Today we are analyzing a case study from Jesse Foutch, a blogger, and webmaster who was able to build a niche site that currently generates over $3 000/ month passively with just 199 posts.
In this case study, we are looking at the statistics of this website that Jesse built in late 2018 and analyzing its income, the mistakes he made, and how he could improve it in order to max out the opportunities it presents on the table.
Brief Details of the Site
- Jesse started this site in November 2018 as a result of chasing a new niche.
- The niche was small but had a lot of potentials to grow and that’s exactly what aggravated the shiny object syndrome in him.
- He wrote the majority of the content himself together with his partner, and also had some content outsourced.
- He did the site designing and all branding.
- The niche is seasonal — the peak months are March-May.
- He wasn’t an expert in the niche when he started the site.
- The site now runs passively i.e., he doesn’t have to check on it every day.
Content and Earnings
Jesse has been adding content to this site sporadically and sporadically. By November 2020, which was 2 years from the launch, the site had only 199 articles.
When it comes to the revenue, it had an exponential increase from $0 in November 2018 to $3 600 in November 2020. Jesse tried monetizing the site with the Amazon affiliate program and display ads from Ezoic and Mediavine.
The table below shows the performance of this site since its inception in November 2018:
Summary
- Total articles: 199 posts
- Last 6 months average earnings: $3 177
- Valuation at a 34X multiple: $108 018
If you noticed, the traffic going to Jesse’s website kept on reducing especially in the last months. This is mainly because of two reasons:
- He was working on other websites to diversify his portfolio.
- He really didn’t put in full effort into this project from the get-go.
Lessons Learned from This Project
Looking back, Jesse admits that there are many things he did wrong and he needed to do better.
Someone else who knew what they were could have taken this site very far and beyond. However, he learned a lot from the experience and these are the mistakes he made, and is looking forward to improving them:
- He didn't publish as much content as he could have or should have, especially at the beginning.
- Many of the earlier articles were pure crap, and are still live on the site.
- He never had a clear monetization or traffic strategy for this site until later on.
- A lot of the content is just a bunch of random articles related to the niche.
- The internal linking needs a lot of work.
- A lot of older articles still need optimizing.
- He never did any outreach or link-building so the site has a low DR which affects rankings.
- He never created any info products and just relied purely on ads and affiliate earnings.
- The YouTube channel for the site has only 11 subscribers and just a handful of terrible low-quality videos, so much potential there that he’s missing out.
- The site’s speed could be better.
Conclusion
Even though the site has done about $29 875 in just 2 years, Jesse feels like he’s left a lot of money and opportunities on the table. He plans to optimize it further and add a lot more content.
For this particular site, Jesse chose the right niche at the right time and wrote a lot of the right type of content for it. As a new blogger then, it was a perfect storm of several good decisions too that made Jesse this nice income-producing asset.
