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

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.

After 10 months of struggle and hard work, we’re happy to report that we finally were able to make a four-digit commission and end the month with a nice profit!

If you’re interested in the full journey, 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)
• Project G: Small Sale At Last! (Month 10)

In this post, we’ll be covering our Month 11 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

For now, no significant changes, however Richard and I are finally realizing that it’s time to switch our editors because our current one is a big headache.

We always highly recommend OnlineJobs.ph for finding affordable talent from the Philippines for a fraction of the price compared to US freelancers.

In our case, we have a great editor, but absolutely shit work ethics. And it’s time we let him go and find someone better.

November 2023: Goals & Progress

Similar to October, we kept our goals modest to keep our expenses to a minimum.

Take a look:

And here are the results:

• Amount of articles

Frankly, the amount of articles we published isn’t as great as could have, but we still tried to publish posts to offer something fresh for Google and let Mr. G know that we’re still being active.

Have a look:

As you can see from this screenshot, we published:

• 1 listicle
• 3 info guide
• 8095 words in total

Like I mentioned already 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

Luckily, video production was great, despite lowering the expenses in general.

We had some videos prepaid, so we ended up publishing 7 long-form videos in total, 2 more than we anticipated.

• Podcast

Just like in October, we didn’t publish any podcast episodes due to lowering our expenses.

And it showed too, because we only got 225 downloads, nearly twice as less compared to the previous month

• Paid ads & leads

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

We plan on doing some paid ads once we make our big sale. With our current budget, we made a decision to minimize the expenses, especially on ads.

Still, we managed to attract 3 leads, with one of them being qualified (+$200)!

But the best part is, that the person who made us the $380 commission in October bought additional products and we got our first 4-digit commission in 2023!

Take a look:

$1,438 in a single day!

Our commission is 3%, so this means our lead invested almost $50,000 with this company!

It was definitely nice to see this commission despite the fact we don’t promote this company nearly as much as our main offer.

(Too bad we don’t have the 10% commission rate with this company like we do with our #1 recommendation.)

Eleventh 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).
• In October, we spent $300 (or $150 each)

In November, we spent the lowest amount out of any month so far, totalling $263 for a couple of videos and some subscription services we use for our website.

Definitely nice to keep the expenses low and seeing our first big commission!

Eleventh Month Stats

Let’s take a look at our traffic numbers.

The traffic pretty much remained the same compared to last month.

In October, we recorded 152 clicks and 31.5k impressions.

This month, we managed to get 131 organic clicks and 31.1k impressions.

Surprisingly, our total traffic (referral + organic) grew a bit, probably mainly because of our uptick in YouTube traffic.

From 438 visits in October to 457 visits in November.

Take a look:

Slowly getting there.

YouTube

In October, we saw a nice lift in views (5K more from the previous month)-

Luckily, our YouTube views only dropped a little despite publishing few videos in October.

From 7.6K views in October to 6.7K views in November.

Take a look:

We also got another 40 subs, getting us closer to the 1000-subscriber mark.

Stay tuned for next month!

November Summary (Earnings, Expenses & Traffic)

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

Another month in profit.

YAY!

Project G Plans for December 2023

We keep our expenses low and plans modest. Especially with the holidays in December.

Have a look at our goals:

However, because we made $1400+ in commissions, 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, as well as order a couple of non-AI reviews from our writer.

Final Words

And that’s it for November!

Our first 4-digit sale and 4-digit profit. Far from our goal, but gotta celebrate smaller victories as well.

Next month is the last month of our challenge (that we’ll document), so stay tuned for the final stretch!

If we don’t end up hitting our goal, we’re going to continue this journey and definitely hit it next year! And you’ll be the first ones to know.

READ NEXT: Project G: Documenting The Last Month of Our Challenge! (Month 12)

Thank you for your support!

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.

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.

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