I just wanted to share an update on my non-Google reliant niche site experiment. Yesterday, it hit a new record of 850 unique visitors in a single day.

This is a site I built a few years ago in the English grammar niche that got hit by Google’s Helpful Content Update back in September 2023.

After it was hit, I stopped working on it. But months later, I noticed it was bringing in 20-40 visitors/day from Bing. Not much, but it was enough to inspire me to add loads of new articles to see what might happen.

Traffic climbed very slowly. For every new article published, the site gained an extra 0.33 visitors/day on average.

To see any meaningful traffic increase required publishing tons of content. So that’s what I did.

I gathered thousands of keywords to target using ClearSERP, then built a workflow in Publish Owl to generate a full article, complete with a featured image and relevant internal links, for every keyword.

I spent a lot of time refining the workflow to make sure the output was comprehensive and helpful. Once I was happy with the results, I let it rip on over 3,000 keywords (each keyword = 1 article).

Those articles have been going live on my site once every hour for more than two months now, and will continue going live until October.

Interestingly, the 0.33 daily visitors per article math has held up. There are over 2,500 articles on the site now, and it’s been hitting 800+ visitors/day recently.

In the last few months, I’ve probably spent about an hour on it - mainly doing keyword research and clicking buttons in Publish Owl.

It’s very low maintenance, and rankings hold steady.

Google updates have no effect on the site, since traffic primarily comes from Bing, DDG, and Yahoo.

Of all the online business models, simple passive content websites like this are among my favorite. The main work is in the initial build and then keyword research and content automation. But that doesn’t need to take much time if you use the right tools.

I’ve monetized my site with AdSense (and I applied to Journey by Mediavine months ago but am still awaiting approval).

AdSense pays about $4 per thousand pageviews so far, which is decent considering the low value niche.

In the last 30 days, the site earned $81.93.

Yesterday alone it earned $7.17 which was a daily record.

I know these numbers aren’t crazy, but for the effort I put in, I’m happy. It wouldn’t take much time to build a whole portfolio of simple sites like this, and that’s where the numbers get interesting. Imagine owning a couple dozen of these!

Of course, it does take time for sites to rank (even in Bing), so this is a long-term game. Plant your orchard today, and harvest the fruit years from now. Possibly sooner, as some sites take off in a few months.

Alright, that’s all for the update. I promised awhile back I’d write about how the site was doing once I had results from the content automation experiment. So far, so good. I plan to share another progress report in the future as well. Hopefully this was inspiring!

If you want me to write about how I built the site next - specifically how I approach keyword research and content creation/automation - let me know!

Thanks for reading,

Ian

P.S.

I’ve been very inconsistent with this newsletter. A combination of busyness and perfectionism has kept me from writing more often. I’m going to try to suppress my perfectionism and just share what I find interesting, even if it’s short or only interesting to a portion of my audience. After writing what I thought were many great emails, and then watching them flop, I’ve learned I can’t please everyone, so I’m not going to try.

If you like reading about websites, SEO, vibe coding (or is it “AI assisted development” now?) and similar topics, then good, cause that’s what I plan to write about for the most part. And if not, that’s fine too, just giving you a fair warning about what to expect. Feel free to unsubscribe, my feelings won’t be hurt (this time 😆).

Oh also, I don’t use AI to write these emails and I never will. Which means they take a long time to write. I’ve been at this one for more than 3 hours (almost done yay!). I don’t have 3 hours to just sit and write an email very often, so expect my future emails to reflect that. Meaning, they’ll mostly be short and sweet compared to my usual.

Ok, enough yapping. I’m excited for this new chapter! And excited to build my writing muscles more consistently! I feel like they’ve been atrophying. Too much talking with Claude Code. I hope you’re excited too. Thanks for being with me on this journey.