Project G Challenge: Sales Yet? (Month 4)

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 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)

As we’ve shared at the beginning of our journey, we’re in a very expensive and competitive niche, which has the potential of bringing us high commissions.

In this post, we’ll be covering the Month 4 progress, and what milestones we 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.

There were some changes we made in March, but in April, we worked with the same guys.

Here’s the team and their roles for April:

• Richard (Founder): KW research
• Zarina (Founder): Article editing
• Kate (Junior Editor): Light article editing
• Martin (Designer): Custom graphs, featured images, etc.
• Joseph (Designer): YouTube thumbnails
• Mary (Writer): Article writing
• Eric (Writer): Article writing
• Kyle (Voice Actor): Voiceovers
• Sonny (Video Editor): Faceless YouTube videos

If you recall, last month, we hired a new video editor.

Are we still happy with him?

Even though he’s still adjusting to our high-quality standards and lengthy videos, he’s been doing a pretty good job overall. Every new video is better and better and requires less and less feedback.

Once we’ll have plenty of text-based content and voice-overs, we plan to move him to a full-time position.

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

Generally speaking, we didn’t hire anyone new in April.

Frankly, achieving a smooth workflow with the current team is the main focus, and then we can scale it further.

April 2023: Goals & Progress

Even though Richard and I had quite ambitious goals when we started, after 3 months, we’ve tried setting more realistic goals for each month.

Here’s a visual checklist of what they were for the fourth month of this year:

And here are our actual results:

• Amount of articles

Now that I have experience with how fast I edit and publish text-based content, I’ve decided to set more realistic goals of having around 8 articles or 12,000 words.

I almost achieved it.

As you can see from this screenshot, we’ve published:

• 3 guides
• 1 listicle
• 1 versus post
• 11,845 words total

A couple of lengthy posts were especially challenging for me to edit because it was still fairly new topics for me, and I wanted to provide only the best version of it.

Now, considering that I was pressuring myself before my Mexico vacation, I’m especially glad I did it on time.

And it seems focusing on 8-10 articles or 12,000+ words per month is a good, realistic goal to set.

• Social media

As we mentioned last month, social media isn’t our main focus at the moment.

We have Pinterest and Twitter accounts set up, but we haven’t come up with a content strategy for our social media accounts.

We plan on coming up with one once we build some online presence through our website and YouTube channel.

For now, though, nothing worth mentioning.

• Video marketing

YouTube has turned out to be an amazing idea, despite our niche not being so popular on the platform.

Sonny, our Filipino video editor, has made great improvements over the time he’s been with us–The videos he creates now require very few changes, so we are able to publish videos immediately.

In total, we published 6 videos and 1 short.

While we haven’t met our goal, the videos we published this month were longer (some were up to 20 minutes long), and we’re very happy with the quality.

Plus, some older videos started gaining traction, which led to some excellent results this month.

Here are the milestones from March:

And here are our achievements from April, where we basically increased our views and watch time by 2-3 times:

This has also translated into more subscribers, as we gained 122 subs just in April, putting our total subscription count to 222 (as of April 30th)

If we keep up the pace (which we will), we’ll be able to monetize the channel very soon.

And being in the financial niche, the RPM (revenue per mille) on our videos could be very high.

I am just speculating here, but definitely excited about the growth of our channel.

Plus, people seem to really enjoy our videos, which keeps us motivated to put out even more videos!

• Podcast

Podcast is another area of our content strategy that’s been steadily growing. This month, we managed to publish 5 episodes.

As we mentioned in the previous post, we’re getting virtually no traffic to our main offer, but the numbers are pretty low to make any conclusions yet.

Still, we nearly tripled our downloads from the previous month.

Here are the downloads from March:

 

And here are the numbers from this month:

Remember, you don’t always need to make money on every single piece of content you put out.

We’re happy we can provide another form of content to people; plus, it doesn’t cost us anything, really.

• Paid ads & leads

In April, we decided to experiment with paid ads again.

This time we decided to try newsletter advertising – one of the websites we previously advertised with had a 30% discount on ads, so we gave it a go.

Their newsletter had about 80,000 subscribers, and thanks to the discount, we only paid $120.

And while it sounds like a good deal, it wasn’t very effective.

We only got around 45 visits and a single lead… Who submitted incorrect information.

Yikes.

Plus, we only got one additional lead that month (not from an ad), for a total of two leads for the whole month.

The second one was ”Unable to qualify”.

Double yikes.

Here are our full stats for April:

So while April wasn’t the strongest, we still have an active lead from March, who should make a decision soon about whether she’s interested or not.

Plus, something exciting happened at the beginning of May, it seems like we’ll have action-packed months coming up.

Stay tuned! 🙂

Forth 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, our expenses were on the lower side, because of still only having one writer (we may keep it this way for a while), and not going crazy on paid advertising.

Our total for this month was $1766.78 ($883.39 each)

For those who are reading this first time, don’t get discouraged to see such big expenses.

As we mentioned many times already, we wanted to outsource most of the work to keep our hands free for our own websites and to produce only the highest quality content.

And while seeing that we spent nearly $8,000 in 4 months, and haven’t seen any profit yet, we’re confident we’ll be successful.

As with anything worthwhile (and especially online), you need to be patient.

Also, this is GREAT for you to see this kind of case study because if you’re new to affiliate marketing/content business, it’ll give you a realistic image of how long it takes to make the first commissions.

We’re not feeding you the lies that it’s fast and easy.

REAL BUSINESS TAKES REAL WORK.

Please remember this.

Fourth Month Stats & Earnings

Despite not making any money in April, the traffic keeps going up on all fronts.

In March, we recorded 5.42k impressions and 50 organic clicks (according to Google Search Console).

Have a look:

In April, our organic traffic grew as well, though not as significantly as in previous months.

We’re still happy to see some traction this early on.

In a similar fashion, our overall traffic (organic + redirected traffic from YouTube and other platforms) only grew a little bit.

From 611 page views in March, we ‘only’ got 713 in April.

March traffic:

April traffic:

Again, although these may seem like low numbers, we’re happy with the growth of the website, especially considering we’re only on month 4.

Youtube

Now, the big performer for us is YouTube.

Firstly, we more than doubled our subscriber count from 100 to 222 (already 266 at the time of this writing).

More importantly, we received double the views and watch time.

In March, we were able to get 9.7K views and 547 hours of watch time.

These are our numbers from April:

Overall, the traffic increase isn’t as significant compared to previous months, but that’s not going to stop us from pumping out amazing content.

April Summary (Earnings, Expenses & Traffic)

As usual, here is the full summary of the most important numbers for the fourth month.

This includes traffic, earnings, and expenses – still not profit, sadly.

Have a look:

Still heavily in the red, but we’re sticking to the process and keeping a positive attitude (for the most part, lol).

Project G Plans for May 2023

So, what are our goals for the upcoming month?

Now that we laid down our structure and set up a smooth operating process these past months, the goals will be more or less the same going forward.

Once we make our first big commissions, we’re going to implement more paid advertising and possibly hire more writers.

For now, though, we’re mostly going to focus on producing top-notch content on all platforms.

Have a look:

 

As you can see, nothing fancy.

Tools/Resources We Use & Recommend

This section will also be included in each of the upcoming posts.

We’ll 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.

Final Words

There you have it; this was our fourth month with Project G.

Overall, April 2023 was a pretty quiet month.

No problems, but at the same time, nothing too exciting as well.

Regardless of the results, we’ll keep grinding until we reach our goal – and you should do the same if you’re running your own online business.

No matter where you’re at in your online journey, keep at it and serve others with valuable content. That’s our plan with Project G.

READ NEXT: Project G $100K Challenge: A Challenge Indeed! (Month 5)

So wish us luck, and for those interested in joining our community, see you in our Telegram group!

Over there, we’ll help you and other like-minded peeps reach their online goals to the best of our ability.

Until next time!

Sharing is caring! ↓