Project 24 Update: Real Traffic Numbers Across 4 Sites (Sept 29 to Oct 5, 2019)

Week six of tracking Project 24 in public. Four live websites, one week of real data, zero cherry-picking. If you have been wondering what organic traffic growth actually looks like in the first few months of a content marketing push, this is it: four different niches, four different start dates, and four very different results for the week of September 29 through October 5, 2019.

Project 24 is a content marketing course built by Jim and Ricky at Income School. The name comes from their core promise: follow the system and you can replace your full-time income with passive income within 24 months. The method is simple on paper. Create great content, get found organically through search engines, skip the obsession over backlinks and paid traffic. I purchased the course on September 7, 2019, and I have been tracking my progress across four sites ever since. These are the real numbers.

What You’ll Walk Out With

The exact page view numbers for all four of my Project 24 sites for the week of September 29 through October 5, 2019
Why Site 1 gets organic traffic from Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo but almost none from Google
Why a 93% bounce rate on Site 2 has one simple explanation that has nothing to do with content quality
What 10 blog posts can actually generate in daily page views when the keyword research is done right
The Quora and Blog to Social strategy I use to drive off-Google traffic to Site 1
Why the country your traffic comes from matters more than the raw page view count
How to figure out which online income model fits your situation right now at finder.platformproof.com

Site 1: The Flagship (Started September 7, 2019)

This is my largest site and the one I spend the most time on. I started it on September 7, 2019, the same day I joined Project 24. By the time this update was recorded, I had published somewhere between 95 and 100 blog posts and had uploaded about 35 YouTube videos to a connected channel. The YouTube channel had 45 subscribers, and I was uploading one video per week on Mondays.

Here are the raw numbers for the week:

Page views: 435
Unique visitors: 220
Average time on page: 23 seconds
Bounce rate: 13.71%
Exit rate: 45.29%

Divide 435 by 7 days and you get roughly 62 page views per day. That is consistent with where this site had been running recently. The bounce rate of 13.71% is worth pausing on. A bounce rate that low tells you people are sticking around and clicking to other posts after they land, which is exactly the behavior you want on a content site built for long-term passive income.

Now here is the part that stands out. Organic search is leading all traffic channels, which is what you want to see when building a sustainable content asset. Organic traffic is free, compounds over time, and does not disappear the moment you stop paying for it the way paid traffic does. The problem this week? When you drill into which search engine is actually sending that organic traffic, Google is not the answer. Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo are all outperforming Google. YouTube referral traffic is actually higher than Google organic at this point.

This is a niche size issue more than anything else. The topic area of Site 1 is relatively small. There are people searching for it, but the overall pool of potential readers is limited compared to my other sites. Small niches tend to get indexed faster on smaller search engines, and Google often takes longer to trust a newer site in a narrow space. The good news is that Bing and DuckDuckGo traffic confirms the content is indexed and getting found. Google tends to follow once a site builds enough signals.

Beyond organic search, two other sources contribute meaningfully to Site 1’s traffic. The first is Quora. Every day, I go into Quora, find questions related to my niche, write a real helpful answer, and link back to the relevant post on my site when it makes sense. This takes maybe 10 minutes a day and drives a consistent trickle of referral visitors without any ongoing cost. The second source is a premium plugin called Blog to Social. Whenever I publish or update a post, the plugin automatically sends it out to all of my connected social media accounts. I also have older posts scheduled to go out to my social networks on a weekly rotation for 52 weeks, which keeps older content in circulation without any extra work from me.

One more detail worth noting on Site 1: traffic is coming from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. These are four of the strongest markets for affiliate commissions, display ad RPMs, and consumer willingness to spend money online to solve a problem. The country your traffic comes from matters for monetization, and I will come back to that point in its own section below.

Site 2: The Low-Maintenance Content Machine (Started October 2018)

Site 2 is a different kind of experiment. I started it on October 24, 2018, which makes it about a year old at the time of this update. It has somewhere between 35 and 45 blog posts and 10 YouTube videos on a connected channel with 10 subscribers. Unlike Site 1, I do almost nothing actively to promote this one. No Quora answers, no manual social media outreach, no extra activity. The content goes up, and then I leave it alone.

The weekly numbers:

Page views: 222
Daily average: approximately 31 to 32 page views per day
Bounce rate: 93.24%
Exit rate: 93.24%

That 93% bounce rate looks alarming. If you didn’t know what was causing it, you might assume the content was poor or the traffic was unqualified. But there is one clear, simple explanation: this site is not running the Avocado theme. Site 1 uses the Avocado theme, which is a free premium WordPress theme that comes included with a Project 24 membership. Avocado (later renamed Acabado) is built specifically to reduce bounce rate by featuring related posts prominently, keeping navigation clean, and pulling readers toward a second article after they finish the first one. Site 2 does not have that structure, so when someone reads a post, there is much less pulling them to a second one. That is the bounce rate gap in full.

Despite the bounce rate, the traffic source breakdown for Site 2 is encouraging. Google organic is leading by roughly a four to one margin over direct traffic. That is exactly what Income School points to as a sign that a site is maturing. When Google is sending the majority of your traffic consistently, the content is starting to earn real search authority. Site 2 is older than Site 1 and has had more time to accumulate signals, which explains why it is performing better with Google even though I do less active promotion for it.

Site 2 is also in a much wider niche than Site 1. It appeals to a larger potential audience, which shows up in the traffic geography: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, India, and Canada are all represented in the weekly data. A broader niche means more potential searchers, but it also means more established competitors in search results. That tradeoff is real, and it is worth thinking through carefully when you are choosing a niche before you write your first post.

Site 3: The Local Travel Play (Kenosha, Wisconsin)

Site 3 is what I call a local travel site. It is built around Kenosha, Wisconsin, which sits between Chicago and Milwaukee on Lake Michigan. Kenosha is technically a suburb of Chicago in some definitions, and the city gets more tourism activity than most people expect. I originally created this site in July 2018 with the goal of selling ad space directly to local businesses at a rate cheaper than what Google Ads would cost them.

When I joined Project 24, I realized the problem with that plan: I needed actual traffic before any business would pay for a spot on the site. So starting in January 2019, I began adding blog content about Kenosha. By this update I had about 25 pieces of content on the site. There is no YouTube channel attached to it yet, which is something I have been wanting to fix. The city has a strong summer events calendar: festivals, church fairs, a Taste of Kenosha event, a Taste of Wisconsin, and a Renaissance Fair that draws visitors from the region. There is real content potential waiting to be built out.

This week’s traffic shows organic search leading by a three to one margin over social and direct. Google is the primary source, followed by direct traffic and Facebook. That is a healthy signal for a local site in a specific geography. Most visitors come from the broader United States, which makes sense for a city tourism and local guide site. Any traffic from outside that region is unlikely to convert into the local business advertising model I’m building toward anyway.

The monetization model here is different from a typical affiliate or display ad site. The goal is to grow traffic to a point where local businesses see genuine value in paying for a placement directly on the site rather than going through Google. That takes time. At 25 posts and growing, the foundation is being laid. But this is a longer play than a standard affiliate niche site, and anyone considering this type of local site should go in knowing that upfront.

Site 4: What 10 Blog Posts Can Do With the Right Keyword Research

Site 4 is the most instructive of the four. I started creating content for it in January 2019, and by this update it had exactly 10 blog posts. That is it. No images beyond a basic logo. No email list. No social media presence. No YouTube channel. The site is about as stripped down as a WordPress install can be while still having real written content on it.

Here are the weekly numbers:

Page views: 289
Daily average: approximately 40 to 43 page views per day

289 page views from 10 blog posts with no social promotion, no YouTube, and no Quora strategy. For comparison, Site 1 has 95 to 100 posts and is generating about 62 page views per day. Site 4 has 10 posts and is generating 40 to 43 page views per day. On a per-post basis, Site 4 is running circles around everything else I own.

The reason comes down to keyword research. I’ll be direct about this: when I started Site 1, I was in a hurry to publish content. I moved through keyword research too quickly, and I published posts targeting keywords that were either too competitive or not actually being searched at meaningful volume. The result is a site with close to 100 posts that is underperforming per post because many of those early posts have no real shot at ranking on the first page of results.

By the time I was building Site 4, I had learned from that mistake. I slowed down on keyword research significantly. I spent more time identifying low-competition, specific-intent keywords that real people were actively searching for. The result is 10 posts that each have a genuine shot at a first-page ranking, and the traffic data confirms that several of them have earned it.

Google organic leads Site 4 by a wide margin, followed by direct traffic, an unidentified referral source, and DuckDuckGo. There is no YouTube referral traffic at all because there is no connected channel. This site is pure search engine optimization, and the SEO is working because the keyword foundation is solid from the start.

The lesson from Site 4 is worth taking seriously before you start anything. Before you write a single word, before you buy a domain name, before you set up hosting, spend two or three days on keyword research. Sleep on it. Run your target keywords through the research process more than once. Do not be in a hurry to start publishing. The fastest path to organic traffic is not publishing at the highest volume you can. It is publishing the right things. The months of slower growth on Site 1 are the cost of skipping this step, and Site 4 is the proof that fixing it changes the outcome entirely.

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Why Traffic Country of Origin Matters More Than Raw Page Views

One thing that often gets overlooked in early content site discussions is where your traffic comes from, not just how much of it there is. On all four of my sites, I check the country breakdown every week. The reason is straightforward: a visitor from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, or Australia is worth more to a content site than a visitor from many other parts of the world.

That is not a judgment on any country or population. It is a reflection of how affiliate programs and ad networks actually pay out. Display ad RPMs, which is revenue per thousand impressions, are dramatically higher for US and UK traffic than for traffic from regions with lower advertiser demand. Affiliate programs pay commissions when someone completes a purchase, and purchase conversion rates differ significantly by region based on disposable income, payment infrastructure, and what products are available in that market.

A content site generating 1,000 page views per day from US and UK readers will earn meaningfully more than one generating 1,000 page views per day from regions where those programs pay at lower rates or where readers do not convert into buyers at the same frequency. When you are choosing a niche and writing content, this is worth thinking about. Niches that attract developed-market audiences monetize better than niches that skew toward international traffic from markets with lower advertiser demand.

For Site 1 and Site 2, the US, UK, Canada, and Australia make up the bulk of weekly traffic, which is a strong signal for long-term monetization. For Site 3, the local geography naturally concentrates traffic in the US Midwest, which is appropriate for a local business advertising model. For Site 4, there is a small amount of traffic from India, which was somewhat unexpected for that particular niche, but the majority remains US-based and the Google organic performance is strong.

The Project 24 Model: What It Actually Looks Like in Practice

For anyone coming to this update without background on Project 24, here is the basic structure. Income School, run by Jim and Ricky, offers a membership that includes the Project 24 course, the Avocado (now Acabado) WordPress theme, a YouTube course, a Pinterest course, and access to a private community of other people building content sites. The 60-step framework inside the course walks you from zero to a published site. Day one might be signing up for web hosting. Day two might be registering a domain name. Of the 60 steps, 30 involve publishing blog posts, one per day.

The point of the 60-step format is not to finish in exactly 60 calendar days. It is to prevent you from getting stuck in planning mode and never publishing anything. Some steps can be knocked out two or three at a time in a single afternoon. What the framework does is keep you moving forward. Every day you do not follow the steps is a day added to your timeline on the back end. That is not meant as pressure. It is just honest math about how content compounding works.

The 24-month income replacement timeline in the course name is a target, not a guarantee. Your niche size, the quality of your keyword research, and how consistently you publish all affect how quickly passive income grows. Running four sites in parallel has taught me that the gaps in performance between my sites are almost entirely explained by three variables: keyword research quality, whether the Acabado theme is installed, and the level of active promotion being done. The fundamentals of the Project 24 system are working across all four. The differences come from execution, not from the system itself.

Honest Drawbacks Worth Knowing Before You Start

Project 24 is not a shortcut, and the timeline is longer than most people expect when they first encounter the course. Here is what I would want someone to know before they buy in and start a site:

Google will likely ignore a new site for the first three to nine months. Bing and DuckDuckGo tend to index faster, but Google takes time to build trust with a new domain. Checking Google Analytics daily in month one expecting Google organic traffic will lead to frustration. Plan for this timeline before you start.
Keyword research is the most important work in the entire process and it is also the easiest step to rush through. It feels less productive than writing content, so people skip it or spend an hour on it and move on. Site 4’s performance versus Site 1’s performance on a per-post basis is the most direct evidence I have of what that mistake costs over time.
The Acabado theme makes a real, measurable difference in bounce rate. The 13.71% bounce rate on Site 1 with the theme versus the 93.24% on Site 2 without it is not a content quality gap. It is a theme gap. Install Acabado from the start on any new site.
Not all niches produce equal traffic ceilings. A very small niche will grow slowly even with excellent execution. A broad niche will face more competition in search results even though the total pool of potential readers is larger. Research the size and competitive landscape of your niche before committing to it.
Traffic volume in your analytics does not tell the full story. A site with 500 page views per day from US readers will outperform a site with 1,500 page views per day from markets where ad and affiliate revenue rates are significantly lower. Watch the country breakdown in addition to the raw traffic numbers from the beginning.

Find Your X

If you are reading this and trying to figure out whether a content blog, a local site, a YouTube-paired niche site, or something else entirely is the right first step for your situation, the fastest way to get a clear answer is to go through a short diagnostic. At finder.platformproof.com, you answer a few questions about your skills, available time, and income goals, and you get a specific recommendation that fits where you actually are right now rather than generic advice that fits no one in particular.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Project 24 and who created it?

Project 24 is a content marketing course and membership program created by Jim and Ricky of Income School. The core premise is that you can build a content site generating passive income comparable to a full-time salary within 24 months by following their system of publishing high-quality, SEO-focused blog posts without chasing backlinks or paying for traffic. The membership also includes a premium WordPress theme, a YouTube course, and a private community of other builders following the same system.

How long does it realistically take to see organic traffic growth with Project 24?

Across four sites, meaningful organic traffic from Bing and DuckDuckGo tends to appear within the first few months if keyword research is solid. Google typically takes longer, often three to nine months or more before it begins sending significant traffic to a new site. The timeline varies based on niche competitiveness, keyword difficulty, and publishing consistency. Building four sites simultaneously has confirmed for me that the sites with better keyword research started getting Google traffic earlier than the ones where I rushed that step.

What is the Avocado or Acabado theme and does it actually make a difference?

Avocado, now called Acabado, is a free premium WordPress theme included with a Project 24 membership. It is designed specifically to reduce bounce rate and keep readers on your site longer by surfacing related posts and making internal navigation easy. My own data shows the difference clearly: Site 1, which uses the Acabado theme, had a 13.71% bounce rate for this week. Site 2, which does not use the theme, had a 93.24% bounce rate on similar traffic volumes. That gap is almost entirely attributable to the theme, not the content.

How do you drive traffic to a new blog before Google starts ranking it?

A few approaches that work in the early months: answer questions on Quora in your niche and link back to the relevant posts on your site, use a plugin like Blog to Social to automatically distribute new and updated content to your social media accounts, schedule older posts to recirculate on social media on a weekly basis, and create YouTube videos on topics related to your blog content so you can capture YouTube search traffic while Google builds trust in your domain. None of these replace Google organic eventually, but they keep traffic coming in while Google takes its time.

Why does keyword research matter so much for a content blog?

Keyword research determines whether your content has any realistic shot at appearing on the first page of search results. You can write a technically strong, well-researched post and still get zero organic traffic if nobody is searching for that topic or if the competition for that keyword is too established for a newer site to break through. My Site 4 has 10 blog posts and generates about 40 to 43 page views per day because I was careful with keyword selection. My Site 1 has close to 100 posts and generates about 62 page views per day in part because many early posts targeted keywords that were too competitive or too low in search volume.

Is a local city guide site a good model for Project 24?

It can work, but the monetization model is different from a typical affiliate niche site. A local travel or city guide site can earn through direct ad sales to local businesses, display ads from networks like Mediavine or Raptive once traffic thresholds are met, or tourism-related affiliate programs. The challenge is that local traffic ceilings are lower than national or global niches. You need a clear monetization plan before you start building, and you should go in knowing that the growth timeline may be longer than it would be for a site targeting a larger audience.

Does connecting a YouTube channel to a blog actually drive meaningful traffic?

Based on my data, yes. Site 1 has a connected YouTube channel and receives measurable referral traffic from YouTube that is actually outpacing Google organic traffic at this early stage of the site’s life. Site 2 has a connected channel as well and shows YouTube as a traffic source in its referral data. Site 4, which has no YouTube channel, relies entirely on search engine traffic with no YouTube contribution at all. YouTube is not required to build a successful content site, but it adds a traffic channel that can compensate for the time it takes Google to start trusting and ranking a new domain.

What does actually replacing your income with Project 24 require in practice?

It requires consistent publishing over an extended period, careful keyword research from the start, patience with the slow early months before Google begins rewarding the site, and a niche with enough search demand to support the traffic volume needed for meaningful passive income. The 24-month timeline assumes you are following the 60-step framework and publishing regularly. Running multiple sites simultaneously can accelerate your learning about what works and what does not, but it also splits your time and attention across more properties. Many people find better and faster results focusing deeply on one or two sites rather than running four in parallel the way I have been doing in this series.

Sources

Income School: creators of the Project 24 course and the Acabado WordPress theme
Blog to Social plugin: automated social media distribution tool for WordPress
Quora: question and answer platform used as part of the referral traffic strategy
Google Analytics: traffic data source for all four sites referenced in this update