Next Quarter
Late 2019, I’d already been reading the various case studies on the JustStart subreddit for a few months and decided that I want to work on my first website. I had no prior experience with commercial blogs but the mantra on that subreddit was always “just start (and see what happens)”, so I took the plunge. Plus, I had eventually discovered that I had some experience and skills that helped me, plus something that I for the lack of a better word call intuition.
Anyway, I had no idea which niche to choose, so I went to GoDaddy auctions and scrolled until I found a $9 Buy-it-Now expired domain that had a couple of meh backlinks, was brandable, and relevant to a niche that I was ok with. I set up some cheap hosting, created the website, set everything up, and started writing.
After a couple of months, it became apparent that between work, family, and church I didn’t have enough time to pump out any meaningful amounts of the content myself, so I decided to go all-in, took my savings of $1500, and invested it all in content. After a couple of weeks, I had about 20 posts up.
Nowadays, I reinvest everything into content, and I’m still writing myself whenever I find the time (which is not too often).
Strategy
My strategy is pretty simple: I choose a product and write a review. I then split my efforts between producing info content to support the review, writing reviews of related products, and interlinking. I then create a silo page that consists of a single page with an intro to that product category, a map of reviews and info posts I have, and a snippet-optimized FAQ section. I then grouped these product-based silos into topical silos based on a specific use case, for example, one with everything for welders, one with everything for carpenters, etc. So far I have two that are linked to from the top of my home page.
I never recommend things that I wouldn’t buy myself, despite the commission. A couple of times I saw a keyword opportunity about a bad quality product (or product type) and wrote reviews and roundups that basically say “don’t buy X, try Z instead”. Happy to say they are ranking (though not in the top 3) and producing clicks.
Goal
My goal is to start a website, grow it to a valuation of $100k, sell it, and – you guessed it – create ten more. I was hooked from that first $2 commission, and from that point on it was incredibly fulfilling to watch a business grow, even being the grind that it is. It also helped that my wife is incredibly supportive, even though I don’t take a salary.
Numbers
Here’s the good stuff.
| Month | Posts | Users | Affiliate | Ezoic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| December | 4 | 17 | ||
| January | 1 | 4 | ||
| February | 1 | 3 | ||
| March | 15 | 267 | ||
| April | 9 | 1635 | $2 | |
| May | 5 | 5483 | $118 | |
| June | 1 | 7380 | $119 | |
| July | 3 | 10918 | $211 | |
| August | 2 | 14845 | $336 | |
| September | 11 | 18988 | $858 | $125 |
| October | 10 | 23849 | $1065 | $126 |
| November | 22 | 31745 | $1548 | $198 |
Some Things I’ve Done
- I have done two rounds of outreach fishing for guest posts and adding my topical silo pages to other sites’ resource pages. I have scraped 350 emails from mid-to-high DR domains and written my best and most sincere pitches yet. My open rate for resource pages is 34%, for guest posts 50%, and response rates are 2% and 4% respectively. All I got is 10 “no thanks” emails. Oh well.
- I have created an info product. I’ve custom built 150 pieces of info content related to my main niche and created three 60-page ebooks. I’ve then put them on Gumroad, created a landing page, and implemented a hello bar on my website pointing users to the page. I’ve also run two sets of Facebook ads: one targeting a broad related audience and one retargeting visitors captured by my pixel (50k users). I’d been running the ads for a week with low bids and had about 100 click-throughs to the landing page and zero click-throughs to Gumroad. I guess it was stupid to think that people were waiting to give me their money. After spending $50 on ads and getting close to zero click-throughs, I stopped and only drive people through the hello bar.
- Every once in a while, I go into the search console and optimize posts to include shoulder content. I also have a gigantic snippet-optimized FAQ post with everything related to my main niche, and I’ve noticed that some questions are getting more love, so I built them out and moved them over to standalone posts. I also started using Surfer several months down the line.
- From the outset, my mantra has been “loads of value”. I always try to choose genuinely the best products, and when I or my writers review them, we go deep – specialized forums, Reddit, Quora – and do a condensed and weighted evaluation on each one. Plus, I try to include how-tos, guides, and other info content.
- At one point, I increased spending and hired a field expert as a writer. I now send him products and have him re-write my best hands-off reviews with real hands-on reviews to provide even more value.
Lessons Learned
- How many writers out there are trash. Every time I posted a job on Upwork, I paid attention to reviews, vetted the “native” writers, gave strict outlines, requirements, and samples, and tested different pay tiers, what I got on the other end was burning heaps of trash.
- How little meaning the design has. I spent an incredulous amount of time tweaking small things in the Appearance menu and CSS. Looking back, it was such a massive waste. For the palette, go with coolors.co. For the logo, use a text one. For the layout, just take a site from the Generatepress library and use a WYSIWYG editor like Elementor.
- This might seem obvious, but keyword research is king. I have tried every trick in the book, and nothing has any value if you don’t do keyword research properly. On the other hand, if you do proper research, you can get away with bad typography, pictures, copy, tables, anything.
- The hyped backlink acquisition techniques just don’t work. Nobody cares that I wrote a post that’s marginally better than a post they linked to seven years ago. All that worked for me was HARO, but that’s only to the home page. For the page-level links, I am doing manual link insertion/guest posting outreach.
- I can’t figure out Pinterest. My niche is visual and women-focused, but I know zilch about Pinterest. I tried reading up on blogs but didn’t find a working technique, so I hired an account manager on Upwork. Got some repins and engagements through Tailwind that resulted in some junk traffic to the site that didn’t convert. Not my proudest $250 spent.
- Short content is fine. I spent so much time and energy on long-form content but then had to write a roundup post for very simple products where there wasn’t too much to say. I decided not to fluff it up and just posted the 600-word roundup. In 2 months, it was ranking in the top 1 (albeit the KW is easy and competition is weak). I then stopped writing (and ordering) a minimum of 1500 words and instead chose to write as little or as much as necessary to respond to searcher intent, sometimes as little as 200 words, and this has been working for me.
- As much as I want to diversify, Amazon is still hard to beat EPC-wise. I am applied to several programs and offer them as a secondary option, but I won’t pull the plug just yet.
