Introducing a new case study: A fully outsourced AI content + expired domain + Ezoic content site portfolio.

I have a portfolio of sites that had been mostly neglected, but I have decided to put on an effort to rebuild them. Most of these sites are built on expired domains from LightningRank.com and content created using GPT-3 tools, then significantly human-edited, similar to how RocketContent.ai produces content.

I have hired a manager, given them access to tools, and had them build out procedures that I reviewed. This has been going now for about 6 months and its time to start providing a monthly income report.

Overall I am really happy with the progress of the sites, the content quality being useful, and the cost/article we are currently producing. 

My plan is that each month we are going to share the traffic, revenue, expenses and overall PnL for a portfolio income.

Why Expired Domains? The power of backlinks in the eyes of google is undeniable. Building relevant sites on expired domains continue to be a SEO “hack” we see work.

Why AI Content? AI content with a human editor to spot-check and fact-check produces solid quality content that is useful at unbeatable prices.

Why EZoic? Ezoic is the simplest way to monetize sites successfully. It Beats Adsense all day! When it makes sense, some sites have affiliate monetization, but the focus is on traffic and display ads. 

Why Fully Managed? In this case study, I have a manager assigned to the portfolio managing everything! From the sites to the writers to ezoic. 

The aim is marginally profitable solid growth.  

Everything below is prepared by the manager (who is awesome!)

Here’s how our portfolio of AI-driven content has performed in October 2022 with Ezoic. 

1. Traffic & Earning Overview (Ezoic)

Our portfolio sites get the most traffic from search engines, and Google is the primary source.

After the latest updates from Google, we noticed positive and negative impacts on the AI content sites. While some sites significantly improved their SERP rankings, others lost a substantial portion of top-ranking keywords, creating an unrelaxed fluctuation in the overall traffic for the portfolio. 

The overall portfolio traffic in October lost 9.62% in total visits (75,570 compared to 83,610 in September 2022) and 9.27% in terms of page views (88,413 vs. 97,448 in September 2022).

Regarding revenue, the portfolio sites show similar statistics to traffic, a 10.90% drop compared to the previous month (September 2022) and a tiny drop in ePMV of 1.42%. It’s pretty obvious not to maintain a higher total revenue while there’s a 14,000 fewer page views gap than the previous month.

While the October traffic and revenue outcome of the portfolio is not successive to September, we have a much better result for an entirely AI-driven portfolio than the same month of the last year.

The portfolio growth data (Oct 2022 vs. Oct 2021): 

1. Total Visits (+147.70%)
2. Pageviews (+141.43%)
3. Revenue (+182.53%) 
4. ePMV(+14.06%)

2. Traffic Overview By Site

Traffic data per site on the portfolio has had frequent ups and downs following the Google algorithm updates in the last couple of months. Some of the major sites’ traffic dropped a little bit, while other new sites have evolved into a major contributor to the portfolio’s overall traffic, and some other sites tanked.

Here are October traffic data from a couple of prominent sites in the portfolio: (compared to September 2022) 

The portfolio obtained a total of 75,570 traffic in the month of October across all sites, 36,244 being the maximum and 164 being minimum traffic for a site. We found an overall change of -8,040 visits to the previous month and -9,035 that of page views.

The maximum pageview gained by an AI content site in Oct was 41,515, and 174 was the minimum. That would be average traffic of 5894 across all sites in the portfolio publishing AI content.

3. Revenue Data Per Site

The portfolio’s revenue stats are directly proportional to October’s visits and page view stats. The total revenue for the portfolio was $738.51 in Oct 2022, with $467.32 as the highest revenue for a site with an average ePMV of $7.19 compared to $7.31 of the previous month (September) across all sites. 

The maximum ePMV during the month was $21.03 and registered the minimum ePMV of $1.45 for a site with the least page views.

The changes in terms of ePMV and Revenue are -1.69% and -9.46% from the previous month (September), respectively. 

4. Expense

Running a website portfolio with multiple sites publishing regular content can be quite expensive. Having a functional, well-managed AI content machine was the plan to reduce the cost of content creation. 

To produce content with an AI copywriter tool, we have a team of human writers who follows specific guideline, take care of the content creation, does fact check for AI-generated texts, and does the optimization to ensure output quality and authenticity. 

So we have a combined monthly expense of the editorial team and AI copywriter tool, which generates texts for a fixed price per word.

Here’s the portfolio October total expanse compared to revenue generated with Ezoic Ad revenue (excluding other revenue sources) looks like:

Key data:

1. Total expanses: $652.00
2. Total Revenue: $740.73
3. Profit (with Ezoic revenue): $88.73 
4. % of profit Ezoic revenue brings in: 13.61% 

5. Changes & Focus:

The unpredictability of website performance in terms of traffic and revenue has always been a part of content-based websites, especially those that get the most part of their traffic from search engines. 

To publish content that is written with AI support and still do well in Google SERP, we need to put great effort into content quality and optimization. That being one of the primary focuses, we also need to ensure delivering an optimized experience to the reader. 

Apart from maintaining the content quality, our objectives for the sites in this portfolio are, 

1. Delivering simplicity: a simple and easy-to-understand approach to delivering information people are looking for and letting them access something without having to deal with complex elements on the site.
2. Visual Hierarchy: we attempt to organize the website elements so that the visitors naturally see the most important elements first.
3. Navigability: All the sites have navigations that are well organized, allowing visitors to have an idea about the clusters quickly and letting people find what they are looking for.
4. User-centricity: we believe in the idea and build & update the websites in the portfolio to convey smoother usability and experience to the users. After all, it is the users who will experience the website and explore its contents.
5. Accessibility: we try our best to reduce anything that can prevent users from accessing the website and can break the functionality.
6. Responsivity: the sites are 100% responsive to be compatible with many different devices our visitors use. 
7. Maintain a Good site health score: ensuring the site does not have minor issues such as abuse of headings, metadata, or links is vital because they can be decisive when you are pushing for the SERP position and want your pages to be 100% ready to compete with a quality piece of content. If done right, it’s quite possible with AI copywriting tools.
8. Site speed and web vitals: site speed and maintaining good web vitals is one of our primary objectives. Our internal data states that with speed upgrade, portfolio sites led to a much better crawling experience for the Google bot and resulted in ~ 6x daily crawling requests compared to before. 

Not only that, fast-loading sites improve the browsing experience and provide us peace of mind after having passed web vitals matrices on the google search console. We also improved our visitor’s time on the page and page depth on the site with the speed upgrade, thanks to Ezoic’s CDN and performance tool (LEAP).

1. The addition of a new site to the portfolio

With a plan of smoothly running currently available sites on the portfolio, we look forward to adding potential sites to grow within our strategy. Having a functional setup to publish regular AI content and a plan to optimize them makes bringing new sites to the portfolio easier. 

Once a new site arrives, we scale the site’s current traffic, design, performance, and other elements to come up with a plan that can lift up the overall quality and experience. Once the site is ready – we strategically prepare a content plan to execute in the upcoming months. 

That being said, not every site we added to our portfolio has had a great time and better output. Some sites tanked and lost a significant portion of the traffic – but most of those threats arrived after the recent Google updates. It brings in the debate of Google penalizing AI content sites which does not hold TRUE for other AI content sites in the portfolio. 

Sites that lost a major portion of traffic lately were the sites ranked well for previously created content. It is safe to say those were not the best quality documents available on the internet for a particular search query. We are still putting our effort into better content updates to see and test how those pages perform as we advance. 

Number of sites added to the portfolio in October: 2

2. Nameserver connection for Ezoic

Ezoic recommends the nameserver connection method to integrate your site with the platform for better site performance and revenue boost. Earlier on, we had many sites integrated with the Ezoic plugin now all of them switched to the nameserver method. 

With the nameserver connection, the site performance has improved a lot. Almost all sites in the portfolio are passing or close to passing web vitals… although we needed to bring some visual and technological changes to the site. 

The improvement in performance and loading of the primary page elements faster helps the ads load faster. Pages and ads that load faster can improve your ad revenue by a decent margin and definitely help our sites to increase Ezoic ad revenue.

3. Seasonal decline & monitor performance

Seasonal interest and demand for products and services affects sites and is a perfectly natural, annoyingly unavoidable aspect of websites, even in any business. Quite obviously, our sites in the portfolio aren’t independent of seasonality. 

There are unpredictable ups and down in terms of traffic for the sites. Having to maintain lots of sites in the portfolio and smoothly take care of other aspects of the sites, it becomes quite challenging to keep a close eye on each site individually. 

Semrush and Ahrefs help us by providing the traffic overview and keywords found in organic searches for each site. It gives us an idea of the ongoing traffic state of a site compared to what could be a scenario for the site in the coming months based on the trajectory of organic keywords. 

In addition, we can analyze the organic keywords situation, and based on their latest form; we can decide to improve the content if required. 

Conclusion: It is fun to manage multiple sites and have a proper plan to run them all together while still making some decent profit with provisions to increase revenue in the future. This could easily be a project that consumes most of our time, but a well-designed plan and ready-to-use tools + the right people in the right place, make it much easier to manage the portfolio.

This income report serise is aimed at sharing our growth and the fundamentals that helped us reach here, minor details that can help you build your AI-driven website’s portfolio at a significantly lower cost.

Below is a strategy to build an authority site using multiple expired domains. I call this strategy both the 301 Building Block Strategy and the second part of the strategy is 1+1 = 3.

This is all about using several niche relevant authority websites built on expired domains, placing quality content on them and through internal link building getting the search engine to recognize the new website owner as an authority.

One of my favourite posts are these detailed advanced tutorials. Below I share the exact details of new strategies I am using including the specific tools, steps and procedures I use is what I enjoy most.

Are you not yet an SEO Expert? If so this will likely be too advanced, checkout – How to Make a Wordress Website

The strategy is a combination of… (more…)

Over the past 10 years I have purchased hundreds of sites. Often these are smaller sites sometimes with some problems that people are looking to sell quickly. For years I have ranked #1 for sell your website fast and have seen lots of interesting deals come across my plate. 

Some of the deals have turned out to be amazing while others have been complete failures.

When I recently did an analysis on all the purchases that failed I could group them into 3 categories. 

These are now my 3 keys when purchasing sites…

ONE – Simple + Believable Traffic and Monetization Data

This one has always been hard. Often a site that can’t be sold somewhere else will come to me and will have some odd way of monetizing. It could be a unique affiliate arrangement, hard to track earnings, traffic tracked with something other than GoogleAnalytics, weird Google Analytics setup etc. 

This rule is also a catch-all for any time that the numbers are confusing or don’t check out. 

When a site has a clean monetization method that I am familiar with (adsense & amazon are ideal) and traffic sources that can be verified (organic traffic with Google analytics) it makes the purchase much simpler/faster. 

Case Study: Custom Affiliate Arrangement Cancelled In The First Week

I purchased a site in the tech space that had tutorials that were about 2 years old. A couple of those tutorials were ranking very well and the site was generating about $25/day from one relationship for lead generation. It was also making some earnings from adsense but the revenue per user from the lead generation arrangement was 10x better than adsense. 

Lots of things checked out…

• the site had been around for a couple years
• traffic was growing steadily
• the quality of the content was the best for what it was ranking for

But… 1 week after I purchased it I received an email from the business contact for the lead generation company and was informed they no longer saw value in the relationship and were terminating it. I don’t believe any funny business occurred with collusion between the seller and the lead generation company but it certainly hurt! I was able to refocus the site on adsense and bring up the earnings to about 25% of what they were when I purchased the site. 

Overall it was an unfortunate event and one of a few where I purchased a site with a monetization strategy I was not very familiar with and the site struggled.   

TWO – Not Declining and with Decent History

Lots of sites that are declining have sellers that are eager to sell. In terms of the multiple paid to purchase the website they can often look like incredible deals.

So many sites come to me that are declining I have even created a strategy for trying to revive them… Dead Cat Strategy – How to turn around a declining site.

However, what I have often seen is that the inertia of a declining site takes more energy to turn around than it is worth. If the deal is too good to pass up then great but many times I have been lured in from the “cheap” multiple to buy a declining site and been overconfident in the time/energy I will dedicate to turning it around. 

Case Study: First Larger Purchase

Early on around 2010 I put in a lot of effort and the most money I had to date to purchase a site. The site was declining but I had grown a site in that niche already and had unique affiliate arrangements which gained me more per commission than the seller was receiving. I thought despite the fact it was declining I would be able to turn it around and instantly give it a lift with improved monetization. 

The result was that despite way too much effort to turn it around the site continued to slide. The lift in earnings I was able to achieve was great but all of that lift was quickly eaten up by the continued decline.

I certainly overpaid but the bigger failure in this case was sticking with the site for too long. This and others like it helped me evolve my dead cat strategy… 

• buy cheap
• give it a kick (quick SEO audit and add more content/links)
• if it jumps nurse it back to health and if it stays on the decline let it go

THREE – Current Operator Not Doing Unique Activities

This one is my favourite because it often brings me in contact with some “crazy” entrepreneurs! 

I have had a couple experiences where I purchased a site where the deal came to me because they had been turned away from brokers due to being volatile/rude/crazy! Some of these purchases have been great but I often learn the same lesson over and over. 

That lesson is that if the founder is still heavily involved in the business they are often doing something that is generating value you can’t simply plug in an SOP to handle. 

Case Study: Welcome to Crazy Town!

There was an ecommerce site generating 20k/month in revenue and everything about the deal was great!

• Great price to buy the site as she was too crazy for brokers who she previously spoke with to handle or put her on a call with a buyer
• Lots of organic traffic verified with significant content marketing growth opportunities
• Healthy margins for dropshipping and long history with the wholesaler (10years)
• Sites conversion rates could do with an easy improvement with images/redesign

There was one big variable… the founder. She was working tons of hours with it as her full time job and most of the activities I thought were completely inefficient. She was spending her day doing what seemed like inefficient tasks such as directory submission, social bookmarking, misc conferences, calling every customer (valuable but inefficient), TONS and TONS of “research” and only a little content creation.

But what I didn’t fully appreciate was how much that relentless energy and obsessive focus put into the business yielded sales. 

We improved a lot of things easily… improved the rankings, improved the site and the conversion rate for organic traffic, email automation, abandoned cart and other site tweaks. All these changes improved the metric we were trying to but overall… sales dropped by 40%!! 

How…To a significant extent I didn’t realize how much she was acting as a sales person talking to everyone she could about the site/product wherever she went… grocery store, post office etc. 

For me who likes to see all activities in the business fit neatly into an SOP I need to be on the lookout for the founder doing things that don’t scale and can’t be efficiently replaced.

Overall the purchase of this business was still a great one as even though revenue declined it was operated more efficiently and profits went up but… I had hoped for much more.

What Are Your Hard Earned Website Purchase Due Diligence Rules?

If you have been busy purchasing sites have you discovered any “rules” you follow? If so please share in the comments.

This post is to share my story about purchasing a website privately and the incredible success I initially thought I had followed by a sizable blow!

I will write this post in chronological order and walk you through the stats as I saw them.

If you are interested in learning how to do in depth due diligence to avoid this time of error visit this complete guide to buying websites.

Other Resources:

• How to Sell Your Website Fast
• Where to Sell Your Website for Free

Also I will show you exactly what I did to get an increase in click through rate of 10x resulting in an affiliate click graph looking like this… (more…)

My content’s predictable summer crash and how I’m overcoming it this year.