We are sharing a case study from Luke Jordan, a blogger and affiliate marketer who was able to grow his website to over 1 000 000 monthly organic visitors in just 15 months. In this period, the website’s revenue grew up to $42 000 in monthly revenue.
In this case study, Luke shares how he built the site, its traffic sources, revenue, growth strategies, and other interesting bits of information.
Proof of Results
The table below indicates posts, sessions, and revenue details from Lukes’s site for the period starting from July 2020 to October 2021.
Project Background and Overview
Luke acquired this site with less than 100 posts and while it was getting approximately 100 visitors per day in early 2020. It was originally an Amazon affiliate site but he didn’t do much with the affiliate marketing part after purchasing it. His plan was to run his first ad monetized website, so he started filling it with informational content.
6 months after starting it, he was hit by the December 2020 Core Update, which instead inspired him to go all-in on the site and to make it a strong project.
Strategy
Luke’s site relied on a model that is a bit different from other regular content sites. The key differences are his content model and the team workflow behind it.
For content, Luke’s site is in a fast-moving niche that has new areas of content that pop up regularly. This means that he doesn’t have to compete against articles that have been ranking for years. Keyword research tools don't work here because most don’t function in real-time.
For the writing team, Luke doesn’t use a "content machine" and avoids bottlenecks. He trains his writers to find their own article ideas and keywords. They write, format, and publish themselves. He incentivizes this with bonuses and other employee benefits, that make his business a good one to work for.
Traffic
Luke’s main aim was to grow his traffic organically from 3 000 sessions in July 2020 to 1 000 000 sessions by October 2021. The site massively depended on search traffic with no social, email, or paid ads. He sold his other websites and put more money into this site, especially on the content creation side because that's what would generate organic traffic.
"After our huge hit in December 2020, I rebranded and rebuilt large parts of the site and brand. I culled a range of content because we were spreading ourselves too thin. Whilst all of our content was highly relevant to our niche, we had 500 posts (at the time) and 40-50 categories, maybe more.
I used a freshly-registered domain name and we custom-built a nice-looking theme on top of Generatepress. I got lucky in coming up with an awesome name that had never been registered before and was perfect for us to build a real brand on, then redirected our old site to it.", Luke says.
95% of Luke’s strategy was to just publish high-quality informational content based on what people are searching for in Google. The other 5% is creating viral 'digital PR' style campaigns aimed at getting other people like journalists and bloggers to talk about his brand.
Revenue
Luke’s site is mainly monetized by Google Adsense and Amazon Associates. His Google Ads revenue started growing drastically from June 2021 to the point where he was earning $41 000 per month.
His main focus was having a website that's mainly monetized by ads and this made him not give much consideration to affiliate revenue. For this reason, he focused on publishing more informational content rather than promotional content. This is why his affiliate revenue was averaging at $500 per month.
Conclusion
Luke was able to attain an exponential growth of both his traffic and websites revenue by consistently uploading tons of informational content on his site which enabled it to be easily discoverable on search engines. He has made about $67 000 in total revenue in the previous 15 months and the website is still on its way up.
The biggest takeaway with all this is that to become a big site, you need to behave like a big site. You must have good branding, good content, and must have other sites talking about you.
