Project G: Small Sale At Last! (Month 10)

Hi everyone,

Welcome to our Project G Challenge, where we (Richard and Zarina) share everything we do to try to go from $0 to $100K per month within a year.

If you’ve read our last couple of posts, you’ll know that we struggled with a lot.

We honestly share our journey and the challenges, so that you have a CLEAR understanding of how things work in the content marketing business.

(Especially if you’re in a highly competitive niche like ours.)

And if you’re new here, read these posts first:

• Project G Challenge: From $0 to $100,000 in 365 Days (Month 1)
• Project G $100K Challenge and Our First Commission! (Month 2)
• Project G Challenge: March 2023 Goals & Progress (Month 3)
• Project G Challenge: Any Sales Yet? (Month 4)
• Project G: A Challenge Indeed! (Month 5)
• Project G: Out of Google Sandbox? (Month 6)
• Project G Challenge: A Slight Shift in Strategy (Month 7)
• Project G: Experiencing a High Level of Demotivation & Burnout (Month 8)
• Project G: The Struggle Continues (Month 9)

In this post, we’ll be covering our Month 10 progress and what milestones we reached (or haven’t reached).

So, grab a coffee, and let’s get started.

Our Team

In our first post, we shared that for this project, we had 7 people involved who do what they are best at.

Here’s our current team and their roles:

• Richard (Co-founder): KW research
• Zarina (Co-founder): Article editing
• Martin (Designer): Custom graphs, featured images, etc.
• Joseph (Designer): YouTube thumbnails
• Kyle (Voice Actor): Voiceovers
• Sonny (Video Editor): Faceless YouTube videos
• Kim (Writer/Editor): AI content editing

Even though most of them were hired thanks to OnlineJobs.ph and are affordable, we still had to make some big cuts in order to save money (until we make a sale).

We decided to take the whole month off in October in terms of expenses, and just focus on optimizing the existing content ourselves.

But let’s get back to October stats.

October 2023: Goals & Progress

As mentioned earlier, for this month we decided to pretty take a break from all the expenses, and do some work ourselves.

So our goals were straightforward:

Here are the actual results:

• Amount of articles

We had some leftover articles from September that I worked on and published in October.

Not a lot but still good to have something fresh to let Google know that we’re being active.

Have a look:

As you can see from this screenshot, we published:

• 3 reviews
• 1 info guide
• 6505 words in total

This definitely isn’t very satisfying and we’d definitely like to publish more content, but given the current situation, publishing even 4 of articles is a win.

• Social media

No news here. 

We have Pinterest and Twitter accounts set up, but it’s not our focus.

For now, our main energy goes towards building out the website and YouTube channel.

• Video marketing

Usually, our monthly goal when it comes to YouTube videos is to try publishing at least 8 videos.

In October, we only published 1 long-format video and 3 shorts.

We had more videos lined up (paid our editor in advance), but he had some family issues going on and wasn’t to produce more videos.

Because YouTube has been our best performer in terms of producing leads, we are on top of this and planning to increase are video production for the upcoming months.

• Podcast

Just like videos, our usual goal is to post 8 episodes monthly, but since we cut expenses, we didn’t have any new voiceovers that we could use on our podcast.

Which is fine; this is definitely our least converting format anyway.

Still, we got 406 downloads during October.

• Paid ads & leads

In October, we didn’t do any paid ads.

We plan on doing some paid ads once we make our big sale, since it’s currently not possible with our budget.

Regardless of that, we managed to attract 4 leads:

These leads weren’t qualified unfortunately.

However, we did have a little surprise this month…

We made a sale from an unexpected source!

Somehow we made a small sale from a company that we don’t heavily promote. Sure we had affiliate links in one of our posts, but we definitely didn’t rely on it.

So, we made around $380 thanks to this company:

(The screenshot doesn’t include the $25 for qualified lead that we actually received in September and didn’t know about).

We’ll still keep promoting our main company because in our opinion they are the best in the industry, and they certainly pay great commissions.

Just gotta receive that huge sale at last! 😄

Tenth Month Expenses

• In January 2023, we spent $2135.10 in total (or $1067.55 each).
• In February 2023, we spent $1801.78 (or $900.89 each).
• In March 2023, we spent $1774.4 (or $887.2 each).
• In April 2023, we spent $1766.78 (or $883.39 each).
• In May 2023, we spent $1163 (or $581.5 each).
• In June, we spent $589.9 (or $294.95 each).
• In July, we spent $988.30 (or 494.15 each).
• In August, we spent $794.5 (or $397.25 each).
• In September, we spent $663.15 (or $331.6 each).

And October was the lowest of all since we basically cut all expenses.

We had minor things like Buzzsprout, Ahrefs subscription, and paid for shorts. All of which were around $300 (or $150 each).

Definitely felt nice to slow down a little because we were highly demotivated and burnt out.

Tenth Month Stats

In this section, we’re going to take a look at our traffic. Not just website traffic, but our YouTube views as well.

Compared to previous months (July and August), our numbers our down around 30%, but that’s due to the infamous Google algo update that hurt nearly everyone.

However, compared to September, we’re slightly up, meaning we’re heading in the right direction.

In September, we recorded 138 clicks and 31.5k impressions.

This month, we managed 152 clicks and 31.5k impressions.

Not bad.

Our total traffic (referral + organic) also grew, probably mainly because of our uptick in YouTube traffic.

From 291 visits in September to 438 visits in October.

Take a look:

YouTube

If you’ve been following our Journey, you know how much effort we put into YouTube.

Despite publishing only one video we’ve got a lot of views compared to September.

From 2.7K views in September to 7.6K views in October. That’s almost 200% more traffic!

Take a look:

The good news is also that our video editor finally cleared up his schedule, and we’ll be on a steady publishing schedule going forward.

Stay tuned for next month!

October Summary (Earnings, Expenses & Traffic)

Alright, let’s take a look at the numbers.

First month in profit! LOL

Project G Plans for November 2023

Because our individual websites took a hit after the latest Google update and not seeing ROI from Project G yet, we decided to take it easier in November too.

Have a look at our goals:

However, because we got paid around $380 early November, we’ll use it to order more videos and try having them published more this month.

In terms of articles, Richard and I decided to do the work ourselves with the AI assistance.

Tools/Resources We Use & Recommend

This section is included in every post.

This is where we share a few tools or services we personally find super helpful – we won’t be sharing anything we don’t use ourselves.

So here it is, the list of useful resources that you can benefit from too:

Wealthy Affiliate – Online business community and training platform.

We just have to share this one.

This is where we started our journey, this is what we owe our success to, and most importantly, this is where we found each other and many other good friends.

Astra Pro – Fast and easy-to-use WordPress theme.

We did a lot of research on themes going into this project. We wanted something fast and highly customizable.

Astra Pro, coupled with Elementor, fits the bill perfectly.

LinkWhisper – Smart, fast, and easy-to-use plugin for internal links.

If you’re a pretty experienced affiliate marketer with one or more established websites, we encourage you to check it out.

It’s an impressive tool created by Spencer Haws (the founder of Niche Pursuits), and we didn’t realize just how much it would save time when doing internal linking.

Doing smart internal links is important for SEO purposes, and this plugin can potentially help you improve your Google rankings.

OnlineJobs.ph – To hire affordable freelancers from the Philippines.

If you want to hire someone for cheap, OnlineJobs is amazing for that.

On this platform, you’ll be able to hire full-time video editors and writers for around $700 a month or designers for $300-400.

For comparison purposes, a full-time video editor or writer would cost you at least a couple thousand dollars in the US.

This is because the cost of living and wage rates in the Philippines are MUCH lower than in North America. So $700 is considered to be a pretty great full-time salary.

Note: When hiring, be mindful that every profession has different rates and that, in some cases, you’d have to train them (for example, writers).

NitroPack.io – All-in-one speed optimization for your website.

With the recent additions of the Core Web Vitals, your website’s speed is more important than ever before.

We’ve had some performance issues for a while, but by adding NitroPack (they have a free plan for up to 5000 page views/mo), everything was solved, and all of our websites are soooo fast now.

Absolutely loving this one.

Originality.ai – AI content checker/detection tool.

Lately, AI tools for writing content have become VERY popular among freelancers, so make sure to scan every single article for AI-generated content.

We like originality.ai for its simplicity, affordability, and accuracy.

Ahrefs – SEO, keyword, competitor analysis tool.

We started using it again for keyword and competitor research.

One of the popular tools, but it is quite a bit expensive, so if you’re on a budget, you can invest in it for a month to gather info and keywords and then cancel the subscription.

Final Words

With October gone, we have a couple more months to try securing that $100K sale.

Place your bets!

As you can see, we’re definitely not giving up. We keep plugging away.

Even if we cut our expenses, we still do the work ourselves.

The truth is that REAL BUSINESS REQUIRES REAL WORK.

(And that applies to online content websites and channels as well.)

READ NEXT: Project G: Our First Big Sale! (Month 11)

Feel free to join our Telegram group; while we’re not yet active there, it’s still a good idea to join and have access to us should you have any questions.

Sharing is caring! ↓