DIY Date Night Case Study

There are some affiliate links below, but they are all products I highly recommend. For more info, view my disclosure here.

Welcome to my DIY Date Night Case Study! I purchased the site on September 3, 2023. Below, I’ll be posting monthly updates of how the site is growing so you can follow along.

In the first month, the most important tasks involved switching everything over from the seller, Sadie Smiley of Passive Income Pathways.

Full disclosure: I’m part of Sadie’s AMAZING VIP group for building passive income to six figures. She posted the site for sale in the group for $1500 and I immediately jumped on it! I’ve been in Sadie’s VIP group since January, and her free (and extremely valuable!) passive income FB group for a while before that, so I was fully aware of her site-building process and she knows her stuff!

Beginning Stats For The DIY Date Night Case Study

When I saw the site for sale, I knew it would be a perfect fit for me. First off, I love travel and finding the perfect date nights. In fact, Dan and I even got married on a cruise ship!

A few other factors that led me to feel it was a great purchase for me included the fact that the site had an attractive theme and was well-structured.

With 753 users at the time of purchase and no monetization, it definitely fell in the “starter site” category, but with a user increase of 56.2%, it was clearly on an upward trajectory.

The traffic source was primarily organic, which is great. Since it had almost no Pinterest traffic, that meant I could get a great boost from that down the road, given my years of experience as a freelance Pinterest specialist.

Month 1 Update – September 2023

As mentioned above, the first month involved switching the website to my hosting and updating the site’s About page and colors to reflect my personality. I added 6 new articles (some of which are already getting organic traffic!) and lightly edited 6 existing articles.

Even though this is around the same time as Google’s most recent so-called “Helpful Content Update” that saw lots of sites negatively impacted, this site continued to grow at a great pace! Google Site Kit shows an increase of 89.4% in the last 28 days.

I set up a Pinterest account for the site, as it seems like that niche (relationships and local date night ideas) would be a perfect fit for Pinterest.

Within 3 days of setting up the Pinterest account, I had 10 followers. Now it’s a few days later and I’m up to 14 followers, and 518 monthly Pinterest account views. Not too bad for a new account, especially since I really haven’t focused on it much besides set up.

I have a lot of Pinterest accounts I manage, between my starter sites I build to sell and my main, front-burner sites. I definitely need to work on my strategy for managing them all, and figure out which ones are priority.

Monetization is still a bit early, but it did make $2.18 from Amazon affiliates! Only 1497.82 until I break even. 😉I published a few articles on NewsBreak, and reached the requirement for monetization, so I applied right away and I’m just waiting on approval.

The plan for the site going forward is to continue to add quality content, syndicate it on NewsBreak, and add more affiliate links, like Viator tour recommendations in articles. Plus, I have an excuse to do more date nights with Dan so I can write about it!

I’m planning to wait a bit before putting ads, but I’m with SHE Media on some of my other sites, so I can easily add it there when I’m ready. I want to brainstorm other income options besides ad revenue.

I plan to focus a bit more on Pinterest, since it’s pretty easy for me. I’m also working on building a course – Pinterest Mastery: An AI-Assisted Approach, so it will be great to work on this one and use it as examples in the course.

Want to follow along for more updates? Sign up below and you’ll also get access to my resource library for buying, growing, or selling websites!

Month 2 Update – October 2023

Woo month 2 of growing DIY Date Night is done! I’m super excited with the progress so far. I published 9 posts this month (some were previously drafted guest posts that were pretty much ready to go) and 2 Google Web Stories.

I’ve done a few web stories on other sites and they’ve been hit or miss, but one of the stories I published a few days ago has gotten around 400 views, and gave me my biggest traffic day so far!

I mean, look at that spike! I’m pretty happy with it. Traffic was up over 40% before the web stories, which is fantastic, and now it’s up over 68%. The downside of web stories is they seem to be pretty short-term traffic, but hey, I’ll take it!

I’ve played around with creating stories through the very clunky, not-so-user-friendly Web Stories plugin, and creating the images in Canva, and so far, the Canva ones are the ones getting traffic. If you’re planning to give them a shot, the Canva size is 720 x 1280 px.

Overall, the site is on a solid upward trajectory. The plan for November is to create at least 4 articles and add 4 web stories to see how they do. Stay tuned for updates!

Month 3 Update – November 2023

Today marks 3 months since I bought DIY Date Night, and I’m SO glad I did! It’s such a fun site to write and create content for. I published 4 articles and 3 web stories throughout the month.

Traffic is still going up, and even though it’s dropped down a bit since Thanksgiving, it’s still trending higher.

I made $8.18 in an affiliate sale from Viator recommendation, and 90 cents from an Amazon sale 😆 1488.74 until I break even!

December is a bit crazy and I have a few pretty big projects going on, so I’m setting my goals to be 4 posts published and 2 web stories for the month. See you next month!

Month 4 Update – December 2023

December was a great month for DIY Date Night! This month’s report is a bit delayed because there was a weird glitch on my Google Analytics that I was waiting to see if it would correct itself, but no luck.

For some reason, GA shows no traffic at all for the majority of the day on December 30, even though real time traffic was showing, and there are more clicks showing in GSC (177) than there were in GA below. I don’t get it, but oh well.

Between that glitch and a Google web story that had performed great in November, the month was down -13.5% compared to November, but for a busy holiday month + glitchy analytics, that’s not too bad!

The month overall was awesome, even without that day being accurate! I managed to reach 50 posts published, and I have a fully filled out article plan for the next few months.

This will be a lifesaver when I have those moments of “what should I write about?!” because I’ve front-loaded the brainstorming and now I’ll just be going through my list. I also created a valuable freebie here.

I’ve also brainstormed a membership plan that will be affordable and value-packed. My stretch goal is to launch that by Valentine’s Day, but it’s a busy client month as well, so we’ll see if I can make that happen.

Before I launch, I want to have at least 2 months of content ready to go so it’s less stressful. I eventually want to have that work be completed at least 3 months in advance, so I have a buffer for vacations/breaks/higher client workloads.

I’m aiming to have the site on Mediavine by June. Given the current traffic patterns and the workflow I have set up, it’s definitely doable with some hard work! See you next month!

Month 5 Update – January 2024

This month has been wild! Traffic has grown considerably and continues to increase. It’s so exciting watching it grow. This month, I created another valuable freebie to grow the mailing list.

I’m working on building a free resource library full of fun activities, relationship-building guides, and more. The membership is still in the planning stages as I want it to be super valuable and helpful to everyone.

This month, I published 10 articles and one Google Web Story. The new posts started getting clicks pretty quickly. I’m using RankIQ to target low-competition keywords that I can rank for, and it seems to be working well!

I’m also using Sadie (Passive Income Pathways) Lazy SEO method and it’s immensely helpful. Honestly, I would NOT be where I’m at without the incredible support, training, and the community of Sadie’s PIPS VIP membership. The goal is to get DIY Date Night to be a 6-figure site within the next year, and it’s totally doable with the path we’ve mapped out for it. Check back next month for February’s update!