This is an update to an on and off case study I was doing on 3 sites that I created last year. Last I reported, I had combined the 3 sites together and added them onto a fresh domain. It has now been about 4 months since I did that so I thought I post about how it was going so far on this new domain.
Case study – merging 3 sites into 1
Overview
As mentioned, I had created 3 sites last year. They were in related niches but not overlapping. 1 of these sites was progressing pretty well while the other 2 weren’t so much. I decided to register a new domain and combine all of the content together, which equaled about 130 posts total.
When I was done with the migrations I had a new site with 3 categories and 130 articles. I set up 301 redirects for all of the posts, these redirects are still in place today.
Content
For the first 30-45 days I did not add additional content to the new domain, aside from what came over from the other sites. So the domain sat with these 130 articles for a month or so. I was just letting the dust settle.
At this point I start slowly publishing new content on the domain. As of right now I have 238 posts live on the site, publishing about 80 last month alone.
Traffic
It has been just under 4 months since I migrated everything and in the last 30 days I’ve had just over 11k pageviews. Strangely enough, only about half of my traffic is coming from Google while the rest is coming from other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo.
Technically I’m still in the sandbox with this domain, the 301s just helped give me a boost. It’s my guess that in the next 60-90 days when I truly leave the sandbox, my Google traffic will really pick up.
I have a loose goal to move this site onto Mediavine by early December. That gives me almost 4 months to get my traffic from about 10k to 25k sessions/month (MV will consider second sites at 25k).
I think this is very doable with as much content as I am pumping into this site. I’ll probably go for about 100 posts/month going forward which should put me at well over 500 posts by December on this domain.
If we don’t count the previous sites I bailed on, that would put this one on Mediavine in under 8 months with over 500 posts.
Monetization
This site is not really monetized yet. It does have a few Amazon links, but not much to speak of and it doesn’t even have ads yet. I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not to add Ezoic or Adsense, but I’ve decided to just wait.
When it hits MV traffic levels I’ll just add it straight to there are get a nice earnings boost each month. At 25k sessions/month with a reasonable RPM of $30, I can expect to immediately start making an extra $750/month. And it will only go up from there.
Going forward
As of right now it is my plan to make this site a long-term earner. I like the niche and I’ve put a lot of work into the site so far, I hope that it becomes a long-term asset. I can see it going in a lot of different directions strategy-wise.
For now I’m going to just keep hammering it with new content. I’m ranking really well on Bing and often getting the snippet, so I’ll keep taking advantage of them to boost my growth.