1,900 pages, 14 months, written by people. The traffic graph and the costs

RankGarden's blog has 1,900 pages. No generated text. Four freelance writers, one editor (me). Fourteen months.

• Total cost: about $61,000
• Organic visits last month: 88,000
• Trials from organic last month: 410
• Paying from those: 37

At $79 average that is about $2,900 of new MRR a month from content that is already written. Payback on the whole spend was month 16.

The curve was flat for seven months. If I had looked only at month 6 I would have stopped.

A content post with the cost in it. I could weep. Thank you.

What share of the 88,000 comes from the top 50 pages?

62%. So yes, about 1,850 pages share the remaining 38%. I would not write all 1,900 again. I would write 400.

Did the update in March hit you? Half the newsletter operators I know lost a third of their search traffic.

Down 9% for three weeks, then back. The pages that fell were the thinnest ones, which is fair.

From the docs side: your comparison pages rank, but your documentation does not, and docs convert better than any blog. Have you opened the docs to search engines?

They are behind a login. That is a very good and very embarrassing point.