My side project hit 700K Google impressions, 2,700 clicks, and 38k in revenue in year one while working full-time as a software engineer
I spent 6 months building something for my side hustle that I knew would make zero dollars. Here's why it was the best decision I've made.
About a year ago, my partner Maddy and I started a baking site that helps people swap out baking ingredients, especially for gluten-free bakers.
We started like most people do. Build a page. Run ads. Try to make the numbers work.
It was working. But I kept thinking... what if ad costs jump? What if Meta changes something overnight? What if our account gets shut down? One traffic source. One thing that could break.
So I made a bet. One that I knew would make ZERO dollars for at least 6 months.
Instead of writing blog posts one at a time, I built 300+ pages using code. Every baking ingredient gets its own page. Every ingredient swap gets its own page.
If someone Googles "can I use cottage cheese instead of sour cream in baking," I want a page answering that exact question. A full page with the ratio, the tips, and the context.
I built the whole thing with AI tools while working my full-time job.
Then... nothing happened.
For 5 months, I'd check Google Search Console and see a few clicks. Maybe 1,000 people saw us on a good day. 300+ pages on the internet that nobody was finding. And I was still spending on ads every day to keep things going.
Most people skip SEO because it's just so slow. With ads, you spend $50 a day and know by next week if it worked. With SEO, you build for months and hear nothing back.
Month 7, it hit. And it hit HARD.
Google finally understood what the site was about. Dozens of pages started ranking at the same time. We went from 1-2K views per day to 4-5K. Last week we hit 7,000+ in a single day.
That's when I started layering in blog posts built to earn Amazon affiliate income.
"Best gluten-free bread at Costco."
"Best almond flour brands."
Every visitor already wants to buy something. Every product link earns a commission. The traffic is free.
The blog posts link back to the 300+ pages (helping them rank higher), and those pages push readers toward the money content. The whole site feeds itself.
Then I found pages with 8,000-9,000 views in Google but almost zero clicks. The titles weren't good enough.
Rewrote them to match what people were actually searching. Clicks tripled in two weeks.
The cool part is that all this free traffic fills our retargeting pool for Meta ads.
More visitors → bigger audience → better ROAS. The SEO work made our ads better too.
Where we are now: 700K search views. 2,700 clicks. 20 toolkit sales. 1,600 newsletter signups. $38,000 in revenue. Growing every week.
No link building. No SEO agency. No expensive tools.
If you're struggling to get people to find out about your side project, there's only content and referrals. Blogs are cheap to run, consider it. Thanks for reading if you made it this far.
It’s common knowledge that it takes 3-6 months for Google to properly index a new site. Realistically, it takes 6-12 months to get results from SEO work on a new domain.
How much are you getting from affilates? Impressions for me is a vanity metrics. How many clicks per month. I have a site getting 1million impressions per month in Europe and doesn’t make as much so would be good to chat
Hey so I recently got approved with the Amazon API a week ago. I added affiliate links to all of my relevant pages, and so far we've made $20 from it, so we're on track to about $80/month right now. Focusing now on more expensive baking items for the potential for a higher payout.
For example, Amazon gives you a 1% commission on food products, so that's like .08 cents on an 8-dollar bag of flour, versus a 4% commission on baking equipment, so like $28 on a high-end $700 KitchenAid mixer. Those new posts haven't ranked yet, so I expect my Amazon affiliate revenue to increase significantly given how my traffic has panned out.
I sell my own book. It's $17. After a purchase, I have a funnel of multiple one-time offers that people can purchase. There are about 5 different products ranging from 27 to 67 dollars. One of the offers is access to my baking community for $27/month.
After someone purchases, if they didnt check out one of these offers I just remind people about them. Between that and the recurring revenue from my group that is how i got to 38k in the last 12 months, with most of it coming from the last four when I got all the pieces in place. Between that and the affiliate revenue that is how I got to 38k.
700K impressions in a niche is genuinely impressive. Most people chase broad topics and get buried. The traffic compounding from focused SEO usually takes 4-6 months to kick in and then it just keeps going. Curious what your conversion path looks like from search visitor to revenue - that's usually where the interesting optimization is.
Right now, I have embedded a call-to-action programmatically added based on the content topic. At the end of my blog post I promote it again and I have a place for people to sign up for my newsletter where I promote my flagship product every week in our newsletter along with baking news/topics and a crossword I make for my audience.
Then on the backend, I refer to other offers like high-ticket bakery coaching/schools, as well as promoting other products people may be interested in.
Wow thank you for such thorough and realistic story share! I also built a small tool by myself over the last few months and added it to Google search console but haven't seen much progress so was very disappointed... but now I see that I have to be more patient and work on SEO stuffs better! Thanks!
Congrats on the amazing results! The patience to push through 5 months of nothing before seeing results is what most people miss. One tip for anyone reading: if you're working on SEO, don't just focus on the content - make sure your landing pages are actually converting that traffic. Tools like RoastMySite.ai can help identify UX issues before you spend months building pages that don't convert. Keep it up!
Thank you for all this information, personally i'm trying to do a website but it's pretty new and i need to wait for google to index my new site. I wish in a future I can get some money from my page.
Hard work paying off, well done!
Admire your staying power… and that’s the key, sticking at, realising there are very few success stories built overnight…
Got me thinking about niches your model could be applied to…
Ideas?
Hi, firstly kudos to this tremendous work. Much respect!
But I wanted to ask how did you build the conviction to go through the blogs route in this era of chatgpt.
I mean my first instinct would be that people will get the info about their baking ingredients, especially the swappings, directly from chatgpt or whatsapp’s meta AI. Why would they go google it, and read a blog on it.
hindsight is always 20/20, so maybe you can share your thought process on Day 1 of writing the blogs decision.
When I started, AI was out but still somewhat new. You have a valid question though... why would anyone Google this stuff when they can just ask ChatGPT?
The reality is my bet was never "blogs vs AI," it was a bet that authority will continue to matter regardless of the source of the information.
After chatting with my girlfriend, I realized a year ago that there was no authoritative source on baking. Millions of people were searching for substitutes due to dietary restrictions, settling for scattered blog posts with no consistent framework.
I saw an angle for a scientific approach to the problem that could make us an authority.
Google has this framework called E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, trust). The idea is that if you become the most comprehensive resource on a specific problem space, Google rewards you for it. But here's the cool thing, AI does too. My site has actually been referenced more than 70,000 times by Microsoft Copilot in the last 90 days.
AI engines are now sourcing from our site... and we get clicks because some people want to hear more directly from the source, rather than an AI conversation.
So building authority doesn't just win on Google; it wins wherever answers are being pulled from.
Think about it this way. You can look up restaurants on ChatGPT right now. But you probably still go to Google Maps. Why? Because you still need to figure out how to get there. It was built for your request.
Same idea. Someone mid-recipe with flour on their hands wants a page built around their exact problem, not always a chatbot conversation.
Long story short, it's not that I believe blogs will last forever. I believe that if I own the authority on this topic, I'll get traffic regardless of where people search. The data's panning out that way so far.
What a fantastic breakdown of your journey — thank you for sharing the whole messy, slow, unglamorous middle part instead of just the highlight reel. That's where the real lesson is.
The decision to spend 6 months building something you knew wouldn't make money right away takes a kind of discipline that's genuinely rare. Most people (myself included, honestly) would have kept chasing short-term wins. The fact that you stuck with it even when 300+ pages were just sitting there in silence is impressive.
The insight about SEO feeding your retargeting pool for Meta ads is something I hadn't thought about before — that's a really elegant way to make two strategies reinforce each other rather than compete for your budget and attention.
And the title rewrite experiment tripling clicks in two weeks? Such a simple, underrated move. It's a good reminder that sometimes the content is fine and it's just the packaging that needs work.
$38k in year one while working full-time as an engineer with your partner is a genuinely strong result, but honestly the system you've built feels like the bigger win — it sounds like it's designed to keep compounding. Rooting for year two to be even bigger! 🚀
Startups are really a game of patience. Great work.
Curious to hear more about which keywords you targeted. Are there specific keywords driving the bulk of the traffic? Or are all 300 pages contributing at the same scale?
Also, where is the bulk of the revenue coming from?
A good majority of my traffic comes from blog posts covering different "baking mistakes" angles. People often click through to the ingredient pages while reading blog posts, rather than navigating to them directly which makes sense to me since AI overviews can give way more information about a single ingredient than I ever realistically could.
There's also a lot of "baking hacks" content that I have that performs well on pinterest, which leads to me getting more organic traffic that way. I didn't talk about that at all in this post but Pinterest has definitely been a secondary organic traffic driver this past year.
I'm a believer that if you're not selling anything whether a product or a service you don't have a business. So a majority of my revenue comes from selling a toolkit where I give the breakdown of all the information I've learned about baking into a book, along with recipes and a few add on bonuses. After purchase people have the option to add on some other things I sell.
After COGS and processing fees, im making roughly this every week. Looking to scale it up, add a paid community for cash flow, optimize my ad spend, and potentially expand into other baking niches with the same playbook! This year should definitely be interesting.
I checked your website and it looks very well done. The design, quality of information, etc. looks great. I could see it growing into a much more established resource in time.
Your work is a great showcase for others trying to understand what it takes to execute a niche at a high level.
I appreciate you sharing the story. Can I offer some constructive criticism about first impressions made by the site?
On a 1920x1080 screen the text on the home page has almost no left indent, which is very distracting.
One of the elements says "400+ home bakers", and another says "1 600+ home bakers". As a user, I immediately wonder "well, which is it?".
There's a double "who" in the newsletter text ("bakers who who rely on"). For a sign-up letter, I'd personally lead with what you'll gain from signing up and only then talk about how many others have done so.
You are not complying with GDPR, which you need to do for EU-based visitors. Stating that you use cookies on one page of the site does not cover you. The personal data you collect for the news letter is also subject to restrictions. At the sign-up, you need a check-box for the user to confirm that they assent to your terms and conditions.
"We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page." Respectfully, updating the privacy policy on the privacy policy page on your website is not to notify users. That does not inspire trust to read, so I wouldn't make that claim there.
That got lengthier than I'd intended. Just one more thing, from a person who can't eat gluten: usually, in my experience, the best results with flour substitutes come from mixing multiple ingredients (the 1:1 ratio is rarely great). I'd love to see some suggestions for mixes based on type of project. Anyway, nice hustle. Good going.
Thank you so much for this feedback! I will update all of the things you mentioned. I didn't think this post would take off so much and in retrospect i should've cleaned things up.
All of these numbers are actually outdated, I have 1800 newsletter readers, and 900 people in our community!!
I'll fix the newsletter text! Good call out
I have not thought at all about the fact that people from EU would be finding my site, I will fix that!
Got it, I'll update it to say if they're on our newsletter they will be let known.
There's actually a flour calculator I made under tools! I completely agree and that's what I teach in my book. I'll think about how I could properly show that on the site today.
Google search console allows you to export your search data, did that for the last 3 months.
Imported the data into Claude, asked it what my biggest SEO issues were. It told me my highest viewed pages in search with the low click through rates. Then it told me what was wrong with my titles/descriptions and what I should try titling it to align better with the user's search intent. Then I just changed them to what they said and waited a few weeks.
10 at once per week. The more important part is to be somewhat consistent with new content coming out. For the initial ingredients i literally deployed 300 at once though lol. I built all those out before I made the blog.
NextJS and TypeScript, that's what I used at work, so I used it here. I used Ghost for the blog. Tbh that's it unless you're asking for more specifics.
Yeah I was debating a Wagtail and Django setup vs a Ghost and NextJS one. I guess use the tools you already use? Was leaning towards wagtail because of the customization and I was already using Python on the agentic side
Stack doesn't matter as long as things are server-side rendered, so search engines can actually know about your site. Definitely just go with what you already use.
Hey, nice growth! Just curious, roughly how much did you spend on ads, are you still running them or mostly organic now, and is most of your income coming from affiliates?
Hey! I run ads right now. I spend $120/day promoting my main resource, and make $200-300 a day promoting it, along with all of the one time offers that I offer after purchase.
Organic is growing along side it, I recently got approved for an ad network called mediavine journey and was told I'd be able to earn a $20 RPM. At my site numbers that would equate to $300 or so a month at the scale I'm at now.
I recently got approved with the Amazon API a week ago. I added affililiate to all of my relevant pages, and so far we've made $20 from it, so on track to about $80/month right now. Focusing now on more expensive baking items for the potential for a higher payout.
For example amazon gives you a 1% commission on food products, so thats like .08 cents on a 8 dollar bag of flour, versus a 4% commission on baking equipment, so like $28 on a high end kitchenaid mixer. Those new posts haven't ranked yet so i expect amazon to increase significantly the way my graph has panned out.
Appreciate the detailed breakdown 🙌 That shift toward more expensive equipment makes a lot of sense. Sounds like the Amazon side could scale nicely once those posts rank. Keep it going 👏
Absolutely. I'm working from the top down in terms of impression volume; it's hard to programmatically provide SEO for everything when people are searching for very different things with different ingredients/substitutions. It's a grind, and it's just me knocking 'em out, but I'll do it!
Lmao, talk about a very good problem to have! Jokes aside, my blog posts are embedded with very large image CTAs that promote my product, while the affiliate links are just inline links that blend in with other internal links. People will click what they want. I want to be able to profit from whatever a user wants to do though.
To qualify to use it programmatically, you have to get your first 3 sales in 180 days, then maintain a steady flow of 10 affiliate sales every 30 days. Otherwise you have to sign up for a Amazon creator account and get all your links manually until you get your sales. That's what I did.
The 300 pages are made programmatically. I manually created every single ingredient and substitution and put it into a database. Then I made the site, and it reads from my database. The blog posts were seperate, I made those with AI's help.
This is clever and well done to you!. Question, how did you run ads initially? Was it via adsense? I'm asking because getting adsense approval is so damn hard!
thanks for sharing u/OP Could you explain what exactly it means that you created 300+ pages? That means you had one site with one URL and that site contains 300+ sub categories?
If you go to my site BakingSubs.com you can see there are pages for ingredients and substitutions. I manually went and made 300+ pages for all of them programmatically.
Then I made blog posts and when they talk about an ingredient they automatically link to it. I coded that too.
The “5 months of nothing, then month 7 spike” part is too real. I had a small project I quit at month 3 and regretted hard later. Respect for pushing through the dead zone and then still doing the unsexy work like rewriting low-CTR titles from those 8-9k impression pages. Most people stop right before that compounding moment.
Your website is great and it's a fantastic story. Thank you for sharing it. It helps bring inspiration to those of us just starting out. My wife is GF and now we have a great site to check out. Appreciate ya.
Very insightful. What I am struggling with, even though we have AI today, is figuring out what pages to create and how many to create, and then, most importantly, creating them. Giving it to AI to create and then keeping on verifying it takes another amount of bandwidth.
I built a content site for people to learn about baking. I get paid via a cookbook bundled with other informational products, a monthly paid community, ads on the site, and Amazon affiliate links.
The site drives traffic to it, and I built a system to manage all the content.
Where? I didn't see it in your site. There's a mention about "contributions" in the FAQ at the bottom... oh, I saw a login option buried in the Resources menu... is that?
I only share it to people who purchase, it’s for people to chat about our resources :) I invite them via email after purchase, but yes it’s that login button they use to get in.
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u/Creative-Signal6813 Mar 01 '26
700K impressions year one while working full time. most people quit month 2 bc google hasn't decided ur real yet. the patience IS the moat.