Project 24 May 2019 Update: Traffic, Earnings & Growth on My First 2 Sites

Eight months into Project 24 and I have real numbers to show you. Not projections. Not Income School’s marketing copy. Actual pageview counts, traffic sources by channel, and an honest look at what is moving the needle and what is not across two niche sites I have been building since the fall of 2018.

Site 1 launched September 7, 2018. Site 2 launched October 24, 2018. By May 2019, Site 1 had 97 blog posts and Site 2 had 40 to 45. Here is a full breakdown of the numbers, what they actually mean, the tactical moves I made to get here, and the specific changes I am making in June to push toward consistent affiliate sales.

What You’ll Walk Out With

Exact pageview and unique visitor counts for two real niche sites at the 7 to 8 month mark
A channel-by-channel traffic breakdown, organic, direct, social, and referral, with specific source data
How Blog2Social automates social posting so 300 Instagram posts went live with less than 10 minutes of manual work
Why YouTube may be a stronger competitive advantage than Google for sites with low domain authority
The niching-down move that drove 75% of Site 1’s May traffic
How to read your traffic numbers to diagnose exactly where your blog is failing
The specific June action plan: affiliate links, outsourced writing, Amazon OneLink, and YouTube volume
Not sure which model fits your background and schedule? Take the free quiz at finder.platformproof.com

Site 1 at 7 Months: The Actual Numbers

Site 1 went live September 7, 2018. The first 35 blog posts were published in 45 days, which is the Income School pace for the initial sprint. After that, life intervened and I did not write again until mid to late January 2019. By May, the site had 97 total blog posts, meaning roughly 60 to 62 posts were added between late January and the end of May 2019.

May 2019 traffic for Site 1: 595 pageviews, 532 unique visitors, just over 2 minutes average time on page, a bounce rate of 88.28%, and an exit rate of 73.11%.

Raw pageviews of 595 is modest. But average time on page above 2 minutes is worth paying attention to. That means the people who are landing on these posts are actually reading, not closing the tab in ten seconds. For a site at month 7 with no Google authority, that is a real signal. The content is working on visitors who arrive. The challenge is getting more of them to arrive in the first place.

The bounce rate of 88% is high, but at this stage of a new site with a traffic mix that includes social and direct visitors, a high bounce rate is normal. Most visitors came for a specific answer, found it, and left. That is expected behavior for informational affiliate content. What you want to see, and what is present here, is improvement in organic search traffic month over month, even if total numbers are still small.

Where Site 1’s Traffic Is Actually Coming From

The overall traffic mix for Site 1 breaks down as follows: organic search is close to 40% of all traffic, pulling in 155 users. Direct traffic is 120 users. Social is 114 users. Referral is 5 users.

At the individual source level: 120 direct, 67 spread across Bing, Facebook, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Quora, and YouTube. Google specifically sent 9 visits, about twice per week. My own website navigation accounted for 3. Facebook desktop and mobile combined make up the bulk of the social traffic.

The Google number is small and I know exactly why: the first 30 posts on this site were not keyword-researched carefully enough. There is a competitor in this niche with high domain authority who has answered nearly every question thoroughly and with long-form content. They are dominating Google for most of the terms I initially targeted. No amount of publishing speed fixes a keyword research problem. Those early posts are unlikely to rank well on Google for a long time.

The more interesting signal is that organic is nearly 40% of traffic even with Google only sending 9 visits per week. That is because Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo are quietly working. These search engines are underappreciated by most bloggers. For newer sites without Google domain authority, the alternative search engines often start sending traffic months before Google does. Tracking them from month one gives you a clearer picture of whether your SEO is actually working, independent of Google’s timetable.

Quora has been a meaningful referral channel. During the early months of both sites, I was answering two to three questions per day on Quora and including my website URL in my display name and at the end of each answer. That drove direct referral traffic and appears to have contributed to the direct channel as well, people who found my name through Quora and came back to the site later by typing the URL directly. I have scaled back Quora activity recently, but the traffic baseline it built is still holding.

Geographic breakdown: the US is the number one traffic source, followed by the UK. India comes in third or fourth by pageviews on Site 1. For an Amazon Associates affiliate blog, that geographic mix matters. Visitors from India are unlikely to convert on Amazon US links because they are redirected to a store where shipping costs and availability often make the purchase unrealistic. That is not a reason to disregard international traffic, it is a reason to set up Amazon OneLink, which I will cover in the June action plan section.

Blog2Social: Building Instagram Reach Without Logging In

The tool behind Site 1’s 114 social visits in May: Blog2Social, a WordPress plugin. It connects to your social media accounts and automatically sends out each new blog post when it is published. You do not have to manually post anywhere. You set it up once and it runs on its own.

The feature that changed the scale of what is possible: Blog2Social supports a 52-week resubmission schedule. Older posts get recycled back into your social feeds automatically, week after week, for an entire year. That means your back catalog keeps generating social impressions without any manual action on your part.

The practical result: Site 1 has approximately 300 Instagram posts. I have been on Instagram for less than 10 minutes over the past month and a half. Followers are growing. Traffic is arriving. I am not there at all. That is a real multiplier on your time, a one-time setup decision that pays dividends continuously.

Does Blog2Social work for every niche? Probably not at the same rate. Niches with strong visual appeal tend to do better on Instagram. But the principle applies broadly: if you are building a content site solo and social media feels like a second full-time job, automation is the right call. The goal in year one is not to be a social media personality. The goal is to build a content library that earns while you sleep. Blog2Social helps keep social working while your attention stays on publishing.

YouTube as Competitive Advantage: Going All-In

This is the strategic insight from May 2019 that changed my June plan entirely: my primary Google competitor does not do YouTube.

That site has high domain authority, long-form posts, and thorough answers to nearly every question in this niche. Outranking it on Google with an 8-month-old site is a multi-year project, and there is no shortcut. But that site has zero YouTube presence. Every question in my niche that a searcher types into Google also gets searched on YouTube. If I build a YouTube library of 100 videos aligned with my 97 blog posts, I am competing in a space where the dominant Google player does not exist at all.

As of late May, I had about 25 YouTube videos on this channel. YouTube was sending approximately 18 visitors per month to Site 1, roughly 5 per week. That is a small number, but it is directionally right and it is growing. I committed to publishing one new YouTube video every day during May, and I plan to continue that daily pace into June.

The math is straightforward. If I can get to 100 YouTube videos covering my 97 blog posts, I create a parallel content library that leverages YouTube’s domain authority, not mine, and that my main competitor cannot neutralize because they have not built it. YouTube videos also appear in Google search results directly, which gives me a second entry point into the same search traffic I cannot access via my blog domain yet.

This is not a fast strategy. Building 100 videos at a rate of two per week takes about a year. Going daily compresses that to 100 days. The trade-off is production intensity. One video per day is demanding. But for a site stuck at 9 Google visits per week despite 97 published posts, the alternative, waiting for Google authority to slowly grow, feels slower than building a YouTube library that works right now.

Niching Down: The Move That Drove 75% of Site 1’s Traffic

After reviewing the performance of the original 30 posts and seeing minimal organic traction, I took a step that Income School teaches but that is easy to skip when you are in the sprint mentality of the early content phase: I niched down further within the main niche.

Within any broad niche, there are sub-topics that go deeper. They are more specific, more targeted, and less dominated by established competitors. When I identified those angles and started publishing content there, posts 31 through 97 on Site 1, the results improved substantially. By May 2019, approximately 75% of Site 1’s 595 pageviews were coming from that niched-down content, not from the original 30 posts.

This pattern tells you something important about the Project 24 methodology that the promotional material does not always make explicit: the first 30 posts are often exploratory. You are learning what the niche rewards, where the competition is genuinely dominant, and where the gaps are. The gap-finding phase, where you identify sub-topics the main competitors have not thoroughly addressed, is where real early traction comes from.

To use an analogy I came up with when comparing the two sites: if the broader niche is a house, some sub-niches are the master bedroom, the most important and trafficked rooms. Others are the third bedroom, the room you put your in-laws in. It needs to exist, and there will be problems if it does not, but it is not where the most people go. Site 1 started in the third bedroom. Site 2 started closer to the master bedroom. The traffic data reflects exactly that difference.

If you are at month 6 or 7 with a Project 24 site and organic traffic is not materializing, the first question to ask is not “am I writing enough?” It is “am I competing in a space where I can realistically rank, or do I need to go one level deeper?” Honest self-assessment here is more valuable than producing 10 more posts in the same underperforming direction.

Site 2: Bigger Niche, Different Results

Site 2 started October 24, 2018. The first 30 posts were not finished until the first week of January 2019, a slower pace than Site 1’s initial sprint, partly because my interest in this niche was lower from the start. By May, the site had 40 to 45 total posts.

May 2019 numbers for Site 2: 115 pageviews, 112 unique visitors, 39 seconds average time on page, a bounce rate of 95%, and an exit rate of 87.83%.

At first glance, these numbers look worse across the board compared to Site 1. But context matters. Site 2 has fewer posts, less promotional activity behind it (no Pinterest, minimal YouTube, less Quora), and a completely different traffic profile. Yet Google is sending more proportional traffic to Site 2, and that is because the niche itself is larger.

Traffic breakdown for Site 2: 45% organic search at the top, followed by social, direct, and referral. Individual sources: Google sent 34 visits, Facebook 33, direct 14, Bing 5, my own website 2, DuckDuckGo 2, Facebook 2, Yahoo 1 or 2. Google sending 34 visits to a site with only 40 posts is a meaningfully better ratio than Site 1’s 9 visits from Google across 97 posts. The niche size is doing that work, a larger topic with more search volume gives a low-authority site more opportunities to catch long-tail queries early.

The geographic breakdown for Site 2: US first, then India in second or third position, then Canada, Australia, UK, Ireland, China, Singapore, Botswana, and Hong Kong. India appearing this high is likely connected to Quora, Quora is heavily used for information exchange across South Asia, and any Quora-linked content pulls international traffic that organic search might not.

The 39-second time on page is a concern. Site 1’s 2-minute average suggests visitors are reading. Site 2’s 39-second average suggests many are not staying long enough to get value. Whether that is a content quality issue, a topic mismatch, or an artifact of the traffic sources, Facebook social traffic tends to bounce faster than organic, I will know more in two months as the outsourced writing ramps up.

Income School’s Project 24 recommends YouTube and Pinterest as promotional channels for niche sites. I have done almost none of that for Site 2. No Pinterest at all. Very limited YouTube. Part of the reason is that I am not genuinely interested in this topic, which makes producing video content feel forced. To compensate for that and keep the post count moving toward 100, I have outsourced the writing to a content service.

Trying to figure out which niche or model fits your actual background and time constraints?

The free quiz at finder.platformproof.com helps you identify the model most likely to work for you before you spend months building in the wrong direction.

June 2019 Action Plan: Specific Moves With Reasoning

Here is exactly what I am doing in June and why each decision makes sense given the May data.

Add Amazon Affiliate Links to the Top 10 Most-Viewed Pages

At the end of May, I went through the lifetime traffic data and added affiliate links to the most-visited pages. In June, I am repeating that process but looking at the trailing two to three months instead of the full history. Recent traffic is a better signal of current momentum. Pages that are getting views right now are the ones where a well-placed affiliate link has the best chance of converting. The last 60 or so posts on Site 1 were published without any affiliate links. That is the core of the sales problem, not a value problem, but a mechanics problem. No links means no clicks, which means no commissions regardless of how good the content is.

Hold Site 1’s Post Count and Push YouTube Daily

Site 1 is staying at 97 posts for now while I redirect production energy into YouTube. The plan is one new video per day through June, building toward a library of videos that maps to each existing blog post. YouTube traffic is already growing, 18 visits per month and trending up. More importantly, YouTube is the competitive gap my main Google rival has left open. Building that library is more valuable right now than adding blog post number 98 or 99 to a site that is already waiting for Google to age it into authority.

Outsource Site 2 Writing to Reach 100 Posts

Site 2 needs to reach 100 posts to have a realistic chance of competing across its full keyword surface. At 40 to 45 posts, the site is not small enough to be considered a micro-niche play and not large enough to have the content coverage needed to rank broadly. The goal is 100 posts. Since producing that content myself is slow given my lack of interest in the topic, outsourcing to a content service is the practical path. The risk, outsourced content sometimes misses voice or depth, will be monitored via time on page and engagement metrics over the next two months.

Set Up Amazon OneLink for International Traffic

India is a top-three traffic source on both sites. Without Amazon OneLink, visitors from India who click an Amazon US affiliate link are sent to a store with high shipping costs and limited product availability. They do not buy. Commission is zero. OneLink routes those visitors to Amazon India instead, where the purchase makes more sense for them, and where I also have an affiliate relationship. The setup takes roughly 30 minutes. Given that India represents a meaningful percentage of total visits on both sites, the potential commission recovery makes this a high-priority June task.

Honest Drawbacks: What Is Not Working

No affiliate sales in the two to three months preceding this update. That is the hardest number in this report. The sites are getting traffic. People are reading for more than two minutes on Site 1. But nobody is clicking through to Amazon and buying anything.

The most likely cause is mechanical, not strategic. The last 60-plus posts on Site 1 were published without affiliate links. A reader who finishes a post and has no link to follow cannot become a buyer, regardless of how well the content was written. The fix is not to produce better content, it is to go back and insert contextual affiliate links into the posts that already have traffic. That work is now on the June task list.

The keyword research on the first 30 posts was weak. Those posts targeted terms where the dominant competitor was already well-established and hard to displace. Some of those posts may never rank competitively on Google. That is a sunk cost at this point, the posts exist, they are not actively hurting the site, but expecting organic growth from them is unrealistic. The lesson here is front-loaded: do the keyword research before you write, not after.

Site 2’s 39-second time on page is a number worth watching. It suggests visitors are not connecting with the content. This could mean the outsourced writing is not matching the tone of what searchers expect in this niche, it could mean the traffic sources are sending low-intent visitors, or it could mean the posts need clearer structure so skimmers can find what they are looking for faster. This number needs to improve over the next two months or the outsourcing experiment is not working.

The prime buying season for Site 1’s niche is October through December. Gifts and seasonal needs drive purchases in that window. If affiliate links are not in place on high-traffic pages before September, that earning opportunity is gone for another year. That urgency is real and is part of why adding links is the top June priority.

How to Read Your Own Numbers

One of the most practical things I talked about in this update is using traffic data as a diagnostic tool rather than just a scoreboard. Here is how to apply it to your own site.

If people are not clicking through to your blog posts from search results, your headline or title is the problem. It is not compelling enough to earn the click against the other results on the page. Rewriting titles on low-CTR pages is a faster lever than writing new posts.

If people are clicking through but not clicking your affiliate links, you have a value problem. You have not built enough trust or demonstrated enough relevance to earn the click to the product page. More links help mechanically, but if the underlying content is not making a clear case for the recommendation, more links alone will not fix it.

If people are clicking your affiliate links but not buying, you may have a product-audience mismatch. The traffic might be from buyers in markets where the product is not available, or the product may not match the actual intent behind the search. International traffic without OneLink configured is a common version of this problem.

If you have no traffic at all, you have a distribution problem, not a content problem. Better content does not help if no one can find it. Focus on one or two promotion channels (Quora, YouTube, Pinterest, Bing) and build consistently before adding more.

The numbers will tell you which problem you have. The mistake is looking only at total traffic and total sales without going one level deeper into where traffic is coming from, where it is dropping off, and what action it is or is not taking after it arrives.

Find Your X

Project 24 is a genuine methodology and it can work. But eight months in, I can tell you that the biggest variable is not whether you follow the steps, it is whether the niche you chose has the right combination of size, monetization potential, and personal sustainability. A niche you are not interested in is harder to promote via YouTube, harder to write for at volume, and harder to push through the slow months when traffic is still building.

If you are trying to figure out which online income model fits your specific background, schedule, and skills before committing 12 months to it, the free quiz at finder.platformproof.com is designed for exactly that. It takes about three minutes, asks the right questions about what you already know and what kind of work you actually want to do, and points you toward the model most likely to produce results in your situation.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many pageviews should I expect from a Project 24 niche site at 7 months?

There is no universal number, but real benchmarks from these two sites: Site 1 had 595 pageviews with 97 posts and active promotion via Quora, Blog2Social, and YouTube. Site 2 had 115 pageviews with 40 to 45 posts and minimal promotion. Niche size, keyword research quality, and promotional consistency all influence the outcome significantly. If your numbers are lower than these, the first thing to check is whether your early posts targeted achievable keywords, not whether you published enough volume.

What is Blog2Social and should I use it for my niche site?

Blog2Social is a WordPress plugin that automatically syndicates your published posts to connected social accounts. It also supports a 52-week resubmission schedule for older posts, recycling your back catalog through social feeds without any manual work. Site 1 had approximately 300 Instagram posts with less than 10 minutes of manual Instagram activity in the preceding month and a half. For solo bloggers who cannot afford to treat social media as a separate daily job, Blog2Social reduces that to a one-time setup. It works better in visually-rich niches, but the automation value applies broadly.

Does Quora still drive meaningful blog traffic?

Yes, at least in many niches. Answering two to three questions per day on Quora, including your website in your profile display name and at the close of each answer, can produce steady referral traffic that builds over months. Quora also draws international traffic, particularly from South Asia, which inflates geographic diversity in your analytics. That traffic may not convert via Amazon US, but it contributes to domain signals and can lead to direct visits later. The tactic is most effective during the first 6 to 12 months before organic search builds its own momentum.

Why might YouTube outperform Google for new niche blogs?

New sites have low domain authority, which means competing on Google for contested keywords is a multi-year process. YouTube ranks on its own signals and your video content borrows YouTube’s domain authority in Google search results. If your primary Google competitor has not built a YouTube presence, you can establish dominance in that channel before they respond. YouTube videos also appear in Google’s video carousels and in regular search results, giving you two entry points into the same search traffic. The trade-off is time, producing daily video content is demanding, but for sites stuck below page one on Google despite strong written content, YouTube is often the faster path to audience growth.

When should you niche down within your existing niche?

Consider niching down if your first wave of 30 posts is 5 to 7 months old with minimal organic traction. The signal to look for: your main competitor has answered every top-level question thoroughly, and you are not finding any keyword angles where their content is thin or absent. Niching down means identifying a sub-topic within your niche where competition is lower and where your content can realistically rank. On Site 1, the niched-down posts, published after the initial sprint, generated approximately 75% of the total May traffic. The original 30 posts generated the remaining 25%, despite having a 4-month head start.

Is outsourcing blog post writing a good idea for Project 24 sites?

It depends on why you are considering it. If you chose a niche you are not genuinely interested in, outsourcing can keep post volume growing toward the 100-post threshold while freeing you to produce YouTube content or manage the sites strategically. The risk is quality, outsourced writing may miss the depth or voice that earns reader trust and affiliate clicks. The right way to evaluate it: monitor time on page for outsourced posts versus self-written posts over two to three months. If outsourced posts have similar or better engagement metrics, the trade-off is working. If time on page drops, the content is not connecting.

What is Amazon OneLink and why does it matter for niche sites?

Amazon OneLink routes international visitors to their regional Amazon store when they click your affiliate links. Without it, a visitor from India who clicks an Amazon US link is sent to a store where the product may be unavailable or prohibitively expensive to ship, they do not buy, and you earn nothing. OneLink detects the visitor’s country and redirects to Amazon India, Amazon UK, or another regional store where you also hold an affiliate relationship. If India, Canada, or the UK represent more than 5% of your traffic, setting up OneLink is a straightforward configuration that converts previously zero-commission clicks into earning ones. Setup takes about 30 minutes in the Amazon Associates dashboard.

Why would a niche site have traffic but zero affiliate sales?

The most common causes, in order of likelihood: no affiliate links in the content (visitors cannot click what is not there), affiliate links present but not contextually integrated into the recommendation (visitors do not trust or notice them), and traffic from geographic markets where the product is not available through the affiliate program. In this case, the direct answer is mechanical, approximately 60 of 97 posts were published without any affiliate links. That is the first thing to fix before assuming the content or the niche is the problem. Add links to the highest-traffic pages first, wait 30 days, and see whether conversion metrics change before drawing further conclusions.

Sources

May 2019 Google Analytics data for Site 1: 595 pageviews, 532 unique visitors, 2+ minutes on page, 88.28% bounce rate
May 2019 Google Analytics data for Site 2: 115 pageviews, 112 unique visitors, 39 seconds on page, 95% bounce rate
Blog2Social WordPress plugin, blog2social.com
Income School Project 24 methodology, incomeschool.com
Amazon Associates OneLink, affiliate-program.amazon.com
Quora as referral channel, quora.com