After a little more than 6 months the Vehicular Experiment has yielded some very interesting lessons. Before I get into lessons learned I want to reiterate the experiment , the goals for the site, the analytics and revenue.
I had a collection of low quality articles. They revolved around things automotive and also include RV, motorcycles and watercraft. I paid $5.00 for these articles on Fiverr.com. I also paid $3.99 for a .us domain from GoDaddy.
The experiment was whether those low quality articles could garner enough traffic to fuel a few Google AdSense ads to make back the $8.99 outlay of cash. I built the site ( Vehicular.us ) in WordPress and started putting up a few articles. I used the Yoast SEO plugin to help keep an eye on keywords and the little things that help in SEO. All in all, minimal effort.
The Analytics
So, 7 months later, what happened? Here are some of the analytics:
- Pageviews: 8,307
- Visits: 3,575
- Unique Visitors: 3,080
- Pages/Visit: 2.32
- Bounce Rate: 33.06%
Not horrible. I’m not quitting my day job anytime soon, but for not doing any back linking at all, and not posting anything new on the site for months, not bad.
Google AdSense
As of today, Vehicular.us has made exactly $30.37 which is $21.38 over my goal of $8.99!
While this is all great and successful, it was really the answers to some of my questions that I was really after.
Lessons Learned
Of the lessons I learned, on of the biggest was that half of the revenue was produced in the first 40 days. Those were the days when I was posting articles on a daily basis. The second half of the revenue trickled in over the next 6 months.
Another lesson, is that you can buy traffic but it does very little to your overall success. The traffic you seek has to have a a good reason to come to your site. Meaning, good content. SEO can help a little with bad content, but not enough to matter. The Pages/Visit stat of 2.32 will attest that most people do not stick around.
I think that the domain name is a poor one. I wonder if people have a hard time with the spelling and the .us TLD is not conducive to gaining traction.
What’s Next?
I think the next step is to seek out or to create some better content. Maybe spruce up the place a bit. When I created the site I did it quickly with no real design.
I think that I will use more of the low quality content but I will change the content to try to make it more unique. Just a little side experiment.