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.

We can’t discuss fixing web vitals without discussing one key factor called LCP, the Largest Contentful Paint. LCP is essential to the user experience. People typically don’t like to wait for a page to start loading when they could immediately get a faster experience elsewhere. 

LCP tells you how long it takes to load the main contents of your page and become readable to the users. The faster the LCP is, the better-performance impression a user gets on your website. 

The largest Contentful Paint is considered one of the main factors on the web vital and starting to play a vital role in your page rank on the SERPs. To be in favor of Google and have pages that deliver a better experience for the visitors, it’s important to remain on top of your LCP.

Poor LCP can be one of the reasons for higher bounce rates, ranking issues, or even lower conversion rates.

What is a Good Or Bad LCP?

According to Google, the main content of a page should load within 2.5 seconds when a user tries to visit a page, which refers to having a good LCP. If the main content takes more than 5 seconds, people are likely to exit from your site and be considered poor LCP. 

Usually, when a page can maintain a good LCP (main content load time under 2.5 seconds) for 75% of the time, the performance is considered good in Google Search Console.

This image explains how LCP ratings are categorized. 

What can cause poor LCP and how to detect it?

There’s not a definite element that is responsible for LCP. Anything that slows down the page rendering process could be the reason for the LCP issue on your pages. Usually, the elements that take up a lot of space, media players, unoptimized images, social media buttons with 3rd party connections, and newsletter sign-up forms can increase your page’s load time.

If we dive deeper to find the primary reasons for LCP, they can be classified this way.

1. Slow Server Response Times

Regardless of how much you try to optimize your website, if you have a slow server, its response time will slow down your page loading matrices. This will definitely result in a poor LCP record.

Bad server back-end infrastructure, unoptimized databases, and longer time to resolve API requests are often the reasons for slow server response time. 

So the first step towards improving your LCP records is to host your website on a fast web server. 

2. Slow Resource Load Times

Resources that are large in file size or have a dense visual impact will take longer to load. Unoptimized images, GIF files, videos, and many text content above the fold will affect your LCP record. 

The best way to take care of your LCP is to compress file size, ensure loading only necessary elements above the fold, and avoid video or large image files in the first print.

3. Render blocking Javascript and CSS

CSS and Javascript play a significant role in how they are being served. Adding javascript and CSS to make a fancy-looking web page will eventually cost your page performance. 

It’s true that without CSS and javascript codes, we can’t add dynamic, interactive, and attractive elements to our websites. But the timing of execution for these files should be taken care of. If you load them in head and they take longer execution time, it will block other website assets from loading. 

Reducing render-blocking assets can significantly boost your pages in terms of LCP. Still, you must remember while fixing render-blocking, you are not shifting important libraries and javascript & CSS codes to the footer. This might end up with a broken web page or an accessibility issue.

4. Client-side Rendering

Rendering web pages in the browser with JavaScript is a popular web development method. Client-side rendering can be one of the main reasons for LCP issues if your pages use this method. 

Client-side rendering involves the browser collecting and loading javascript before rendering primary content on the page. The webpage might struggle to pass LCP matrices depending on the rendering time and complexity.

So when you are concerned about your LCP and have client-side rendering on your site, consider optimizing or avoiding client-side rendering if possible. 

How to discover LCP elements on your page?

To fix LCP issues, you need to know what your LCP is. I have ordered the steps we follow to analyze the LCP of a web page and have the plan to take necessary action to fix it.

1. Use Google Search Console

A good way to confirm your page has LCP issues is by checking Google Search Console’s web vital section. The web vital section displays URL’s performance status collected across real users’ devices. You will have a unique report for desktop and mobile versions. 

When the URLs are good, your site LCP has to be good. But when they are marked as “need improvement” or “poor,” you might need to check which web vital metrics are actually flailing & need rechecking.

2. Use page speed insight

Page speed insight is a dedicated tool to instantly check the web vitals of a page over the latest 28-day collection period and via live test. When the origin data in page speed insight has an LCP of less than 2.5 seconds means it’s in a safe range.

It’s the more than 2.5 sec LCP when you should be concerned and try to fix it. The instant test of Page Speed Insight should help you identify elements that are responsible for LCP.

Steps – 

1. Go to page speed insight
2. Perform a test on your page.
3. Scroll down to the “Diagnose performance issues” section.
4. Then set the “Show audits relevant to” to LCP.
5. You will be displayed the opportunity to improve LCP and diagnostics.

3. Use Ezoic’s Browser Extension

Another easy way to inspect your LCP elements is via the browser extension by Ezoic. Usually, this extension is useful for creating the ad and video placeholders on your pages. You can manage those placeholders as well.

There is another section called LEAP where you can perform performance-related alerts, debug CDN on a page, analyze the LCP and highlight LCP elements. After analyzing a page, make sure to toggle the “Highlight LCP element” for the plugin to highlight the LCP element in yellow.

4. Test Your Page On Web Page Test

Webpagetest.org is a page performance testing tool that provides in-depth insights. When you scan a page for web vitals, this tool will give you the scores and elements responsible for LCP. 

This is a handy tool to inspect layout shifting issues as well; you can see which element is responsible for the layout shifts on your pages, making it easier for you to fix it. 

The web Page Test report will highlight the LCP elements with green and provide the timing.

Once you are aware of the reasons for LCP, you can proceed to optimize the LCP content to fix LCP issues on your page if any. Here are a couple of tips on fixing LCP issues.

Few Tips To Fix LCP Issues On Your Page:

1. Optimize your images: Make sure your images are lightweight while the quality is intact. I prefer to keep images between 50 – 100 Kb whenever possible, and it’s quite achievable if you are not running a photography website, portfolio website, or any sites where images are a priority. 

2. Preload your logo: Preloading the logo does not add much to performance, but you would want to load your site logo as soon as possible. This usually gives a 2-5% of boost to LCP timing when done right.

3. Avoid using too many fonts: Fonts make a site attractive but loading too many font files will increase the asset load chain and may be responsible for the late printing of texts on a web page. 

4. Localize and preload above-the-fold fonts: Although google fonts are fast, my favorite strategy that seems to work every time is localizing above-the-fold fonts and preloading them. While preloading, you need to be sure that these font files are not too heavy. In addition, your web server’s speed needs to be fast for localized font files to be served faster.

5. Optimize Javascripts: To optimize your JavaScripts remove unused codes, make sure the code is up to date and compatible with modern browsers, use modern JavaScript libraries and try reducing payloads. A caching plugin with javascript management options makes the job easier for you.

6. Optimize CSS codes: Compressing CSS files and implementing critical CSS often solve render-blocking issues related to CSS. Removing unused CSS files from your WordPress site can help scale down the LCP metric.

Relevant posts:

1. Case Study – Article to Video by Ezoic and Its Impact  
2. Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator Price Review and Test
3. 5 Best WordPress Speed Optimization Services You Can Hire

Website performance has evolved as an important aspect not only for SEO but to provide a fast & smooth user experience which will eventually help your site to be in favor of search engines. 

Benefits of a fast site:

1. Better crawling rate for crawlers. 
2. Better page experience. 
3. Less bounce rate.
4. More page views.

While we have the advantage of CDNs, Caching plugins, and VPS servers for WordPress sites, I encounter many people posting difficulties in passing speed tests and web vitals for sites with Ezoic ads.

With Ezoic connected to a site, it acts as a proxy between the website site and its users. They use a custom CDN that is augmented to improve performance for sites using the platform. Although Ezoic claims that typical caching plugins such as WP rocket, W3 Total Cache, Siteground optimizer work on sites that are name server or Cloudflare integrated, you might not see an upgrade unless you decide to scale down the heavy assets from your website.

Scaling the impact of your website assets on performance is not straightforward. It might depend on various factors such as your host, theme, plugins, 3rd party codes, image formats & sizes, use of multiple CDNs, etc.

Here’s when the Ezoic’s LEAP’Technology scans come in handy. The technology scanner provides you with an overview of the various technologies being used on your site and their impact on your site’s performance. 

* Keep in mind that you may not eliminate all of these warnings or replace them with alternatives. But it will give you an idea of which technologies on your site needs to be withdrawn and ensure your site passes the web vital metrics for good.

Here are a couple of tips we internally use in SpeedySite to make websites compatible with performance and web vitals. 

Recognition: Speedy Site is a WordPress performance optimization service that is now helping people overhaul their existing asset-heavy websites to give you a lean, best-in-class solution. If you have sites lying around that need a significant overhaul, have an outdated theme or plugin bloat, failing all google user experience metrics, you can reach out to the site overhaul service on SpeedySite.

1. Use Name Server or Cloudflare Integration On Ezoic

Ezoic lets you integrate your website via different options.

• Cloudflare Integration (this means Cloudflare runs the DNS server)
• DNS Server integration (this means Ezoic runs the DNS server)
• WordPress Plugin (we did not find this option useful for performance)

It’s recommended to use the Cloudflare integration because a CDN like Cloudflare can speed up your site significantly and take the load off your origin server. In addition, you can customize your Cloudflare settings according to your need when required, unlike Ezoic DNS server integration.

Although, DNS server integration does a great job and manages all the records and server configurations without needing your action.

2. Use a lightweight & SEO-friendly theme

A website’s theme affects your site performance and search engine rankings. Having a well-coded and lightweight theme will help your site’s accessibility, SEO, and speed. We use Generatepress with custom premade templates + hooks, and blocks to reduce page size, so a good-looking, clean design is intact. 

Ezoic Technology library can provide you with a list of fast themes compatible with their platform.

3. Unload plugins & replicate the functionality with custom elements

Plugins are very helpful in extending your website’s functionalities. But overusing plugins can harm your website performance. Try using fewer plugins as long as possible while ensuring your website has active crucial functionalities.

For example, we build author bio blocks, Social share buttons, review blocks, and comparison blocks using WordPress hooks and have them running only where it’s required to avoid installing individual plugins for each feature. This gives us full customization ability in terms of appearance as well. 

Now, this might not be a feasible option for everyone – hence we try to share tutorials on such topics in this weekly email. A few tutorials are instantly available in our previous emails as well. Additionally, you can reach out to SpeedySite for such modules, but that comes with a complete overhaul package.

Like themes, you can identify plugins that can severely impact site performance and find alternatives via the Ezoic technology section.

4. Remove or host Google Fonts Locally

Google fonts can harm your site performance if not used properly. If you don’t want to miss out on the extra level of elegance, it adds you can host the Google fonts locally. In Generatepress, we host the fonts locally using its built typography manager, but you can also utilize the OMGF plugin for this purpose.

If you don’t want Google fonts on your site, check this guide with multiple options to remove Google fonts from your site. 

5. Avoid large images above the fold & optimize fonts

Loading heavy assets on the website head or within the first print is a bad practice. Although, an element with a background image loaded instead of a CSS gradient that occupies the entire viewport is not considered a candidate for LCP issue. 

You would want to load the lightest possible assets in the first viewport of a page. Here are a few tips:

1. Have your logo compressed and preloaded (if it’s an image).
2. Optimize page title font size for mobile.
3. Add a gradient cover or background image to the page title if you want to.
4. For the background image, compress the size without losing the image quality.
5. Preload the fonts that are in use within the first viewport.

6. Host Google Analytics Locally  

Hosting Google Analytics locally can help speed up your site by reducing extra DNS lookups. The analytics script warns about caching because they have their HTTP caching header expiration set short. 

When you host it yourself, your CDN or server’s HTTP caching headers will automatically be applied. In other words, you have complete control over the caching of the script. You can use Flying Analytics plugin by Gijo Varghese to host analytics on the server.

7. Load 3rd party & custom javascript at footer

Putting Javascript in the footer of an HTML document is good practice for performance. This is not the case for libraries like jquery because some other javascript might be dependent on that. However, we should design the site so that the maximum javascript code is placed in the end to reduce. 

You can use the Header & Footer plugin or use Element on Generatepress and set them to load on the footer. Even some CSS files that are not loading above the fold can be set to the footer. However, you will need to make sure the stylesheet loads before the ad scripts start loading.

8. Enable LEAP & Ezoic CDN

Next, you should take advantage of Ezoic’s CDN and have the cache settings values configured as below.

• Enable Caching For Cookies – ON
• Default Cache Age (s) – 2592000
• Override Cache-Control Headers – ON

You can keep the rest of the values as default. Once you are done with the cache settings, you will have to adjust the LEAP settings under the optimize section. This varies from site to site and needs proper testing to understand which configuration will work best for your site.

If you have configured it before but haven’t gotten a positive output, you can reach out to SpeedySite professionals. 

9. Additional Tip To Improve Web Vital Score With Ezoic

This is not something related to performance tweaks but when you enable Ezoic’s Interstitial ads, which basically are full-screen ads that cover the interface when you visit another page on the same website, it improves your overall web vital record, especially LCP and FCP. 

This is because when a user tries to visit the next page and the interstitial ad loads, the target page is actually loading behind the ad cover. When the user cancels the ad they can see the page almost instantly. 

This is a similar concept related to link preload or instant click mechanism used in most of the caching plugins but with the additional advantage of an ad being displayed for a revenue boost.

Summary: With such steps combined, we successfully passed web vitals with Ezoic ads running on our sites, even though these sites are not entirely lightweight. Here’s how our site recovered from vitals & page experience issues.

We want our site to be flawless to avoid penalties or compatibility issues with search engines. Rectifying technical SEOs, Removing possible accessibility issues, and following best practices of web development are tiny details that can decide your site’s performance on search engines.

To secure these criteria, the basic step is to identify the issues on your page. While we usually lean towards great tools like Ahref and Semrush to scan for page-related issues, one quicker and more efficient way to do this is to perform lighthouse scans via your web browser.

Lighthouse, previously known as the “Audits tool,” is a tool to identify and fix common problems that affect your site’s performance, accessibility, and user experience.

These are the simple steps to run a lighthouse scan on pages across your site:

• Open an incognito browser window and click on the three dots in the top right corner.
• Open your website page where you want to carry out the test. 
• From there, navigate to More tools > Developer tools.

• Next, select the lighthouse tab on your Dev toolbar. (click on the drop-down icon if Lighthouse is not listed among the visible tabs)
• Under the “generate lighthouse report” section, set the Mode to “Navigation,” select your preferred device type for testing, and check Performance, Accessibility, Best practices, and SEO under Categories.

• Once done, click on Analyze page load (the test should take a couple of seconds based on your site speed and asset count)
• When the test is complete, Lighthouse will rate your page per category and display technical faults, if there are any, similar to this example.

• Lighthouse reports are great and let you find critical issues on your pages that you might have never thought existed. I encounter many silly mistakes on various page tests, and fixing those issues has been helpful to those sites (personal sites).
• Moving forward, you can switch the available reports to find individual flows in each category. 

Once you know where the issue is, it becomes easier to resolve it yourself or hire someone to fix it. In addition, performing a lighthouse test takes just a couple of minutes, which can be an essential step towards improving your site to be more favorable to search engines. 

You will receive some recommendations on where to start, and getting these small details resolved will definitely boost the site’s overall impression for real users and search engines.

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