Project 24 Weekly Update (April 7-13): Real Traffic Numbers, Next Steps, and Motivation for Bloggers

Seventy-two page views. That is what Alston’s first Project 24 site pulled in during the week of April 7 through April 13. Not thousands. Not hundreds. Seventy-two. And yet he is still in it, still adding posts, still updating his plans, and still being completely honest with you about every number on the screen.

This weekly update is one of those rare documents of what the early months of affiliate blogging actually look like before the money starts moving. Ninety posts written, $10.19 earned to date, and a clear-eyed to-do list for the weeks ahead. If you are three, six, or twelve months into your own blog and wondering whether slow growth means you are doing it wrong, this one is for you.

What You’ll Walk Out With

The exact weekly traffic numbers from a real Project 24 site at 90 posts
A breakdown of where that traffic is actually coming from and why organic Google is almost absent in the early months
The specific action items Alston is adding to fix images, YouTube videos, and Search Console submissions
Why info products beat affiliate commissions by a wide margin, explained with real Amazon Associates math
The honest lifetime earnings to date: $5.65 in affiliate commissions and $4.54 in AdSense totaling $10.19
Why comparing your blog timeline to someone else’s is one of the most damaging things a new blogger can do
How to figure out which online income model fits your skills and schedule at finder.platformproof.com

Site Stats for the Week of April 7-13: What the Numbers Actually Show

Alston opens the screen share on his first site, and the dashboard tells an honest story. The site has 90 published blog posts and 19 YouTube videos attached to it. His plan is to reach 100 posts by end of month or early the following month, and he wants the YouTube count up to 30 as well.

For the week in review, the stats break down like this: 72 page views total, 70 unique visitors, an average time on page of 4 minutes and 55 seconds, a bounce rate of 94.12%, and an exit rate of nearly 95%. Broken down by day, that works out to a little over 10 page views per day.

He points out that last month averaged roughly 16 page views per day, so this week is running a bit below that. He is not worried about it. He knows that weekly numbers at this stage fluctuate more than they reveal useful signal. When your total daily traffic is under a hundred, a swing of six page views per day looks like a lot but it is not statistically meaningful. That framing matters for anyone watching their own low-traffic numbers and misreading natural variation as evidence of failure.

The average time on page of nearly five minutes is worth stopping on. For a blog post, that is a strong signal that people who do land on the content are actually reading it. They are not bouncing in two seconds because the content does not match their expectations. They are staying. Protecting that number as the site grows matters more than chasing page view counts alone.

He also mentions that he plans to add a graphic showing month-over-month data so viewers can see the longer trend rather than just one week in isolation. The week-to-week view at this stage is genuinely noisy. The month-to-month view will be a better indicator of whether the site is on an upward trajectory.

Where the Traffic Is Actually Coming From

The traffic source breakdown for this week is 42% social, nearly 30% direct, 25% organic, and the remainder referral. Of the 64 total users for the week, 27 came from social channels: Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. YouTube links from his 19 videos appear in the referral bucket rather than social.

The organic search number is the one that catches the eye. Twenty-five percent sounds respectable until Alston clarifies where that organic traffic is actually originating. It is primarily Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo, not Google. He is getting very little traffic from Google at this point in the build. His read on this is that it is simply too early. Google has not yet decided to rank his content, and that is a realistic assessment of how Google treats sites that have not been around long enough to establish a track record.

The direct figure requires a footnote he is careful to provide. Direct traffic in Google Analytics is not always someone who typed the domain name into the browser. Analytics puts traffic into the direct bucket when it cannot determine the original source. Some of what shows as direct may actually be organic search that Google simply did not attribute. It is a reminder not to over-read any single channel number in isolation, especially direct, which is the least precise category in the standard attribution model.

He also notes his Quora activity. He posts on Quora once or twice per day on average, with his main site linked in his bio and signed at the end of answers. Some traffic does come from that. He has not invested heavily in Pinterest, while other Project 24 members use it extensively and see strong results from it. Different distribution approaches produce different traffic mixes, and there is no single correct formula that works for every niche and every creator.

The Roadmap: Four Things Alston Is Working On Next

The plan going forward is broken into four clear priorities. Each one is worth walking through in detail because together they form a useful checklist for any blogger who is at a similar stage in their build.

Push to 100 Blog Posts

The first priority is reaching 100 posts on site one. At 90 published posts, he needs 10 more to hit that milestone. He hopes to get there by end of April or early May. This aligns with the Project 24 model, which emphasizes publishing volume in the early months before monetization starts to gain traction. The logic is that Google needs to see enough content to understand what the site is about before it begins rewarding it with rankings.

Build YouTube to 30 Videos

He is at 19 YouTube videos and wants to get to 30. He says he can accomplish that by publishing two or three videos per day for a focused stretch of time. He acknowledges he has fallen behind on the YouTube side of this project and needs to pick it back up. The YouTube content attached to the site drives referral traffic and builds a secondary relationship with people who prefer learning through video rather than written posts. The two channels reinforce each other when both are active.

Add Images to Every Published Post

Alston does not add images on his first pass when writing a post. His personal working style is to focus on the writing and get the content published, but he now recognizes that Google expects visual content in a page as part of a good user experience. His plan is to go back to his very first post and work through them in order, adding appropriate images, and then resubmitting each updated post to Google Search Console to signal that positive changes have been made to the content.

He flags a practical concern here that is easy to overlook: image file size matters. Large uncompressed images slow down page load speed, and page speed is a factor Google considers in rankings. Any images added need to be properly sized and compressed before uploading. Skipping that step could actually hurt the posts rather than help them, which would defeat the entire purpose of going back through 90 posts one by one.

Optimize Every Post for Products

Every blog post needs recommended products and info products visible and accessible to readers. Right now not all posts are fully optimized for this. The plan is to make that a consistent part of every page, then dig into analytics to find which posts are pulling the most traffic. For those high-traffic pages, he wants to examine whether internal links from other pages can funnel even more visitors there, and whether the product call-to-action on those pages is as clear and compelling as it should be. More time on site plus more product visibility means more opportunities to turn a reader into a buyer.

Why Info Products Beat Affiliate Commissions Every Time

Alston makes one of the more important points in this video around the midpoint, and it is the kind of thing that sounds obvious after you hear it but rarely gets stated this plainly for new bloggers who are still in the affiliate-only mindset.

He has an ebook on his primary site. He calls info products the Golden Goose of affiliate marketing and online business more broadly. The reason is straightforward math. With an affiliate commission, you earn a portion of the sale price. With Amazon Associates specifically, that portion is typically between 4% and 10% depending on the product category. If you send a customer to a $100 product and they buy it, you might earn $4. That is the realistic expectation for most affiliate arrangements.

With an info product you own, whether it is an ebook, a PDF guide, a spreadsheet tool, a course, or any other digital asset, you keep 100% of the sale price minus payment processing fees. Sell a $47 ebook and you collect $47, not $2. The unit economics are completely different. And when someone buys directly from you, they know you, they trust you, and they have made a decision to put money in your hands specifically. That relationship is more durable than a one-time affiliate referral where the customer relationship belongs to Amazon, not you.

He also points to Income School itself as a working example of the model in practice. Project 24 is an info product. Income School uses their YouTube channel and website to drive traffic, and they collect the full membership fee when someone joins Project 24. Compare that to their Bluehost affiliate arrangement, where they earn whatever commission rate was negotiated. The info product side is where the real compounding value builds over time. The affiliate side supplements it.

His recommendation is digital over physical for anyone starting out. Digital products cost nothing to replicate. Every copy sold after the first is nearly pure margin. Physical products introduce shipping logistics, return handling, inventory risk, and customer service complexity that a one-person blog operation is not well positioned to manage. For anyone building their first online income stream, digital is the obvious starting point and the highest-margin option available.

Not sure whether blogging, freelancing, or digital products fits your situation best?

Find your match in under two minutes at finder.platformproof.com.

Earnings to Date: The Full Honest Picture

At the end of the video Alston pulls up his actual numbers. He does not hide them or round them up or skip over the uncomfortable parts. Lifetime affiliate earnings to this point: $5.65. AdSense earnings: $4.54. Total lifetime earnings across both channels: $10.19.

His stated goal for April is to reach $15 in total earnings for the month. That would bring his running cumulative total to $20 when combined with the $5 he earned in the previous month. He acknowledges that he is just under halfway through April and would likely need another affiliate sale or a meaningful AdSense uptick to hit the $15 mark. He says it is possible. He does not oversell it or pretend the math is easy.

This is the kind of number that takes honesty to put on screen in public. Ten dollars and nineteen cents after 90 blog posts and 19 YouTube videos and months of consistent work. For anyone following along expecting a steep earnings climb, this is a grounding moment. But it is also a document. It is evidence that the early months of a Project 24 build look like this for most people who are doing everything right, and that the decision to keep going is what separates the people who eventually get results from the people who quit at month four.

Income School is explicit in the Project 24 curriculum that replacing a full-time income takes the better part of 24 months. The early monthly earnings figures are expected to be small. They are not a verdict on whether the site will succeed. They are a checkpoint on a much longer timeline.

The Second Site: 33 Posts and Growing

Alston is not building just one site. He is also working on a second property in parallel. That site is at 33 posts as of this video, with three posts added in the same week. His goal is to get the second site to 100 posts as well, targeting that milestone around June or July.

The niche for the second site is described as drier and more technical in tone. Because of that, he is less certain that a 30-video YouTube component makes sense there the way it does for site one. He may build the second site primarily on written content and skip the heavy YouTube investment. Getting to 100 posts is the shared goal across both properties regardless of the media mix.

His longer-term thinking is to get both sites to 100 posts and then watch whether site one starts producing consistent monthly income. If that happens, he can begin reinvesting some of those proceeds into content production or promotion for both properties. He is treating this as a small portfolio of sites rather than a single bet, which distributes risk and creates multiple chances for one of them to break through ahead of the other.

Do Not Compare Your Timeline to Someone Else’s

One of the most useful things in this video is not a statistic or a tactic. It is something Alston says almost as a side thought, but it is the thing that trips up more bloggers than any technical mistake in their content or their SEO.

Inside Project 24, members share their results in forums and community posts. Some people are making meaningful money much faster than average. Others are far behind where they hoped to be at this stage. Alston’s observation is that your results will look very different from your neighbor’s or your friend’s or anyone else in the community, and that is not a problem. It is just the reality of building something complex with too many variables to control.

The variables are real and they compound. Niche selection matters. Keyword research quality matters. How you distribute your content matters. Whether you have invested in building backlinks or guest posting versus spending that same time writing original content for your own site matters. None of these are identical across two different bloggers, so the outcomes cannot reasonably be compared on a shared timeline as though the inputs were the same.

He offers this example: someone who built backlinks aggressively may be ahead of you in month six. But two years from now, your approach of writing original, in-depth content may produce a more durable and higher-earning site. You will not know which path outperformed until you are both further along. Measuring yourself against their month-six figure and concluding you are failing is a misread of the situation based on incomplete information.

He also notes the Pinterest contrast specifically. Some Project 24 members drive significant traffic through Pinterest and see fast results from that channel. He has not invested much in Pinterest. That produces a real difference in traffic mix and growth pace. It does not mean one approach is correct and the other is wrong. It means they are building different assets with different risk profiles and different audience relationships.

His advice is simple: ask yourself every day what you have done to grow your business today. Focus on that question rather than on what someone else’s numbers looked like last week. The daily habit of moving forward is what compounds over 24 months into something that matters.

Honest Drawbacks: What to Know Before You Start

Project 24 is transparent about its timeline from the beginning. You will not replace your full-time income in six weeks. Alston repeats that several times in this video and credits Income School for being upfront about it. But there are a few additional things worth naming clearly for anyone who is considering starting this kind of build.

First, the time cost is real and it is substantial. Ninety blog posts, 19 YouTube videos, daily Quora activity, and a second site at 33 posts represents hundreds of hours of focused work. If you are working a full-time job and building this on the side, the pace will be slower than Alston’s pace. That does not mean it cannot be done, but it does mean setting honest expectations about when the site will reach 100 posts and when Google might begin to show up.

Second, Google is not going to arrive early. As Alston notes directly, his organic search traffic is almost entirely from Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. Google is sitting out the early months. If you are expecting Google traffic to carry your site in months two or three, that expectation will not be met. Social distribution, Quora, Pinterest, and other channels become your primary drivers while Google decides whether to trust your content.

Third, info products take time to create at a quality level that actually sells. Having an ebook on your site early is good progress, but a product that does not genuinely help people who buy it can damage your audience relationship more than not having one at all. The writing and refinement process takes longer than most people estimate when they first plan it out.

Fourth, the income floor in the early months is genuinely low. Ten dollars and nineteen cents after 90 posts is not an amount that offsets any meaningful cost. This business model only works if you can sustain the effort without needing the income to pay for itself right away. That means either having another income source, using a very low-cost setup, or having savings that give you runway while the site grows.

Find Your X

Alston is building affiliate blogging and a digital product business. That combination fits his skills, his niche, and his schedule. But affiliate blogging is one of several legitimate paths to making money online, and it is not the fastest path for everyone. If you are not sure whether blogging, freelancing, consulting, digital products, or a service business fits your situation best, there is a free tool that walks you through a short set of questions and gives you a personalized recommendation based on your actual skills and available time. Start at finder.platformproof.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many blog posts did Alston have when he filmed this update?

His first site had 90 published blog posts at the time of this April 7-13 update. He also had 19 YouTube videos connected to the site. His near-term goal for both was to reach 100 posts and 30 videos within the following few weeks.

How much traffic was the site getting per day?

During the week of April 7-13, the site received 72 page views from 70 unique visitors. That works out to a little over 10 page views per day. His previous month had averaged about 16 page views per day, so this particular week was running slightly below that average. He treated the dip as normal weekly variation rather than a meaningful trend.

Why was the site not getting traffic from Google?

Alston noted that his organic search traffic was coming almost entirely from Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo rather than Google. This is common for newer sites. Google tends to take longer to rank content from sites without an established history. He expected Google traffic to eventually arrive as the site aged and added more content, and he was not alarmed by the absence of it at this stage.

How much had he earned in total by the time of this video?

Lifetime earnings at the time of this video were $5.65 in affiliate commissions and $4.54 in AdSense, for a combined total of $10.19. His goal for April was to reach $15 in monthly earnings, which would bring his running cumulative total to $20 across the two months he had been actively tracking it.

Why does he recommend info products over affiliate commissions?

Affiliate programs like Amazon Associates pay between 4% and 10% of a sale price depending on the category. On a $100 product that works out to $4 to $10 in your pocket. An info product you own and sell directly pays you 100% of the sale price minus payment processing. The math is significantly better, and buyers of your own products tend to be stronger long-term relationships than one-time affiliate clicks where the customer belongs to the retailer afterward.

How was he driving social traffic at this stage?

Social traffic made up 42% of his visits that week, coming from Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. He was also posting on Quora once or twice per day with his site URL in his bio and signed at the end of answers. He acknowledged he had not invested heavily in Pinterest despite knowing other Project 24 members were using it successfully to drive meaningful traffic volumes.

What was his plan for the second site?

His second site was at 33 posts at the time of this video. He was aiming to reach 100 posts there around June or July. He was less certain about doing 30 YouTube videos for that site because the niche is drier and less visually engaging. His plan was to get both sites to 100 posts and then reassess where to focus his energy based on which one was producing income.

How long does Project 24 say it takes before you see meaningful income?

The Project 24 curriculum is explicit that replacing a full-time income takes approximately 24 months of consistent work. Alston acknowledges this timeline repeatedly in this video and credits Income School for not hiding it from members. The early months are about building content and traffic, not collecting meaningful revenue. If you start with expectations of fast returns, the reality of months two through twelve will be genuinely difficult to sit with without quitting.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “Project 24 Weekly Update (April 7-13) + Next Steps & Motivation for Bloggers!” YouTube, 2019
Income School, Project 24 program methodology and 24-month income timeline guidance
Amazon Associates, commission rate structure by product category (4-10%)
Google Analytics, traffic source definitions including the “direct” channel and its attribution limitations
Google Search Console, resubmission workflow for updated blog content