How Much I Made After 60 Blog Posts (Project 24)

Sixty blog posts. Five months of writing. A knee surgery. Two hired writers. And a grand total of $3.19 in earnings. That is the Project 24 update nobody puts in the headline when they pitch you on Income School.

This post walks through every number from February’s Google Analytics report, explains exactly why the site was ahead of Income School’s traffic timeline but behind on income, and breaks down what actually happens when you hire a writer from iWriter for $66 and ask them to make it sound natural. If you are somewhere in the first 60 posts of your own blogging project, this is the data point you need to see.

What You’ll Walk Out With

The exact February traffic numbers after 60-plus blog posts on a 5-month-old site
A breakdown of every traffic source: direct, social, organic, and referral with user counts
What the first Amazon affiliate sale looks like in real dollars (it was $0.62)
Why a site can beat Income School’s traffic timeline and still miss the income projection
The real quality problem with iWriter and what $66 of outsourced content actually gets you
How Blog2Social auto-schedules posts to LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, and more without daily manual work
What the plan looks like after 60 posts when the niche is not tight enough
Still figuring out your niche? Find the angle that fits what you already know at finder.platformproof.com

The February Traffic Report

The site launched on September 7th. The first post went live September 9th. By the end of February, the site was roughly five to six months old depending on how you count it. Here are the exact numbers pulled from Google Analytics for the month of February:

Total page views: 446
Unique users: 222
Average time on page: 1 minute 28 seconds
Bounce rate: 83%
Exit rate: 61%

These numbers are not viral. But for a site that is not even six months old and still sitting in what Income School calls the “wilderness period,” they are legitimate. The wilderness period is the stretch before Google fully trusts your domain and starts sending consistent organic search traffic. During that window, most of your traffic has to come from somewhere other than Google, which is exactly what the source breakdown shows.

One thing worth noting about the direct traffic percentage: Google Analytics has a known reporting quirk where some search-engine referrals show up as direct traffic depending on how the user arrived at the page. An article from several years ago raises that point. The practical implication is that the 49% direct figure might include some organic search visits that were miscategorized. Take that number as an upper bound for true direct traffic.

Where the Traffic Actually Came From

Here is the February traffic breakdown by source, both as percentages of sessions and as raw user counts from the 222 total users:

Direct: 49% of sessions (108 users)
Social: 37% of sessions (83 users), from Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
Organic search: 13% of sessions (28 users)
Referral: 3% of sessions (3 users)

Drilling into individual sources gives a clearer picture of which platforms were actually sending readers:

Bing: 14 users
YouTube: 14 users
Quora: 12 users
LinkedIn: 7 users
Yahoo: 7 users
Google: 5 users
Facebook: 4 users
DuckDuckGo: 2 users

A few of these numbers stand out. Bing sending the same volume as YouTube (14 users each) is surprising given how rarely Bing gets credit in the blogging community. Most new bloggers set up Google Search Console and ignore Bing Webmaster Tools entirely. That is a mistake. Bing Webmaster Tools is free, takes about 20 minutes to configure, and based on this data, Bing appears to trust new sites faster than Google does. If you have not submitted your sitemap to Bing yet, do it today.

Quora sending 12 users is the other number worth paying attention to. The approach here was straightforward: find real questions on Quora in the blog’s niche, write genuinely useful answers, and include the website name in the author bio or the answer body. It is not automated and it does not scale the way posts do, but in the early months of a blog when Google has not decided to trust you yet, Quora gives you a real signal that the content is answering real questions. Twelve readers from Quora is not nothing.

How Blog2Social Drove the Social Numbers

The 83 social users came almost entirely from a WordPress plugin called Blog2Social. The plugin auto-schedules blog posts to social media platforms. During the first 30 days, the premium plan is free. With the premium version active, you can set up automatic posting schedules to LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The setup here involved scheduling 15 to 20 posts across those networks throughout each day. During this stretch, the LinkedIn account was posting a different blog post every hour, around the clock. Whether that frequency actually works or just creates noise in followers’ feeds is a fair question. The data shows it generated 7 LinkedIn users, which is modest, but keep in mind that the primary purpose of Blog2Social during this phase was not to get massive social traffic immediately. It was to keep the site consistently visible across platforms without requiring any daily manual effort while the writing work continued.

The honest framing: social traffic from Blog2Social is scaffolding. It helps you stay present while you wait for organic search to mature. Social sends traffic in bursts when a post is scheduled. Organic search traffic compounds over time. In a Project 24 site at month five, social is useful but it is not the income driver. Organic is the engine. Social is just how you stay alive while the engine warms up.

The $3.19 Earnings Breakdown

As of March 8th, the total earnings from the site since day one broke down like this:

Google Adsense: $2.57
Amazon Associates: $0.62
Total: $3.19

This is the number that makes people quit blogging. It is also the number that Income School, and every other honest blogging course, warns you about before you start. Somehow the warning does not fully land until you see it yourself after months of actual work. Three dollars and nineteen cents after five months and 60-plus posts is jarring. It is also exactly what the math predicts for a site at this stage with this traffic volume.

How the Amazon Sale Actually Happened

The Amazon affiliate sale is worth examining in detail because it illustrates how the program actually works. Someone visited the site, clicked an affiliate link, and instead of purchasing the niche product the post was recommending, they bought “A Star Is Born,” the Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga film. The movie was priced at approximately $24.95. The commission came to $0.62.

This is the Amazon cookie system functioning exactly as designed. When a visitor clicks any Amazon affiliate link on your site, Amazon places a 24-hour cookie on their browser. If they purchase anything on Amazon within that 24-hour window, not just the item you linked to, you earn a commission on whatever they bought. That is one of the practical advantages of Amazon Associates over most other affiliate programs: you benefit from the full shopping session, not just the single product click.

The commission rate on a movie purchase is in the lower tiers of the Amazon Associates structure. Entertainment products typically earn between 2% and 5%. On a $24.95 movie that works out to roughly $0.62. Not meaningful on its own, but the mechanism is confirmed. The seal, as the video puts it, is broken. The site can generate affiliate revenue. The question from here is traffic and niche match, not whether the mechanism works.

Why Traffic Is Ahead But Income Is Behind

The Income School Project 24 framework includes a spreadsheet that projects approximately where a site’s traffic and income should be at each month mark. By February, this site was exceeding the traffic projection. That sounds like good news. The problem is that income was trailing the projection significantly.

The reason comes down to niche depth. The site was niched down, but not far enough. Income School’s methodology asks you to choose a niche so specific that you can realistically dominate a small subsection of a topic rather than compete across an entire broad category. When you go deep enough, your posts attract readers who are already in a buying mindset for specific products. Those visitors click affiliate links and purchase. When you niche too broadly, you attract general-interest readers who are curious but not buyers. You get traffic. You do not get conversions. The income timeline falls behind even when the traffic timeline is on track or ahead.

This is a trap that catches a lot of first-time bloggers. The instinct at the start is to cast a wider net because a broader topic feels like it would attract more readers. It does attract more readers, eventually. But those readers are not clustered around specific purchasing decisions, so the affiliate income does not follow the traffic growth at the same rate. A narrower niche means fewer total readers but a higher percentage of them are buyers, which is what actually moves the income numbers.

An earlier video on the channel (titled something close to “Why I Won’t Make Penny Today This Month or Next Month”) goes deeper into the niche problem and what to do about it. The recommendation coming out of this February update is clear: hit 100 posts on the primary site, then reassess the niche strategy before spinning up the secondary site.

The Posting Gap and What It Costs You

One detail that helps explain the income-traffic gap is the uneven age distribution of the posts. Not all 60-plus posts were aging at the same rate during February.

The first 35 blog posts went live between September 9th and October 24th. That is 35 posts in roughly seven weeks. Then nothing was published until mid-January, a gap of almost three months. The remaining posts (bringing the catalog to 60-65 total) were only a few weeks old by February.

The cause of the gap was a knee surgery and recovery. Not a motivation failure. Just a medical reality. But the effect on the site’s organic growth is measurable. Google does not send consistent search traffic to fresh posts. The older half of the post catalog, the posts from September and October, were the ones generating whatever organic traffic the site was seeing. The January posts were too new to have earned Google’s trust yet.

This points to something worth building into your publishing approach from the start: consistency beats intensity. Sixty posts spread evenly across five months would mean more posts reaching the six-month aging threshold at around the same time, which is typically when sites start seeing a meaningful organic traffic increase. Publishing in bursts and then pausing creates an age distribution that delays the compounding effect. Google rewards consistency over time, not volume at a single moment.

Still figuring out what to blog about?

Find the specific angle you can build 60 posts around without running out of things to say at finder.platformproof.com.

Hiring Writers: iWriter and AI Writer

During the surgery recovery when writing was not possible, two content writing services were tested to keep the pipeline moving.

iWriter: $66 and What You Get

The iWriter order totaled $66. The content came back looking acceptable on an initial read. Closer inspection revealed the problem. The writing did not appear to come from a native English speaker. The sentences had the specific quality of text written in another language, run through a translation tool, and then processed by a spinner.

Spinning is the practice of taking a piece of content and systematically swapping words and phrases with synonyms to create a version that reads differently from the original while covering the same ground. The result is prose that passes grammar checkers but reads strangely to anyone who actually reads it. The sentences are grammatically correct but the word choices feel off, sometimes overly formal, sometimes oddly casual, in a pattern that does not match how a human writer makes stylistic choices.

The $66 was not entirely wasted. The posts covered the required topics and had the right structure. But every piece needed real editing before it was publishable. If you plan to use iWriter, factor in the editing time when you calculate the actual cost per post. The money is cheap. The time is not.

AI Writer: Still Being Evaluated

Two posts were also ordered through AI Writer, a separate content service. The evaluation of that content had not finished by the time this update was recorded. The plan was to compare both services side by side before deciding whether to continue with iWriter, move to AI Writer, or test a third option.

The broader takeaway from the hiring experiment applies regardless of which service you use: outsourcing content does not mean stepping away from quality control. Every piece still needs a read-through for accuracy, a check for voice consistency, and light editing to make sure it fits the niche. When you factor that review time into the cost of each outsourced post, the price-per-word calculation looks different than the service’s rate card suggests.

Honest Drawbacks of the Project 24 Approach at Month Five

Income School is transparent about the timeline. The course does not promise income in month one or even month six. But the numbers from this update reveal a few things that are worth naming directly for anyone who is currently inside a Project 24 site and looking at similar results:

The income timeline assumes a buyer-intent niche. If you niched too broadly, the traffic timeline and the income timeline will diverge. You get readers. You do not get conversions. The fix is not more posts. The fix is tighter targeting within the content you still need to write.
Adsense income is negligible at 446 monthly page views. At that traffic level, $2.57 from Adsense is mathematically accurate. You need somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 monthly page views before Adsense generates income worth tracking as a business metric. In the first year, Adsense is a proof of concept, not a revenue stream.
Consistency compounds; intensity does not. Publishing 35 posts in seven weeks and then going quiet for three months created an uneven post-age distribution that slowed organic growth. Spreading those same 60 posts across the full five months would have produced better organic results by February.
Outsourced content needs editing time. The $66 iWriter batch was not ready to publish without work. Calculate the real cost of outsourced content by adding your editing hours at whatever your time is worth per hour to the dollar amount on the invoice.
The wilderness period is real and it does not shorten based on effort alone. Google decides when to trust your domain. You can influence that timeline with internal linking, quality content, and backlinks. But you cannot force it. Bing, Quora, and social platforms are your traffic sources while Google takes its time. Use them seriously, not as afterthoughts.

The Plan From Here: 100 Posts Then Pivot

The next milestone for the primary site is 100 blog posts. Once that target is reached, the plan is to shift primary effort to a secondary site that launched at the beginning of January. That site is new enough that there is no meaningful data to share about it yet.

The reasoning behind the 100-post target is straightforward. At 60 posts, the catalog is large enough to have meaningful coverage of the niche topics, but not large enough to have the density that drives consistent internal linking opportunities and cross-post traffic. At 100 posts, especially if the newer posts are written with a tighter focus than some of the earlier ones, the site should start showing the organic compounding that the income timeline requires.

For anyone looking at $3.19 after five months and 60 posts and trying to decide whether to keep going: this is the precise point where most people stop. The data in month six and month nine and month twelve for sites that kept publishing consistently is what makes the first five months worth it. The income does not compound in a straight line. It sits flat and then it moves. The challenge is that you cannot tell from inside the flat stretch when the move is coming.

Find Your X

If you are somewhere in the first 60 posts of your own blog and the income numbers are flat, the first question worth asking is whether you went deep enough in your niche selection. Traffic that does not convert to affiliate income almost always traces back to audience intent. Readers who are curious about a topic and readers who are actively shopping for a product within that topic are two different audiences. The posts you write need to target the second group, not just the first.

If you have not locked your niche yet, or if you chose one that feels too broad based on how the first 30 or 60 posts have performed, visit finder.platformproof.com to find the specific angle that matches what you already know and the audience that is already in buying mode for it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many blog posts do you need before you start making money?

Income School’s Project 24 framework targets 30 to 60 posts in year one with the expectation that meaningful income begins around month 12 to 24 depending on niche depth and publishing consistency. In the case described in this update, 60-plus posts at month five produced $3.19. The income was below the projection primarily because the niche was not tight enough to attract buyer-intent traffic in volume. Post count alone does not determine income. Post count combined with a specific, purchase-oriented niche does.

Is Google Adsense worth setting up on a new blog?

Yes, but manage your expectations about the income. At 446 monthly page views, $2.57 from Adsense in a month is roughly accurate. Adsense income becomes meaningful at traffic volumes in the tens of thousands of monthly page views. Setting it up early is worthwhile because every page view earns something and the account ages with the site. Just do not count Adsense as a revenue strategy until your traffic is significantly higher.

How does Amazon Associates pay you when someone buys a different product?

When a visitor clicks any Amazon affiliate link on your site, Amazon places a 24-hour tracking cookie on their browser. If they make any purchase on Amazon within those 24 hours, including something completely unrelated to what you linked, you earn the commission on whatever they bought. In the case described here, a reader clicked a niche product link and bought “A Star Is Born” instead, earning $0.62 on a $24.95 movie purchase. This is a feature of the program, not a bug. It means you benefit from the full shopping intent of each click, not just from readers who buy the exact product you recommended.

What is the Google wilderness period and how long does it last?

The wilderness period is the stretch early in a site’s life when Google has not yet extended enough trust to the domain to send meaningful organic search traffic. For most new sites with consistent publishing, this period lasts between six and twelve months. During the wilderness period, Bing, Quora, social platforms, and direct traffic are your primary visitors. Most sites start seeing meaningful Google organic growth between months six and twelve, with the strongest compounding typically visible in year two. Publishing consistently throughout the wilderness period matters because the posts you write during it are what Google will rank once the trust builds.

Is iWriter worth using for blog content?

It can be, but your expectations need to match the price point. At the rate paid in this case ($66 for a batch of posts), iWriter can deliver structurally sound content on the right topics. The quality problem identified here was writing that appeared to be translated and then spun rather than written natively in English. Every piece needed editing before it was publishable. If you use iWriter, build editing time into your cost calculation. The dollar rate is affordable. The time required to edit to a publishable standard is the real cost.

What is Blog2Social and how does it work with WordPress?

Blog2Social is a WordPress plugin that automatically schedules your published blog posts to social media platforms including LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. During the first 30 days, the premium plan is free. With premium active, you set up posting schedules once and the plugin distributes your content across platforms on its own. The practical use in early-stage blogging is staying consistently visible on social channels while your writing energy goes into producing new posts and waiting for organic search to mature.

What does Income School’s traffic timeline spreadsheet actually show?

Income School provides a spreadsheet that benchmarks approximately where a site’s traffic and income should be at each month mark, based on consistent publishing in a focused niche. The timeline is a model, not a guarantee. A site can exceed the traffic projection while trailing the income projection if the niche attracts general readers rather than buyers. When evaluating your own numbers against the spreadsheet, check whether the traffic you are getting has buyer intent behind it, not just interest. Traffic that converts is what the income projection assumes.

When should you start a second blog site in Project 24?

Income School generally recommends focusing on a single site until it is producing meaningful income before starting a second one. The plan described in this update was to reach 100 posts on the primary site before shifting attention to the secondary site. The secondary site had launched at the beginning of January but was genuinely too new to generate data worth analyzing. Starting a second site too early splits your writing time and delays both sites from reaching the post density where organic growth starts compounding.

Sources

Google Analytics (February 2019 traffic data, personal account)
Google Adsense (earnings data, personal account)
Amazon Associates (commission data, personal account)
Income School Project 24 (course materials and timeline spreadsheet)
Blog2Social WordPress plugin (blog2social.com)
iWriter content writing service (iwriter.com)