Over One Year Later - Still Going Strong

December 2, 2008

In August of last year I started a case study on building a small niche site from scratch and using 3WayLinks.net to get the site ranked in Google. All of the work I did to put the site together took about 5 hours (from start to finish). I posted a follow-up in May of 2008, showing that the site was still going strong.

Well, it's been over a year now (about 15.5 months actually), and I thought I'd do another follow up. I can't tell you how many nay-sayers have told me that 3WayLinks.net would get sites banned from Google, and how quickly the "Google gods" would catch on and stop the network from working.

Blah, blah, blah, yack, yack, yack. Nay-sayers are so annoying. The reality is that my case study site is doing better than ever! Let's take a look, shall we?

First, there's the overall traffic to the site, which has risen over time. November was its second best month this year, with over 4,000 unique visitors, most of whom came from Google, as the next image shows.

As you can see, almost all of the site's traffic came from Google. The traffic is great, but what's more exciting is the AdSense earnings from the site. Here's November's earnings:

November was the best month so far, at $230.55. Remember how much the site earned when I did the update in May? Take a look:

Only $103.60. Quite a difference, no? A rise of about 223%. How much has the site earned total in AdSense revenue since it was created?

More than $1,800 so far. Let's see: $1,837.46 divided by five hours of work… that's $367.49 an hour this site has earned me. Would you say it was worth putting the five hours into building it? I'd say so! Put up one site per week and do the math — not a bad living, I'd say.

What's very interesting to me is that the longer the site stays well-ranked in Google, the higher the AdSense eCPM goes. So I'm earning more per visitor now than I ever was. I'm not sure if Google's "smart pricing" has decided that the site converts well for advertisers, or if I've just got a new set of advertisers, but it's certainly doing well in the eCPM department.

If you remember my original case study, I said my goal was for a site to earn $3 a day on average. In November my case study site earned about $7.67 per day on average, well over twice my goal. I'd call that a success! For its entire life, the site has earned roughly $4.08 per day on average — still well over my goal. If my eCPM stays high, that daily average will continue to rise as well.

So does 3WayLinks.net work to get sites ranked in Google and keep them there? The numbers speak for themselves.

Please post your questions and thoughts in a comment below.

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under Search Engine Optimization, Blog | 69 Comments

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