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

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

In this post, we’ll be covering our Month 12 progress and what milestones we reached (or haven’t reached).

While we didn’t reach our initial goal, we’ll likely write up a separate post once we hit our first $100K month, but until then this will be the last month we’ll document.

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
• Billy (Video Editor): Faceless YouTube videos

We mentioned before that we had issues with our first video editor. He’s great at video editing, but has TERRIBLE work ethics.

Always late with submissions, often acted highly unprofessionally, and honestly was a big headache (literally).

We put up with him for far too long (don’t make the same mistake we did!) and eventually decided that it’s time to switch to a different editor, Billy, who is also from the Philippines.

If you recall, we always highly recommend OnlineJobs.ph for finding affordable talent from the Philippines for a fraction of the price compared to US freelancers.

December 2023: Goals & Progress

Similar to the last few months, we kept our goals modest to keep our expenses to a minimum.

Take a look:

Here are the actual results:

• Amount of articles

In terms of the amount of posts published, December was the worst. I had a lot of courses to finish and the exam to focus on, not to mention the holidays, so I was a little slow with Project G articles.

(But that means more articles to be published in January.)

As you can see from this screenshot, we published:

• 1 review
• 1 info post
• 4090 words in total

Most certainly the worst month in terms of articles produced but I don’t beat myself about it. It was a very busy month for me and was challenging to stay on top of everything.

There’s an upside though:

Because I had so many things done in December and no more obligations or courses weighing me down before, in 2024 I can focus on Project G site more and be more consistent with work.

• 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

We now switched to a new editor, so it’s taking him a bit of time to adjust to the style and the topic of our channel, but so far, based on the video he submitted, he’s pretty great.

We also reached 5,000 hours of watch time in December 2023!

• Podcast

Just like previous couple of months, we haven’t submitted a lot of podcast episodes, so it was natural that we didn’t have a lot of downloads.

As you can see, a little over 200 downloads for this month.

• Paid ads & leads

Just like the last few months, we didn’t do any paid ads in December too.

Sure this is something we consider doing once we make a huge sale, but for now we’ve made a decision to work on organic traffic and minimize our expenses.

We had a couple of leads, but unfortunately none of them were qualified.

If you look at the screenshot, you’ll see that we had 45 unique visitors and a 4.44% conversion rate, which is a bit better than it was before.

More importantly, we gained these leads organically. That’s why we keep regularly publishing text-based and video-based content, which will eventually result in more sales and conversions.

Twelfth 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 $263 (or $131.5 each)

In December, we had a bit more expenses too compared to November because we needed to order a bunch of voiceovers, thumbnails and videos.

So the total amount spent for December was $457.32 (or 228.66 each). 

Twelfth Month Stats

Let’s take a look at our traffic numbers.

This month was really weird. We got around 30% less organic clicks (from Google); however, we got 30% more total traffic (referral + organic).

In November, we recorded 131 organic clicks and 31.1k impressions.

In December, we got 91 clicks and 22.1k impressions.

And here is the 30% increase in referral + organic traffic.

From 457 visits in October to 667 visits in December.

Take a look:

Youtube

In November, we recorded 6.7k views, which was a slight uplift from the month before.

Fortunately, numbers increased again in December.

From 6.7K views in October to 7.3K views in December.

Take a look:

 

December Summary (Earnings, Expenses & Traffic)

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

As I mentioned before, we didn’t manage to get any sales or qualified leads, so we’re again back in red.

Here is the summary:

Project G Plans for 2024

Well, we kept our promise to document everything we do for a whole year.

Unfortunately, we didn’t hit our goal, but we’ll still keep working on it in 2024. We didn’t put so much efforts into this project just to give up on it, right!?

We’ll continue to:

• post text-based content
• publish top quality videos
• use our voiceovers as podcast episodes

A few other things that we plan to implement at some point in the future are HARO backlinks, as well as paid ads once we make a huge sale.

While we’re done with documenting and writing these monthly posts, it’s very possible we’ll make a separate post once we hit our first $100K month.

Final Words

Here we are! The final post of the year.

This niche turned out to be MUCH more challenging than we thought and indeed it was a challenge.

It was a challenge to document our progress monthly too, especially when we didn’t see results for so long. But we kept doing it because we publicly said we would and kept our word.

And while it might seem like a fail to some that we didn’t achieve our $100K/month goal, we don’t view it as such.

We learned so many things along the way, such as:

• experimenting with paid ads
• working with a team and together as a team
• creating a podcast
• dealing with emotional aspects and pushing through no matter what
• finding our way with AI assisted work

We appreciate your support and your time reading through all the posts that we published to document our Project G.

(While this post is the last one we publish, we might write one when we actually hit the $100K month.)

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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