’s been increasing. So here we’ve got clicks. This is June compared to may. We’ve got the impressions again, June compared to may click through. Et cetera and position. So green is good. Red is bad. And then what I did was I found a cool little formula, which would help me to so formula function, maybe record a function for Google sheets which enabled me to count the color basically.

So based on the cell. If you look through this, you can see. I dunno, lot of green, lot of red, lot of things have been happening,

but it’s not that easy to understand. So what I did was to arrange all this into something a little bit easier to see. So here, we’re looking at queries. Okay. So based on all the queries that I managed to rank for now, I do have to say that in may I was ranking for something like 700 ish queries, whereas in June, that was down to around 500 ish.

So I lost something like 200 queries. This may just be Google realizing that my posts weren’t relevant to those 200 queries. But it’s definitely, there are fewer queries that I was thinking about or associated with. So here, if we look at clicks, you can see that green is an increase. So 24% of the queries got more clicks and red is a decrease.

So 28%. Got a decrease in clicks. And then 46%, the blue nothing changed. It was exactly the same month to month. Now this kind of looks positive, but you gotta bear in mind that this is also counting those queries where I get zero clicks and I haven’t ever got a click like in the last two months. So the difference is about 4%.

So about 4% more queries were getting fewer clicks. Now the impressions, this is what I was interested in. So here.  46% 46 and 5% of the queries got fewer impressions in June compared to May and 52%. Sorry. So 46.5% got more green and 52.5% got a decrease. So I’m getting fewer impressions for those queries above you.

Overall, only 1% stayed the same. So that’s quite interesting. I think maybe that’s where the information is now. If we look at the click through rate so funny enough, I’m getting a higher click through rate. So 32% compared to 26% where the click through rate went down for the queries and again, 41% stayed the.

But that could be quite a few. So if I show you what I mean, these are the clicks here. You can see once we get down to, oh, keep going. One one. One’s. There’s a lot of things getting one. Okay.  onto zeros. So around like the 571st query in the list, it starts getting zero clicks and you can see that some of them had some clicks in made.

I didn’t get any clicks in June. But that’s what I mean by it may, may not show the true story in terms of position. 41% of the queries got an increase in the average position, according to Google search consult 58.2% a decrease. Yeah, so maybe that’s showing the story impressions for queries I’ve gone down.

And the position has gone down. It’s a bit of an issue there, but that was based on queries. So I also wanted to look at each of the pages. So I went through and looked at each URL, each page I have on my website for each post. And just to see how, what the numbers were like there. So here we’re looking at the clicks for each page.

yeah, 43% show showed an increase 45% showed a decrease, and then we’ve got the 11%, which were the same. So if we look at that again with the query, it’s almost the same story. It’s about half and almost the same half and half, so it’s pretty similar. I think this shows perhaps that it’s not a com, it’s not a Google update.

That’s affecting me completely. It hasn’t hit my website. There’s something else happening. If we look at the impressions. So according to the page 66% were getting more impressions than the 32% that got a decrease in impressions.  Now that’s a bit confusing. I think so if we go back to impressions here, so overall most of the queries were getting fewer impressions, but when we look at the pages, most pages are getting more impressions.

So is that because, okay. I may not be ranking.  Queries around the topic of the post. Maybe Google is trimming the fat there, but for the queries that I am ranking for maybe as my position changed, is it what’s happening there? It’s a bit of a mystery. So if we look at click through rate so 40% of the pages got a lower click through.

And 53%, sorry, I’m getting this wrong. 40, 40% got a higher clickthrough rate and 53% got a lower clickthrough rate. And then about 6% didn’t change again. If we compare that back to queries in general, 32%, 26%. So I feel like this big chunk here, the 41%, that didn’t change. That seems to be all those zero clicks.

They got zero clicks before zero clicks. Now, if we go back. Yeah. So it would look like my click through rate is going down, but what about the position? Here’s the thing. 74% of my pages increased in their position. They went up, they started ranking higher. So 28 so 25%.  Lost a ranking.

They dipped and then nothing stayed the same. Apparently something like that. So my theory is that I haven’t been hit by a Google algorithm update because it’s not affecting everything. If I was totally hit by a Google algorithm update, then probably every single one of my Posts,  every one of my rankings would be down, but it’s not it’s. There are some that have been affected. Some that haven’t and looking at the top 10 posts for my website here. The top 10, pretty much haven’t changed from each month June and May, maybe one or two and some of them.

Got fewer page views in June compared to may, but some of them actually got more so it’s, I it’s one of those strange things, but my top post was this kind of crazy post that I created in mid April. And it just shut up to something like 2002 and a half thousand pages really quickly.

So in. It got 2000 page views and in June it only got 1,212. So that was about a 41% reduction. And I wanted to figure out what was happening there. So what I did was I went to that page in the Google search consult and. Got all of the queries that I was ranking for. I went through and I literally searched for the first 25.

I searched all of them in Google, my Google browser. And for the top 25 I had the snippet for everything that was in green hair. So it was most of them. I had four where I was positioned two, I didn’t have the snippet. And then two out the 25 that I. Where I was position zero, but it wasn’t a snippet.

It was just a normal result. So I think the position numbers here are pretty accurate. So to me, the story of this post in particular was that if we, for example, look at the top one where.  In June, I got 46 clicks. Whereas in may I only got 37, so actually the clicks went up, but if you look at the impressions, it was 194 in may compared to 91.

So I had a hundred fewer impressions for this. And you can see a click through rate was higher in June compared to May all these kinds of things and it ranked higher. I just think that people are searching less for this term. And this may be true for many of the other things on my site. Now I think this might be because the current crisis, the pandemic, the lockdown, it’s slowly coming to an end in certain places.

To be honest, I’m a little bit removed from that because living in Taiwan we won’t be hit as badly as other people because of the government. They reacted really quickly and yeah,  they did a very good job and yeah, I shouldn’t be laughing, but if they’ve done such a good job and the funny thing is no one would listen to them.

They wouldn’t even let them into the w H O so anyway they did such a good job that I didn’t. Realized what was happening, but in other countries, the lockdown affected a lot of people and this particular niche was something that you could do at home, even if you are on lockdown. So I think just the searches sort it, and now it’s leveling out and I think pretty much that’s what’s happened.

That’s why I’ve lost those 2000 extra page reviews.  But that being said, the whole site has plateaued a little bit. Okay. Let’s talk about money. So in June, so unfortunately I’m still heavily reliant on Amazon for most of my affiliate commissions and in June I managed to make $58 and 41 cents on Amazon.

And you can see that’s from 52 items. The conversion rate is about 11%. And you can see all that lovely money I made for Amazon and the tiny little commission they gave me. I also have ads on with the Ezoic and I’m a little bit disappointed with the ads. Just the sense that I’m not making that much money out of them.

I only made $20 and 62 cents in the entire month of June. And that was giving me an EPM V of $2 and 47 cents. There’s maybe one or two days where I made more than a dollar. It’s I dunno, my issue with this is that it’s slowed down my site. That’s definitely true. At the moment there’s so many ads on it that it doesn’t always look that great, but I’ve left it because.

The idea with Zurich is it’s all based on AI technology and you need to give it time to optimize. But I dunno if the user experience is that great anymore. And I do feel like it’s plateaued and it may be a combination of the lockdown slowly being less of an issue in some countries.

And. The Zoic ads. It’s just, my site’s just plateaued. It was growing really well for a long time. And then, yeah, not a lot’s happening. However, there is some good news. I actually made one commission from another affiliate. So this is an affiliate to do with my niche. And I made a whopping $3 and 60 cents, which is not.

So overall this site has made $82 and 63 cents in the last month. Not big money, not gonna change my life, but it is a step in the right direction. I think for me, the traffic I’m getting. My biggest weakness is really monetization. I’ve done an excellent job with Amazon. It really works.

With the other affiliates affiliate links and things like that. I haven’t really got them everywhere. They’re not as well placed as the Amazon links. They’re not being sold as well within the text. So that’s something that I will need to focus on. But as Jim and Ricky from Income School say monetization is an afternoon of work, if you know how to get traffic to your.

Then that’s the key thing. Okay. So if you are interested in doing this at home with your own stats, let me quickly just talk you through what I did to be able to get it, to change the color based on the values and then to count them up. What you want to do is to change the colors for formatting, you need to go to format.

and you go to a conditional formatting and I’ve got the rules here. So what you do is you put the range, for example, B2. Colan and then it’s B one thousand 356 for me. That’s how many fields I had. How many rows? Then you put a custom formula is, and then literally equals B2 greater than C2.

And that will turn it green. And then the other rule I had was basically the same thing and then B2 less than C2. And then in red, instead of green, that changed the color. And then in order to count them up. I had to create this function, which is to count colored cells. Then I put the range in followed by a comma and then the target color, which is I’ve placed here.

You’ve got the green, you’ve got the red and then you’ve got nothing. And in order to get this function to work I watched a YouTube video, which I’ll put a link to in the description. And I went over to a webpage and just copied it out. Yeah. So this was the video by let’s give him credit for a guy called prolific Oak tree.

Okay. So once you’ve copied that formula, you just go over to tools and you want to go to script editor and once you’re in script editor, you could go to a new script file. And this is the script that I used. I just saved. And then when I went back into the Google sheets, I was just using the formula here.

I did have to every time I wanted to put it in, I had to rewrite it. Otherwise it didn’t seem to load up again, but it seems to work fine for me. So I will put all those details in the description. If you wanna do the same thing to go into a bit of more detail with your own stats, come up with some nice pie.

Okay. So those were my websites, but I also want to talk about a YouTube channel that I’ve been working on. I’ve been working on this with my colleague, Michael from probably the beginning of the year. I think we started filming maybe in December, but we only really launched it in March. And it’s a YouTube channel, all about an English language exam called the IOPS.

It’s an exam that you need in order to go to university. In English speaking countries to prove your level of English. And we, our tactic was pretty much following the tips I got from Project 24. We built up a massive buffer of about three months of videos. And we film almost every week. I do all the editing and we’ve got to the stage where we’ve got 211 subscribers.

But we get very few views. So this is a channel where we released a video on a Monday and a Friday. In the last week we tried a new tactic. We started filming very short videos, about two minutes, two minute tip videos. And we released a video every single day for about 12 days in a row.

Just to see if that would do anything. I get people a little bit more engaged. If it does, Google would do anything to help us. And to see if YouTube would react in any way. If we look at the analytics just to see what it’s doing, this is the last 28 days. So it’s actually June 15th, July the 12th.

I dunno if I can do, ah, let’s do. Let’s just do from, let’s do from the beginning of June. Okay. So we’ve got 38 more subscribers, but this is a really tricky thing. I’m never sure if these are real people subscribing or it’s just my wife sending it to extended family members. But you can see that we are not getting a great deal of traction, though.

There are a few little blips here and there. So we released in the last sort of couple days, you can see that we had videos every single day coming up. So in terms of other stats here, we can just look at the reach. It’s not looking very positive, but it’s early days. I think. The good thing is the impressions are going up.

Although everything. The impressions are going down, the impressions are going up, but what I was doing before was I was doing a lot of promotion through Facebook. But I realized all that had happened was it got us a lot of subscribers, but people weren’t actually watching it. So I think it’s far better to have fewer subscribers who actually watch your videos than loads of subscribers who don’t, especially in the early days.

Because that’s the way that YouTube tests it. So you can see that most. So 25% of the traffic was coming from outside. And the good thing is now that Google search is on the rise. We were getting something like 2% at the beginning. But 15% is not too bad, so that’s definitely positive, but you can see, yeah, the external.

Facebook, what I do is I go into the Facebook groups for the I arts and I just help people to be honest, as normally when I’m doing my morning business, just on the phone, spend a couple of minutes talking to people, they don’t know what I’m doing.  just helping them often. I recommend a video cuz I know what we’ve spoken about it.

But our, I think our biggest issue is.  It’s really quite frustrating. Actually, I went through and we did search analysis and we tried to pick out those search terms that either we knew that people would be searching for just generally or we saw people, it was coming up as a suggestion, as an autocomplete, but then people weren’t really the videos out there.

Weren’t great. Or they weren’t with the big channels. So we thought we were onto something when we filmed. But what I’ve been noticing recently is where even when we have exactly the same search term in the video title, I put it in and we will be way, way down on the list. And then some of the bigger YouTube channels within the niche.

For example if our video is about writing their videos for reading and listening will come up higher in the list than we will. And that’s really frustrating, but I’m hoping that with time we get the right kind of reputation with YouTube and it will change things, but this is what is taking up most of my time at the moment, because editing it takes a long time.

So editing these kinds of videos takes a lot more effort than editing this kind of video because with the I a S I have to do a lot more vocabulary on screen. Everything has to be visual as well as oral, and it takes a lot of time. So if you look at the last video that I actually put up, I put it up yesterday.

This one I’m pretty proud of, actually. It just talks about the history of English spelling, which is quite interesting. And I put a lot of effort into editing this. It took me like three or four hours and what’s the return on the investment there? I don’t know at the moment, there’s nothing, but.

it’s still, I’m hoping that at some point we’re gonna get to that point where people realize the value of the channel. Cuz I think we have good information. Our biggest problem is nobody’s discovering us right now.  So as you can see, there’s lots and lots of ups and downs across the different projects that I have.

Some of them are doing much better than others. Some of them have extreme experienced, faster growth. Some of them have experienced a step back in growth. But I have to say that I would not have been able to do any of them. Not as easily if I hadn’t joined Project 24. So if you’ve been watching this far and you dunno anything about Project 24?

Why not check out that webinar in the link below now it does take you to a link which is an affiliate link. And if you do choose. To buy through that link. I get a commission, but you know what? Just go watch the Income School’s YouTube channel. And if you’re a little bit more intelligent than me, which doesn’t take much, I’m sure you can learn most of the things that you need to learn just by watching that as well.

Okay guys, thank you so much for watching. If it was your first time you made it this far. So why not become a subscriber? If you’ve got any comments or questions, then please do leave them in the comment section. I do answer everyth. That I can. And I’m happy to help in any way that I’m able to. So don’t forget to join me in my next video, where I will be talking about some more issues that I’ve been having and hopefully they can help you avoid them with your own business.

See you next time. Yeah.

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