Project 24 Nine-Month Update: What the Numbers Actually Show

Nine months into Project 24, three websites running, nearly 100 blog posts written, and the income is somewhere between ten and twenty dollars a month. That is not the number the sales page shows. But it is what honest, consistent effort looks like in the middle of the process, before the traffic compounds. And understanding what went wrong, and what started turning around, is worth more than any highlight reel.

Austin enrolled in Income School’s Project 24 on September 7, 2018. Nine months later he pulled open his analytics across three sites and walked through every number, every mistake, and every sign that the method was starting to work. The data is real. No cherry-picking. This post breaks down exactly what the numbers showed, what killed early growth, what fixed it, and what the honest timeline looks like for someone doing this right.

What You’ll Walk Out With

The actual monthly traffic numbers for three sites at nine months
The keyword research mistake that stalled Site 1 for months and how to avoid it
Why niching down a level changed the traffic trajectory
The Blog to Social plugin and Quora strategy that built early traffic before Google kicked in
Why YouTube videos are a competitive weapon against high-domain-authority sites
How country-level traffic data affects affiliate commission potential
A local city site model that monetizes differently from standard Project 24 sites
How to find out which online income method fits your actual situation at finder.platformproof.com

Site 1 at Nine Months: The Actual Numbers

Site 1 launched September 7, 2018. By the nine-month mark it held between 95 and 97 total blog posts. The first 35 posts were written in 45 days, but Austin went back and rewrote them in a more conversational style after realizing the original drafts felt too expert-facing rather than human. Whether that rewrite helped or hurt is unclear, but the intent was right.

The monthly traffic story looks like this: November 2018 brought 148 page views. December was 154. January jumped to 417 after Austin went back and added more posts. February was 446. March hit 643. April came in at 576 and May at 595. At the nine-month mark the most recent monthly snapshot showed 3,523 total page views, 3,114 unique views, an average time on page of one minute and 54 seconds, an 82.1% bounce rate, and a 67.2% exit rate. Income at that point: roughly ten to twenty dollars per month.

By Project 24’s original projections, that is behind schedule. Austin says so directly, without hedging. But the number that matters most in that list is the one-minute-54-second average time on page. That is not a low number. People who land are reading. The problem was getting enough people to land in the first place.

The Keyword Research Mistake That Cost Five Months

This is the mistake Austin identifies as the single biggest factor holding Site 1 back. Early on he selected topics that looked good on paper for keyword research but turned out to be dominated by one massive site with enormous domain authority. That site writes 25,000-word posts on topics as basic as how to cook an egg. When you go after topics that a site like that has covered at that depth and authority, you are not competing, you are invisible.

The trap is that those topics feel logical. They are in your niche. They get decent search volume. But search volume means nothing when the first five results are controlled by a site that has spent years building trust with Google. Project 24 teaches this principle, but many people, including Austin, underestimate how extreme the competition can be at certain topic levels until they have lived it for a few months and watched their organic traffic stay near zero.

The second mistake compounding the first: titles that were too cut-and-dry. Austin acknowledges that he does not write clickbait-style headlines, and that while he does not want to write misleading titles, there is real craft in writing a title that pulls a reader in. A flat, accurate title competes poorly against a title that triggers curiosity or speaks directly to a specific pain. Both things can be true at once: honest and compelling.

Niching Down: What Changed in January and February

The fix was not abandoning the site. It was going back in January and February and choosing a tighter sub-niche. Instead of targeting the broad topic level where the dominant site was already winning, Austin moved one level deeper. That shift is reflected in the last 60-plus posts on the site, which are all written with that tighter focus.

The traffic data supports the decision. March was the site’s best month to that point at 643 page views, roughly 44% higher than February’s 446. April and May held at 576 and 595, which is consistent performance at a new, higher baseline. That kind of month-over-month stability after a flat or declining period is usually the first sign that the content is finding the right audience.

There is also a volume argument: 60 additional posts means 60 more chances for a page to find an audience, get shared, or rank for a secondary keyword. Each post is an independent opportunity. Austin’s observation that more content means more chances to stumble across success is not just optimism, it is the statistical reality of how content sites build traffic over time.

Three Pages Drive 15% of All Traffic

One of the most instructive data points from Site 1 is the traffic concentration. Ten percent of all page views came from one page. Thirteen percent came from two pages. Fifteen percent of total traffic was concentrated in just three pages. One of those three was the recommended products page.

That last detail is a diagnostic. Readers are finding the products page. They are interested enough to click through to it. But they are not then clicking the affiliate links. That gap points to a copy or relevance problem on the page itself. Either the products listed do not match the reader’s actual need, or the page does not give them a strong enough reason to take the next step. Austin identifies this as something fixable within a couple of weeks, not a fundamental flaw in the model.

A useful benchmark from the data: the seventh most-viewed page on the site was written within the last two months before the update. It was approximately 1,700 words, shorter than the site average. That suggests content age is not the only factor driving page views. Relevance and topic match matter more than post length in many cases.

The Traffic Sources That Built Early Views

Before organic search kicked in, two sources drove the bulk of traffic: social and direct. Social accounted for 7,733 views, organic for 346, and referral for 31 over the tracked period. The social number is large because Austin used a plugin called Blog to Social, which automatically publishes new posts to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram the moment a post goes live. It also allows scheduling of re-promotion posts up to 52 weeks out, so older content continues cycling through social channels without manual work.

The referral number is smaller but noteworthy because it came largely from Quora. Answering questions on Quora in his niche and linking back to relevant posts on his site drove consistent referral traffic. That is a strategy that works while organic is still building, and it puts your content in front of people who are actively asking questions, not passively scrolling.

The update note that matters most in the traffic section: by month nine, organic search finally outpaced direct, Facebook, and LinkedIn in a given period for the first time. That is the signal the method is designed to produce. Organic passing social is the turning point that the first several months of content production is working toward. It was slow to arrive, but it arrived.

YouTube as a Competitive Weapon Against High-DA Sites

Austin’s most important strategic insight in this update is the YouTube angle. The dominant site in his niche has high domain authority and covers everything in text. But they have not made YouTube videos. Google owns YouTube. YouTube videos appear in standard Google search results, sometimes above traditional web pages.

Austin demonstrates this live in the video by searching “how to shoot a basketball” on Google. The top snippet goes to wikiHow, but the next three results are YouTube videos. A creator with a low-authority blog can rank a YouTube video on that topic and pull traffic that the high-DA text site cannot compete for, because the high-DA site never made the video.

At the time of the update, Austin was uploading roughly two YouTube videos per week tied to his blog content. His conclusion: that should be four or five per week to accelerate the competitive advantage. The logic is straightforward. Every video is a second entry point to the same content. The blog post captures text searchers. The YouTube video captures the same query in video search and in standard Google results. Two bites at the same apple.

By the nine-month mark he had embedded approximately 25 YouTube videos on his first site, with a target of 30. The YouTube-to-site traffic was small (about 10-11 referrals per month), but the Google ranking potential for the videos themselves was the larger opportunity he was building toward.

Country Traffic and What It Means for Affiliate Commissions

Austin raises a point that rarely comes up in beginner blogging content: where your readers are physically located changes your affiliate income potential significantly. His top traffic countries included India, the United States, Brazil, and Canada. That mix creates real considerations.

Not every affiliate network operates in every country. Amazon’s One Link product is designed to route international visitors to their local Amazon store and credit the commission, but it does not cover every region. If a large portion of your traffic comes from countries where your affiliate network does not operate, those views generate no income even when readers click your links.

Purchasing power also varies. Products priced for a US audience may be out of reach for readers in markets with different income levels, which suppresses conversion rates regardless of how compelling the product page is. The buying season matters too: Austin notes that the peak buying season in China runs January through March, so a traffic spike from Chinese readers in that window could translate to commission income that would not show up at other times of year.

For Site 2, the United Kingdom traffic had the highest pages-per-session count of any country in his data. UK readers who arrived stayed longer and explored more. That kind of engagement data can inform where to spend time building audience relationships and which regions to target with more specific content.

Site 2: The Younger Site at Five Months

Site 2 launched October 25, 2018, about seven weeks after Site 1. By the update it held approximately 40 blog posts and had been running for about five months. Monthly traffic: November brought 30 page views, December 94, January 62, February 54, March 144, April 97, May 115. Total accumulated: 600 page views, 547 unique views.

The contrast with Site 1 is visible in one number: average time on page. Site 1 averaged one minute 54 seconds. Site 2 averaged 42 seconds. That is a meaningful gap. It suggests readers on Site 2 are landing and leaving quickly, which points to either a mismatch between search intent and content, or content that does not hold attention past the first paragraph. Bounce rate on Site 2 was 91.54%, compared to 82.1% on Site 1.

The promising signal: organic search already accounted for 22% of Site 2’s traffic after only five months. Traffic sources broke down as 165 from social, 145 direct, 90 organic, and 4 referral. Google was finding pages and sending visitors faster than it did on Site 1 at the same age. Whether that translates to sustained growth depends on whether those sessions extend beyond the initial 42-second average.

Site 3: The Local City Play

Site 3 is a different model entirely. Austin started it in July 2018 as a directory site for the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin, positioned as a local alternative to Yelp, where businesses could list their information. After joining Project 24, he shifted it toward a blog-style site with the intent to build traffic first and then sell advertising to local businesses. The pitch to a business would be: this site gets 10,000 monthly page views from people specifically interested in Kenosha. You can advertise here for a fee.

At the nine-month mark the site had fewer than 15 blog posts and 469 total page views, with 417 unique views, an average time on page of one minute and nine seconds, and a bounce rate of 84.45%. Traffic sources: 182 direct, 59 social, 29 organic search, 7 referral. Google was sending 33 users, and each of those users averaged 1.4 pages per session, which is a solid early engagement metric for a local content site.

The city is a tourism destination located between Chicago and Milwaukee on Lake Michigan, with a visitor peak from May through August. Austin’s plan was to build a library of tourist-focused content in time for the summer season, when visitors searching for things to do in Kenosha would be most active. Additional affiliate options Austin identifies: hotel booking affiliates through services like Hotels.com or Travelocity, and potentially event ticket affiliates through platforms that cover sporting events and concerts in the region.

The monetization model here is longer-tailed than standard Project 24. There is no Amazon affiliate revenue in the near term. The income event is a local business relationship, which takes time to build but can produce recurring annual contracts rather than per-click commissions. LinkedIn drove meaningful traffic to this site, likely because local business owners and professionals were the audience sharing the content.

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Honest Drawbacks: What Project 24 Does Not Guarantee

Austin is clear about this, and it is worth repeating without softening: at nine months, with three sites, approximately 135 total blog posts across all three, and consistent effort, the income is ten to twenty dollars per month. Project 24 sets a 24-month target for income replacement. Month nine is not month 24. But the gap between current results and the projected goal is large enough to mention honestly.

The method requires getting keyword research right from day one. Austin’s early months were slowed by targeting competitive topics without fully accounting for the domain authority of established competitors. That error costs time, not just traffic. Posts written for the wrong keywords do not recover easily. They have to be redirected, supplemented, or in some cases replaced entirely.

Interlinking between posts is a step Austin skipped during the initial sprint to 35 posts. He went back to address it later, but the opportunity cost is real. Internal links pass authority between pages, increase pages-per-session, and give readers a path to stay on the site longer. A site with 95 posts and no internal linking structure is a collection of isolated articles rather than a content network.

The recommended products page problem is a specific version of a broader issue: generating affiliate revenue requires more than traffic. It requires that the traffic arriving at a products page have purchase intent, that the products listed match that intent, and that the page copy creates enough confidence for a reader to click. Traffic without conversion is just bandwidth.

None of these are fatal flaws in the method. Austin says directly that Project 24 works, that he would not have the traffic he has without following the process, and that he believes the trajectory is improving. But the honest version of the story includes the mistakes, the slow months, and the gap between current results and the income goal. That is the hard truth in the title.

What to Do If You Are Running This Play

Based on Austin’s nine-month experience, here is a practical framework for anyone running a content site through a course-based method like Project 24:

Check domain authority before committing to a topic. Use a free tool like Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush to look at who already ranks for your target keyword. If the top results are all sites with 50+ domain authority and thousands of backlinks, go one level more specific.
Build internal links as you go, not as a cleanup project. Every time you publish a new post, link to at least two older posts that are relevant. Do this on publish day, not months later.
Set up Blog to Social or a similar plugin before post 10. Early social distribution builds an audience that will amplify future posts. Waiting until month six to set this up means six months of missed compounding.
Answer questions on Quora with links back to relevant posts. Do five per week for the first three months. Referral traffic from Quora is warm traffic, people actively asking the question your post answers.
Make a YouTube video for your highest-performing posts. Start with your top five traffic pages. Create a video version and embed it in the post. This adds a second ranking opportunity for the same topic.
Check where your traffic comes from by country. If India or Brazil represents a large share of visits, confirm that your affiliate network operates there and that the products you recommend are priced accessibly for that market.
Review your products page copy every 60 days. If visitors are landing there but not clicking, the problem is on the page, not in the traffic. Test different product selections, add specific use cases, and tighten the recommendation logic.

Find Your X

Blogging via Project 24 is one path. It is a real path with a real process behind it. But it requires 12 to 24 months of consistent output before income becomes meaningful, keyword research discipline from day one, and tolerance for months where the analytics show work that has not yet translated to money. That tradeoff is right for some people and wrong for others.

If you want to see which online income method actually fits your schedule, skills, and income goal, the Finder tool walks you through seven questions and gives you a specific starting point. Go to finder.platformproof.com to find yours.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much money can you realistically make in the first nine months of Project 24?

Based on Austin’s three-site update, the income at nine months was approximately ten to twenty dollars per month. That is behind the pace implied by the Project 24 name, which targets income replacement within 24 months. Early results vary significantly depending on keyword research quality, content volume, niche competition, and whether the site has internal linking and affiliate infrastructure in place. Some members report faster results, and some slower. Ten to twenty dollars at month nine is honest, real-world data from one practitioner.

What is the biggest mistake new Project 24 members make?

Based on Austin’s experience, the most costly early mistake is targeting keywords that are already dominated by high-domain-authority sites. This feels counterintuitive because those topics often have good search volume and seem squarely in your niche. But if the top five search results are all from sites with decades of authority and thousands of backlinks, a new site will not appear in those results for months or years. The fix is to go one level more specific in your topic selection from the start, rather than discovering the problem after writing 30 posts.

Does the Blog to Social plugin actually drive meaningful traffic?

In Austin’s data, social traffic was the largest source in the first nine months, accounting for 7,733 views compared to 346 organic. Blog to Social automates distribution to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram on publish, and allows scheduling of repeat posts up to 52 weeks out. Whether that traffic converts to income depends on audience quality, but for building early page views and signaling to Google that the site has active engagement, it is a real contributor during the months before organic search catches up.

Can YouTube videos help a low-authority blog compete against bigger sites?

Yes, and this is one of the more underused strategies for new content creators. Google owns YouTube, and YouTube videos appear in standard search results alongside traditional web pages. A new blog that cannot rank a text article for a competitive topic may be able to rank a YouTube video for the same query, because video search competition is often lower. Austin demonstrates this with a live search during the video: searching “how to shoot a basketball” returns three YouTube videos in the top results below the wikiHow snippet. Making video versions of your top blog posts creates a second ranking opportunity for every topic.

Why does the geographic source of traffic matter for affiliate marketing?

Affiliate networks do not all operate in every country. If you are enrolled in an affiliate program that only pays commissions on purchases from the United States, traffic from India, Brazil, or other regions may not generate income even when those readers click your links. Amazon’s One Link product routes international traffic to local Amazon stores and can capture commissions from multiple regions, but it still does not cover every country. Knowing where your traffic comes from helps you pick affiliate programs that can actually convert that audience into income.

What is the Project 24 approach to starting a local city blog?

Project 24 does not specifically prescribe a local city site model. Austin adapted the method to fit a city blog he had already started. The core Project 24 principles still apply: write content around specific topics with manageable competition, build volume, and drive traffic before monetizing. For a local site, the monetization model shifts from affiliate commissions to local business advertising. The pitch is straightforward: once the site reaches meaningful traffic from people specifically interested in that city or region, local businesses have a clear reason to pay for placement.

How important is interlinking to a content site’s performance?

Interlinking matters for two reasons. First, it passes authority between pages on your site, which can help individual posts rank higher in search results. Second, it keeps readers on your site longer by giving them a path to related content. Austin skipped interlinking during his initial 35-post sprint and went back to add it later. In his analysis, the absence of internal links likely reduced his pages-per-session metric and his average time on site during those early months. The practical rule: link to at least two existing posts every time you publish something new, and do it on the day of publication.

Is Project 24 worth the investment for someone starting from zero?

Austin’s direct answer is yes, with a specific qualifier: it works if you do the work, follow the keyword research process carefully from the start, and treat it as a long-term investment rather than a short-term income generator. His evidence is that he would not have the traffic he has without the method, because without it he would have targeted broad, high-competition keywords and received nothing. The method steers people toward lower-competition opportunities that a new site can actually rank for. The gap between current results and the 24-month income target is real, but the direction of travel was positive by month nine. Disclosure: Austin mentions he is an affiliate for Project 24.

Sources

YouTube video: “9 Month Update & The Hard Truth” by Austin (iH9cmCoqjcw)
Income School Project 24 course (incomeschool.com)
Blog to Social WordPress plugin (blogtosocialmedia.com)
Amazon Associates One Link program
Quora (quora.com), referenced as a referral traffic source in the original video