Income School Project 24 Weekly Update: Real Traffic Numbers After 7 Months (April 2019)

Seven months in. Two sites live. Ninety-one blog posts written. Sixteen pageviews per day on site one. Two pageviews per day on site two. One hundred and seven Amazon affiliate link clicks this month — and zero purchases. That is where I sat at the end of April 2019, running two Project 24 niche sites while tracking every number in public so you can see what this actually looks like before you decide to try it yourself.

This weekly update covers April 20 through April 27, 2019. I am sharing the real Google Analytics numbers for both sites, breaking down exactly where the traffic is coming from, why the affiliate click-through rate is encouraging but the conversion rate is alarming, and what I am fixing over the next few weeks. No cherry-picked months. No screenshots from the good week only. Just the real numbers from someone seven months deep into the Income School Project 24 roadmap.

What You’ll Walk Out With

The actual pageview, session, and user numbers from two real Project 24 niche sites seven months after launch
A traffic source breakdown showing how social, organic, direct, and referral stack up at this stage
Why 107 affiliate clicks and zero purchases is actually a solvable problem — and the two most likely causes
What the Project 24 timeline says you should expect at this stage compared to where I actually landed
The outsourcing experiment I ran to hit 100 blog posts and what it actually costs in time and money
The Google versus Yahoo/Bing/DuckDuckGo ranking gap and why it matters for long-term traffic
A practical next-step list for anyone stalled between month six and month twelve on a content site
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What Project 24 Actually Is

Before I get into the numbers, a quick framing note for anyone discovering this for the first time. Project 24 is a course and community created by Jim Harmer and Ricky Kesler at Income School. The premise is direct: follow their roadmap, publish helpful blog content consistently, and within 24 months you can replace your full-time income through display advertising revenue, affiliate commissions, and digital products.

It is not a get-rich-quick program. The 24-month timeline is an honest acknowledgment that content sites take a long time to build momentum. Jim and Ricky provide a step-by-step roadmap, a library of courses covering everything from niche selection to ad network applications, and a community of members doing the same thing. There is a detailed milestone timeline inside the membership that shows where your traffic and revenue should be at each stage. That timeline is what I am using to measure my own progress every week.

I started site one on September 7, 2018. I finished building it out around October 24 of that same year. Site two started the following week and was completed in the first week of January 2019. So as of this April 2019 update, site one is roughly seven and a half months old and site two is about three and a half months old. That context matters when you look at the numbers below — you have to compare sites to their own age, not to some abstract standard.

Site One: The Numbers for April 20 Through April 27

Site one has 91 published blog posts and 18 YouTube videos tied to it. My original plan was to reach 100 blog posts and 32 videos, and I have been dragging my feet on the final stretch. To make the post target more realistic, I brought in a fellow Project 24 member to help write the remaining content. He is finishing up the last eight or nine posts this month, which means by the end of May I should finally hit 100 blog posts on site one.

Here are the raw analytics for the week of April 20 through April 27, 2019:

Pageviews: 131
Unique pageviews: 125
Sessions: 111
Users: 95 (91 new)
Average time on page: 5 minutes 41 seconds
Bounce rate: 89.19%
Exit rate: approximately 84-85%

Divide 131 pageviews by 8 days and you get roughly 16 pages per day. My target for this stage is 25 to 26 per day. I hit that number once during the week — Wednesday or Thursday — but fell short every other day. I am behind the Project 24 timeline at this stage, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

The one genuinely encouraging metric is the 5 minutes and 41 seconds average time on page. That is higher than it has been in any previous week I have tracked. When people land on the site, they are reading, not bouncing after three seconds. That tells me the content quality is doing its job even if the raw traffic volume is still low. High time-on-page at low traffic is actually the right early signal — it means the content will eventually rank, assuming I keep publishing and Google eventually notices the site.

Traffic Sources: Where the Visitors Are Actually Coming From

The traffic source breakdown for site one this week is where things get interesting. Here is how it broke down across 95 users:

Social: 45.3% of traffic
Organic search: 31.6%
Direct: 20%
Referral: Remaining percentage

Social leading the way at 45% is not unusual for a site this age. Before you have strong organic rankings, social sharing and community posts carry the bulk of the early traffic. The Project 24 approach involves promoting your posts in relevant online communities as part of the early-stage strategy, and that is clearly working in terms of raw click volume.

The organic number is the one I care about most. Thirty organic visitors over eight days works out to approximately four per day from search engines. For a seven-month-old site in a competitive niche, four organic visitors per day is a real signal that the content is indexing and beginning to rank. It is not life-changing traffic, but it is the kind of traffic that compounds over time. Social traffic is rent. Organic traffic is equity.

Here is the catch though: a significant portion of my organic traffic is coming from Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo — not Google. Those search engines have millions of real users and I am grateful for every click, but Google holds roughly 90% of the global search market share. If my posts are ranking on Bing but not Google, I am leaving the vast majority of potential traffic on the table. Getting into Google is the longer game, and it requires patience and domain age. The site is still young by Google’s standards. I am watching this number closely and expecting the Google share to increase in the coming months as the domain ages.

Site Two: Early Numbers From a Younger Niche Site

Site two is a different story. This site finished building out in the first week of January 2019, making it only about three and a half months old as of this update. It currently has 40 published articles in a larger niche than site one. Here are the numbers for the same eight-day window:

Pageviews: 16 (2 per day)
Users: 15 (all new)
Sessions: 15
Average time on page: 47 seconds
Bounce rate: 93.3%
Exit rate: approximately 94%

Two pageviews per day and 47 seconds average time on page. Traffic source breakdown for site two: social at 46.7%, organic search at 33%, direct at 13%, referral making up the rest. The organic percentage is actually slightly higher proportionally than site one, which is a positive sign for a three-month-old domain.

The 47-second average time on page is the number that needs work. That is low. When someone spends less than a minute on a page, they either found the answer immediately (possible but unlikely with informational articles) or they landed on the wrong page for their search intent. At three and a half months in, the site is still in what the Project 24 community often calls the “sandboxing” period — the window where Google is evaluating domain trustworthiness before committing to meaningful rankings. I am not panicking about these numbers at this age, but they are numbers I need to improve.

One important note: Income School updated their Project 24 timeline after I started. Some members switched to the new timeline. I am sticking with the original one because that is the system I committed to when I launched. Comparing myself against a different yardstick mid-journey would just be a way of gaming the measurement, not actually improving the business.

The Amazon Affiliate Problem: 107 Clicks, Zero Purchases

This is the part of the April update that is equal parts frustrating and instructive. In the month of April 2019, I generated 107 clicks on Amazon affiliate links across my content — and not a single purchase. Last month I made my first affiliate commission. This month, nothing.

The typical problem in affiliate marketing is getting people to click your links at all. You write a review, you add a link, and nobody clicks because nobody trusts you yet or your call-to-action is buried. I have the opposite problem. People are clicking. They are going to Amazon. And then they are leaving without buying.

There are a few possible explanations for this, and I am actively working through each of them:

Seasonal product mismatch: Some products sell heavily during specific seasons — holiday gifts, summer outdoor gear, back-to-school supplies. If the products I am recommending peak at Christmas or during a specific event, April might simply be a dead month for purchases even from motivated readers. The clicks are real; the buying intent in April for those products might not be.
Price point mismatch: If the items I am recommending are high-ticket and readers need more time and research before committing, they might click to check the price and then come back later — after the 24-hour Amazon cookie has expired. I am not capturing those delayed conversions.
Wrong product for the content: Sometimes the affiliate link does not match the exact thing the reader was already planning to buy. They click, browse Amazon for something else, and leave without a purchase that attributes to my link.
Traffic quality gap: Social traffic converts at a lower rate than organic search traffic in most affiliate niches. If 45% of my readers this month came from social channels (where curiosity is high but buying intent is lower), that could explain the conversion gap.

My plan is to audit the specific posts driving the most affiliate clicks and evaluate whether the product recommendations match what the reader is actively trying to buy. I also want to add clearer context around the links — not pushy, but enough explanation that the reader understands why I am recommending a specific product and why now is the right time to get it. That framing work is something I have been putting off, and this month’s numbers are making it a priority.

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Google Adsense: The Disappearing Pennies

While I am being fully honest about the numbers, here is another one: my Google Adsense earnings have been zero for the last several days of this reporting period. I mentioned this almost as a joke in the video because the amounts involved are genuinely small — we are talking about one or two cents per day on a good day. But zero is still a change from something, and zero for multiple consecutive days suggests something is off technically, not just a slow traffic day.

Adsense revenue at this stage of a site is not significant. It is a data point, not a business model. But tracking it matters because sudden drops can indicate ad serving issues, a change in ad settings, or traffic quality flags. I am going to review my Adsense dashboard and make sure the ad units are still correctly configured and serving properly. It is the kind of small maintenance task that gets ignored when traffic is low but can quietly cost money if left unaddressed for months.

The Outsourcing Experiment: Hiring a Fellow Project 24 Member

Getting to 100 blog posts on site one has been the goal for months, and the reason I am still sitting at 91 is simple: writing takes time, and I ran out of bandwidth. To solve this, I connected with another Project 24 member — someone who is at week 21 or 22 of their own journey — and hired them to write the final 29 posts for site one.

This is a meaningful decision because one of the core Project 24 principles is that every post should be genuinely helpful and written by someone with real knowledge of the topic. Hiring a random freelancer who knows nothing about your niche is a recipe for thin content that does not rank. Hiring a Project 24 member means you are working with someone who has been trained in the same content methodology, understands what makes a post rankable, and is motivated to do the work correctly because they are building their own site on the same principles.

He is wrapping up the last eight or nine posts this month, which means site one should hit 100 blog posts by the end of May 2019. Reaching that milestone matters not just as a round number but because the Project 24 timeline uses 100 posts as a key threshold for when organic traffic typically begins to grow more meaningfully. More indexed content means more surface area for Google to discover and rank, and more long-tail searches the site can capture.

The YouTube Plan: 12 Videos for Site One, 10 for Site Two

The video component of the Project 24 strategy is something I have been underinvesting in. Site one has 18 YouTube videos and site two has none. The plan I am committing to in this update is straightforward:

Create 12 more YouTube videos for site one to reach the target of 30 videos
Create 10 YouTube videos for site two to establish a video presence in that niche as well

The reason I am pushing on YouTube despite being behind on it is that my analytics already show me that YouTube traffic converts differently than social or search traffic. When someone watches a video explaining a topic and then follows the link to your blog, they arrive with higher trust and more specific intent. My 18 site-one videos are already driving a meaningful portion of the direct and referral traffic I am seeing, which tells me the video-to-blog pipeline works when I actually build it out.

I was not making videos during the stretch when I was feeling under the weather, which is when this backlog built up. Now that I am feeling better, videos are back on the production schedule. The goal is to batch-record as much as possible and maintain a consistent publishing rhythm rather than one-off uploads whenever I get around to it.

Real Numbers: What Seven Months of Blogging Actually Looks Like on Paper

Here is a consolidated snapshot of where both sites stand as of the end of April 2019, in plain numbers:

Site one age: approximately 7.5 months
Site one blog posts: 91 published, 100 by end of May
Site one YouTube videos: 18 published, targeting 30
Site one daily pageviews: approximately 16 (target: 25-26)
Site one average time on page: 5 minutes 41 seconds (a genuine positive)
Site one organic share: 31.6% of traffic from search
Site two age: approximately 3.5 months
Site two blog posts: 40 published
Site two daily pageviews: 2 per day
Amazon affiliate clicks (April): 107 clicks, 0 purchases
Adsense revenue: negligible, possible technical issue

Against the Project 24 timeline, site one is running slightly behind where it should be at month 7-8. Site two is too young to make a meaningful comparison. Neither of those facts changes what needs to happen next: more posts published, more videos created, affiliate link optimization, and continued patience while Google’s index catches up to the work already done.

What this snapshot does not capture is the compounding nature of content sites. Every post I publish today is still live and discoverable twelve months from now. Every organic ranking I earn in month eight still generates traffic in month twenty. The work feels slow in the moment and accelerates on a curve that is invisible until you are further along the timeline. That is the psychological challenge of this business model — you are doing real work for delayed, compounding rewards, and the early months offer very little feedback.

Find Your X

Affiliate blogging is one path to replacing income online. It works. But it is not the only path, and it is not the right path for everyone. The right path depends on your skills, your timeline, how much time you can invest weekly, and whether you prefer building an asset slowly or generating cash faster with a service or product.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to see meaningful traffic from a Project 24 niche site?

Most Project 24 members see meaningful organic traffic growth between months 8 and 18, depending on niche competitiveness, post quality, and publishing consistency. The early months are dominated by social and direct traffic while Google evaluates the domain. At seven months in, seeing 30+ organic visits per week is a genuine early signal, not a failure — the curve steepens later.

Why does social traffic convert worse than organic traffic for affiliate sites?

Social visitors arrive with curiosity, not buying intent. Someone who finds your post through a Facebook group or Reddit thread is often browsing. Someone who finds your post by searching “best [product] for [specific use case]” on Google is often already in purchase mode. The distinction in search intent is why organic traffic drives affiliate commissions at a much higher rate per visitor than social traffic does, even though social traffic is easier to get early on.

Is it normal to have Amazon affiliate clicks with zero purchases?

Yes, especially early on. Possible causes include seasonal product demand, high-ticket items requiring longer consideration periods, and a mismatch between the content topic and the product being recommended. If you are getting consistent clicks with zero purchases across multiple months, the most productive diagnostic step is to review which specific posts drive the most clicks and audit whether those posts are targeting readers who are close to buying or just researching.

How many blog posts do you need before a niche site starts earning real money?

There is no fixed number, but the Project 24 framework treats 100 posts as a key threshold because it provides enough content surface area for meaningful search traffic to develop. The honest answer is that post quality matters more than post count — 30 well-researched, correctly targeted posts will outperform 100 thin posts. Most successful Project 24 members report that consistent earnings began appearing between months 12 and 20 with a full library of quality content.

What does Project 24 cost and is it worth it for beginners?

Income School charges a membership fee for Project 24 access. The membership includes all courses, the detailed milestone timeline, and community access. Whether it is worth it depends on your alternative: if you would otherwise spend months watching free YouTube content and piecing together a strategy from inconsistent sources, having a structured roadmap and community significantly reduces the risk of wasted effort. The biggest cost of building a niche site is time, not money, so a structured system that reduces false starts has real value.

Should you hire writers for your niche site or write everything yourself?

The Project 24 approach recommends writing posts yourself initially so you develop a feel for what works in your niche and what your readers actually want. Once you have that baseline understanding, outsourcing to writers who genuinely know the niche is a reasonable scaling strategy. Hiring a fellow Project 24 member is one approach that ensures the writer understands the content methodology you are trying to execute. General freelancing platforms carry more risk of producing thin content that never ranks.

Why is time-on-page an important metric to track even when traffic is low?

Time on page tells you whether your content is actually serving the reader after they arrive. High traffic with low time on page usually means your titles are attracting clicks but the content does not deliver on its promise. Low traffic with high time on page — like the 5 minutes 41 seconds on site one — tells you that the content is genuinely useful when people find it. That pattern typically predicts stronger organic rankings once the domain gains enough authority to compete, because Google’s ranking signals include engagement data.

Can you run two niche sites simultaneously with Project 24?

You can, but it divides your time and slows the progress on both sites. The Project 24 framework generally recommends focusing on one site until it reaches meaningful traffic before starting a second. Running two sites works best when you have a clear content creation system in place and can either batch-produce content efficiently or delegate portions of production to trusted collaborators. The risk is spreading effort so thin that neither site reaches the content threshold needed for search engines to take the domain seriously.

Sources

Google Analytics data for site one and site two, week of April 20-27, 2019 (personal account data)
Amazon Associates affiliate dashboard, April 2019 (personal account data)
Google Adsense dashboard, April 2019 (personal account data)
Income School Project 24 milestone timeline (membership resource, original version)
Income School YouTube channel: Jim Harmer and Ricky Kesler, Project 24 course methodology