Income School Project 24: What 5 Blogs Actually Looked Like in One Week (June 8-15 Update)

Running five blogs at the same time sounds like a recipe for chaos. But if you treat each site like a seed in the ground and track what germinates, the chaos turns into data. That is exactly what this Income School Project 24 weekly update covers — seven days across five sites, from a veteran blog sitting at 97 posts to a brand-new site less than three weeks old that is already pulling organic traffic from Google.

The numbers here are not glamorous. We are talking 15 to 185 page views per site for the week. But the patterns inside those numbers tell you what to do next, and that is the whole point of logging these updates week after week.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A clear picture of how five real blogs performed during the week of June 8 through June 14
The exact tip from Jim and Rikki at Income School that produced sales the very next day after implementation
Why Bing and Yahoo traffic matters more than most bloggers realize, especially before Google kicks in
How to use geographic traffic data to gauge the actual purchasing power of your audience
The Blog to Social plugin setup that keeps social traffic flowing in under 10 minutes a week
Why a site with only 6 posts and no fresh writing since February still pulled 36 page views and nearly 2 minutes of average time-on-page
The multi-site strategy behind building what feels like too many blogs at once
Use finder.platformproof.com to find the income stream that fits the skills you already have

What Income School Project 24 Actually Is

Before getting into the site-by-site numbers, a quick recap for anyone who has not seen the earlier updates. Project 24 is a blogging course and community run by Jim and Rikki at Income School. The name refers to the idea that you can build a full-time income from blogging within 24 months if you follow the method consistently.

The core of the method is writing helpful content in three formats. Response posts come in at around 1,500 words and answer a specific question directly. Staple posts sit at about 2,500 words and cover broader topics that readers return to repeatedly. Pillar posts are the biggest pieces, around 3,500 words, designed to be the definitive resource on a topic and to anchor the rest of the site’s content through internal links.

Beyond the writing templates, Jim and Rikki release a new YouTube video every Monday — typically around 8 a.m. Central — that covers tactics, case studies, and updates that go above and beyond what is inside the course. This is relevant because one of those Monday videos triggered the most actionable moment in this week’s update.

Site 1: The Veteran Blog at 97 Posts

This is the anchor site, the one that has been running the longest. The first blog post went live on September 7th. The 35th post was completed on October 24th. Then there was a gap of a few months before writing resumed, and since then roughly 60 to 65 additional posts have gone up, bringing the total to around 97.

The week of June 8 through June 14 produced these daily page view counts: 26, 38, 29, 24, 30, and 16. That is 185 page views across the seven-day stretch. Extrapolated to a full month at that pace, you are looking at approximately 780 page views — which would represent the strongest monthly total to date.

The traffic sources breakdown is worth studying. Bing and Yahoo together account for a meaningful chunk of inbound search traffic. Facebook is contributing through automated posts via Blog to Social (more on that plugin below). DuckDuckGo is showing up consistently. YouTube is sending 7 visits. Quora, which was a bigger focus in earlier months, is still delivering some traffic even with less active effort there. The notable absence is Google, which has not delivered significant search traffic yet despite the site being almost nine months old.

The geographic breakdown shows mostly developed-country traffic — the United States and similar markets — with some visitors from India and Bosnia. That matters because developed-country visitors tend to have higher purchasing power, which affects affiliate conversion rates. The flip side of that good geographic signal is that if those visitors are landing and not clicking affiliate links, the site is leaving money on the table. That is identified as an area of opportunity going into the next week.

The headline moment from Site 1 this week was implementing a tip from Jim and Rikki. A few weeks before this update, they released a Monday video about making affiliate link anchor text more engaging and more likely to get clicked. The implementation was delayed — the tip sat ignored for two or three weeks. Once it was finally applied, the change was simple: adding a sentence inviting the reader to check the price on Amazon rather than just placing a bare link.

The result? A couple of sales showed up the very next day. That is not a massive number in dollar terms, but it validates the advice directly. The lesson is not the specific tactic — it is the pattern. Actionable information only works when you actually act on it. The tip was sitting inside the course for weeks, producing nothing, because no action was taken. One afternoon of implementation changed that.

Site 2: 40 Posts and a Dramatic Traffic Drop

Site 2 started on October 24th, the same week the 35th post on Site 1 was completed. The 30th post on Site 2 went up during the first week of January. Since then, roughly 10 more posts have been added, bringing the total to about 40.

This week was rough for Site 2. Total page views across the entire week came to just 42 — a dramatic drop compared to prior weeks. The traffic source breakdown shows Google sending visitors, which is actually a positive sign that the site has Google visibility. But none of the keywords are ranking at position one yet, which means there is room to climb and traffic should grow as rankings improve.

The geographic picture for Site 2 is more mixed than Site 1. Denmark shows up, which is a strong market. India and Kenya also appear. Kenya in particular skews toward a lower purchasing-power audience, which can affect affiliate income even if session duration is strong.

The identified action items for Site 2 are specific: add more blog posts to increase the content surface area, build more internal links between existing posts, and make sure affiliate links to Amazon are present and compelling in posts that review or recommend products. These are the same levers available to any blog in the 40-post range — they just have not been pulled yet.

Site 3: The Local Travel Blog About Kenosha

Site 3 is the one that required the most explanation about why it exists, because its origin story is different from the others. About a year before this update, the site was created with the idea of building something like Yelp, but only for Kenosha, Wisconsin. The original business model was to go to local restaurants, document them, and sell advertising packages — essentially a local directory site with a recurring revenue angle.

The problem with that model is obvious once you state it plainly. Why would a restaurant owner buy an ad package from a scrappy local site when they can just list on Yelp for free and reach a much larger audience? The model did not hold up under scrutiny, so the site was repurposed. The plan shifted toward adding Kenosha-specific blog content, building organic traffic, and then approaching local businesses with an audience in hand — a much stronger sales position.

The site currently has between 15 and 20 blog posts. This week it produced 15 page views. Travel-related content is a competitive niche because sites like TripAdvisor and even Yelp dominate many of the informational queries. That is a real constraint to work within, not a reason to quit — but it does set expectations for how slowly organic traffic builds on a local travel site.

The traffic for the week broke down as: Google organic bringing 5 visits, direct traffic accounting for 2, Facebook contributing some, and Bing adding a few. All of the traffic is from the United States, which makes sense given the hyperlocal subject matter. Someone searching for things to do in Kenosha is almost certainly either already there or planning a trip from somewhere else in the country.

Site 4: Under 3 Weeks Old and Already Getting Google Traffic

Site 4 is the newest one in active development. It has about 10 blog posts, and the oldest of those posts was published less than three weeks before this update. Despite that, it generated 33 page views in the week of June 8 through June 14 — more than Site 3, which has been around much longer.

The more remarkable number is what is inside those 33 page views. The traffic breakdown shows Google organic already contributing. When a site less than three weeks old is getting Google traffic, that is a signal. It suggests the content quality is solid enough that Google is crawling and indexing it quickly and deciding it is worth showing to searchers. Most new sites sit in a waiting period before Google pays any attention to them.

The direct traffic count of 18 for the week is higher than expected and likely includes some bot or crawler traffic — the same note applies to Site 1 and Site 2 where direct traffic counts were flagged as suspicious (no one visits their own sites 19 or 72 times in a week). The real story is the Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google, and Yahoo traffic, which is genuine search engine discovery on a very new site.

Geographic spread for Site 4: United States, UAE, Canada, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. That is a strong lineup of developed markets showing up in week three of the site’s existence.

Site 5: The Sleeping Site That Still Performs

Site 5 is alstongodbolt.com itself — the site you are reading right now. At the time of this June update, it had 6 blog posts and had not received any new content since around mid-February. That is several months of zero new writing. Despite that, it pulled 36 page views for the week.

The engagement numbers are strong. Average time on page comes in at 1 minute and 44 seconds. Bounce rate is 52.17 percent. Those are healthy indicators that the people who do land on the site are finding content worth reading and spending real time with it.

The traffic sources break down as YouTube being the primary driver, with Google organic also appearing. Traffic is coming from the United States, Canada, India, the Netherlands, Philippines, and Pakistan — a genuinely global spread for a site with only 6 posts. The YouTube link in the video description is doing real work here, pulling people from the video over to the blog.

The plan for this site is different from the others. Rather than trying to rank for competitive search queries, alstongodbolt.com is meant to serve as a hub — somewhere to send people from YouTube, somewhere to showcase recommended products, somewhere that functions as a landing base for the audience already being built through video. Adding more blog posts here is on the list, but the approach is more curated than the volume-first strategy used on the other sites.

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The Blog to Social Plugin: Social Traffic in Under 10 Minutes a Week

One tool mentioned across multiple sites in this update is Blog to Social. The way it works: once you click publish on a blog post, Blog to Social automatically fans that post out to whichever social media platforms you have connected. In this case those include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Posts can also be scheduled in advance, and older posts can be set to recirculate on a recurring basis.

The practical result is that social media referral traffic shows up in the analytics each week without any active posting effort. The time investment is under 10 minutes a week. For anyone who has tried to maintain an active presence across four social platforms simultaneously, that number is remarkable. The trade-off is that the posts go out automatically rather than being crafted for each platform’s specific audience — but for a blogging operation at this stage, automation beats manual posting every time.

One note from the transcript: Pinterest was temporarily stopped by the plugin because the account may have been flagged for posting too many pins without enough engagement activity. That is worth watching on any site that relies on Pinterest as a traffic source.

What Every Site Needs Next: The Shared Action List

After reviewing all five sites, the action items that apply across the board fall into three categories. These are not hypothetical improvements — they are the specific gaps identified in this weekly review.

Internal Linking

Every site needs more internal links between relevant posts. Interlinking is not complicated — if a post about dog food mentions a specific brand, link to another post on the site that reviews that brand or compares it to alternatives. The relevance has to be real. Linking a post about frisbees to a post about dog food makes no sense. Linking it to a post about frisbee golf does. Search engines use internal links to understand site structure and to distribute ranking power across pages. Readers use them to go deeper into a topic. Both outcomes are good.

Affiliate Link Placement and Anchor Text

The Jim and Rikki tip that generated same-next-day sales should be applied across all sites, not just Site 1. The idea is to make the invitation to click an affiliate link more explicit and more enticing. Instead of a generic “click here” or just dropping a linked product name, add a sentence that tells the reader what they will find on the other side — checking a current price on Amazon, for example. This does not require rewriting every post. It means going through existing content systematically and upgrading the calls to action around affiliate links.

Post Volume on Lagging Sites

Site 2, Site 3, and Site 5 all have fewer posts than they need to build real search visibility. Site 2 is at 40 posts but has stalled in terms of traffic growth. Site 3 is at 15 to 20 posts competing in the travel niche. Site 5 has 6 posts. None of those totals give search engines enough surface area to understand what the site is really about. Adding posts — even a few per week — compounds over time. The 60-plus posts added to Site 1 in the last three months are a direct example of what that compounding looks like.

Why Run Five Blogs at Once?

Someone asked in a previous update why the focus is spread across five sites instead of concentrating on one or two. The honest answer is that the multi-site approach is a deliberate experiment, not a lack of focus.

Site 1 has nearly 100 posts, and more than 60 of those were written in the last three months. At that point, the question becomes: what does the site look like in six months when those posts have had time to age into Google’s index? Adding more posts to an already substantial site while waiting for existing content to mature is one approach. But watching multiple sites with different topic areas, different ages, and different content volumes gives you much more data about what actually works.

The original plan was to launch a new site every two months. That pace proved too demanding, and it was scaled back to roughly every six months. The Kenosha travel site was already a year old at the time of this update. The alstongodbolt.com site was already established before the blog content was added. Site 4 was the freshest plant in the garden.

The seed-and-soil analogy is the honest frame for this approach. Different seeds germinate at different rates. You do not dig them up to check on them every day — you track what comes up, water consistently, and make adjustments based on what is actually growing.

Honest Drawbacks of the Multi-Site Approach

Running this many sites in parallel is genuinely a lot of writing. The transcript is direct about this: the original two-site-every-two-months plan was backed off because it required more content output than was sustainable. Any blogger considering a similar portfolio approach should go in with eyes open about the workload.

There is also a focus cost. When you are split across five different topics and five different sets of analytics, it is harder to go deep on any single site. If Site 2 is struggling with traffic and you have four other sites to maintain, Site 2 might not get the intensive attention it needs. That is a real trade-off, not a side effect that can be engineered away.

The counter-argument — and it is a legitimate one — is that portfolio diversification reduces the impact of any single site underperforming. If Site 2 tanks and it is your only blog, that is a crisis. If Site 2 tanks and you have four others, it is a data point.

Find Your X

Blogging works. But whether blogging is the right income model for you depends on your schedule, your topic knowledge, your willingness to write consistently for months before traffic arrives, and your goals. Those variables are different for every person. If you want a recommendation that accounts for your actual situation — not a generic “start a blog” answer — use the free tool at finder.platformproof.com. It asks seven questions and returns a specific path based on what you already have.

Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly is Income School Project 24?

Project 24 is a paid blogging course and community run by Jim and Rikki at Income School. The core premise is that following their content-writing method consistently for 24 months puts you in position to earn a full-time income from blogging. The curriculum covers content strategy, post structure (response, staple, and pillar post formats), monetization through display ads and affiliate products, and ongoing tactics delivered through a weekly Monday YouTube video.

How long does it take to get Google traffic on a new blog?

It varies, but the experience reported in this update is instructive. Site 4, with posts less than three weeks old, was already showing Google organic traffic in analytics. Site 1, with nearly 100 posts and nine months of history, is still waiting for significant Google traffic. The honest answer is that Google tends to reward older sites and established authority, but early indexing and traffic can appear much sooner — sometimes within weeks — if the content is high quality and the niche is specific enough.

Is Bing and Yahoo traffic worth pursuing?

Absolutely. Site 1 is receiving its best traffic through Bing and Yahoo rather than Google at this stage. Bing tends to index and rank new content faster than Google, which means bloggers can see early validation of their content before Google’s trust-building process is complete. Bing also powers DuckDuckGo, so appearing in Bing search results often means appearing in DuckDuckGo results as well. Do not write off non-Google traffic sources as second-tier.

What is the Blog to Social plugin and is it worth using?

Blog to Social is a WordPress plugin that automatically distributes your blog posts to connected social media accounts when you publish. In this case it pushes to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. You can also set recurring schedules for existing posts. The result here is social referral traffic flowing in across multiple sites with less than 10 minutes of active social media work per week. For bloggers who do not want to manage social media manually, it is a reasonable automation tool. The Pinterest functionality hit a temporary block, suggesting the platform flags accounts that post frequently without engaging back.

How do you use geographic traffic data to make decisions?

The key use case described in this update is using the country of origin to estimate purchasing power. Traffic from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and most of Western Europe tends to come from audiences with stronger purchasing power and higher Amazon affiliate conversion rates. Traffic from developing countries can still be valuable, but the path to monetization may look different — display ad revenue, for instance, can vary significantly by country. Checking the geographic breakdown of your traffic gives you a signal about whether your monetization approach is well-matched to your actual audience.

How many blog posts do you need before traffic starts building?

There is no hard threshold, but the patterns in this update suggest that 40 posts is enough to see some Google traffic even without top-one rankings, while 15 to 20 posts in a competitive niche like travel may not yet provide enough signal for search engines. Project 24 generally recommends working toward 60 or more posts before expecting substantial search traffic. The content has to age — Google gives more weight to sites and pages that have existed for some time and accumulated some signals. Site 1 with 97 posts is still in the maturation window.

What is internal linking and why does it matter?

Internal linking means linking from one page on your site to another page on the same site when the topics are relevant to each other. It matters for two reasons. First, it helps search engines crawl and understand your site’s topical structure — if five posts all link to one pillar post, that sends a signal that the pillar post is the authority piece on that topic. Second, internal links keep readers on your site longer by giving them a natural next step when they finish a post. The guidance in this update is to link between posts where the topics genuinely connect, not to force links where no connection exists.

Should you run multiple blogs at once or focus on one?

This update makes the case for both approaches, honestly. Multiple blogs give you comparative data and portfolio diversification. But they also divide your writing time and attention across more fronts than a focused strategy would. If you are newer to blogging, the focus-first approach — one site, as many posts as possible, as much internal linking and optimization as you can do — is probably the more efficient path to your first income milestone. The multi-site portfolio strategy makes more sense once you have a site that is mature enough to mostly run on its own while you build the next one.

Sources

Income School Project 24 course and community — incomeschool.com
Blog to Social WordPress plugin — blogtosocial.com
Jim and Rikki’s Monday YouTube video series on Income School channel
Google Analytics traffic data for five sites, week of June 8 through June 14
Amazon Associates affiliate program — affiliate-program.amazon.com