Hello Anon,
Welcome to Episode 13 of the BowTiedWookie substack. We have been extraordinarily busy the last few weeks and have not been very active on Twitter. Also we missed the midmonth update for March (oof). This will be a longer substack than usual to bring you up to speed on everything we have been doing. In short, despite continuing to write helpful content for users the blog has not made any more money. Because of this we made the decision to go 100% into transactional keywords and CRO for the website. But first some house keeping.
This week we will cover
Traffic Update
Revenue Update
Costs Update
Improving CRO
Traffic Update
Traffic was up slightly this month despite writing 20 new articles. We are finally in a position where we have two great writers producing content which allows us to spend more time on monetization and “scaling” the site.
Last month we said we wanted to have a minimum of 30 blogs this moth. However, around 7 of these posts are over 5,000 words so we were willing to give up a little bit on the “total number” of blogs posted.
This content is focused on transactional keywords which is much more difficult to rank. Additionally, our pages are taking a lot longer to index over the last few weeks. We aren’t extremely alarmed about this because I am seeing it with multiple sites I have access to.
Charles Floate is an incredibly talented SEO who made a video trying to get around it. This is definitely walking the line as a “grey hat” tactic. At this point I’m not going to use it. So far I have not heard one negative thing about it. If you decide to use this please let me know how it goes!
Revenue Update
Revenue took a hit this month unfortunately. Luckily, we exploded the last week of the month but still came up short. Total revenue for the month was $594.02. If you’ve been following us you’ll know that our goal when we bought the site was to hit $1,000 in March. We failed. What really surprising about this is that the primary drop in revenue was due to our ebook. Everything else was up or flat. To make it even more confusing our ebook page had 120 more visitors in March than Februrary.
Important to note that we have our own IPs blocked so this is all organic traffic
March
February
As you can see we had 120 more people on the check out page in March than February but sold half as many ebooks 🤯 This was outrageously frustrating and for the life of us we couldn’t figure out what was going on. Nothing changed on the ebook landing page.
The big learning here is that its time to start testing this page and diversify revenue away from it. Even our best month had a conversion rate of <1%.
You can see our full revenue breakdown here. Lukily the new affiliate program we joined is slowly starting to produce results. If that didn’t happen this month would have been a huge L.
Costs Update
As we will explain below we started to realize in this month that we had to take some of the resources from SEO and put it into CRO. The blog is chronically under monetized and we spent the last few months grinding hard to improve the topical authority. Looking at the traffic getting better but the revenue getting worse was a wakeup call. We have to give readers a compelling offer. Because of this we hired a dev to help us build several really cool things that we hope will improve the CRO of the site and drastically improve the revenue the site makes this month.
If you have kept track of our spend you’ll notice we spent way more on content this month. This is because we finally have a writing team that can produce content at scale. This may sound scary given the revenue of the site but the worst thing you can do is let it sit in a bank account and slowly erode.
We had 7, 5000+ word posts written for highly transactional keywords. One of them is already ranking for a super competitive term and we hope these posts can all rank over time and make $10-$30 per day. For some this will probably require some linkbuilding but we are at a place where we need to go after keywords lower in the funnel.
March Total Spend: $2,642.56
Content: $2,459.56
Dev Work: $170
SVG (high quality images): $13
Improving CRO
This is where the bulk of March (and April) are going to be spent. There are two ways to improve the CRO of the site. Go after highly trasnactional keywords and advertise an offer that everyone on the site would want to “buy”.
For starters we decided we wanted to go after more transactional keywords in spaces we believed we had topical authority. It isn’t enough to just write a great article it has to look great too.
Because of this BowTiedPlug built out a custom Gutenberg block designed to improve conversions and give us a boost in the algo.
This gets a little technical so here is the TLDR if you want the highlights
Google’s product review update is prioritizing website’s that give multiple stores to buy from
We found a site called sleepopolis that wrote the most gamified SEO posts we have ever seen. So we built a custom solution that allows us to clone what they did for wordpress.
If you are interested we are looking to set this up for other sites that were hit hard by the product reviews update.
Custom Gutenberg Affiliate Block
(With Love From BowTiedPlug)
There are many great plugins, but it is challenging to find an Affiliate Product Feature Block widget. There are plugins like AAWP, but most are specific to a retailer or don’t meet our exact requirements.
We needed a Gutenberg block that can pull dynamically from a product's post type, handle three affiliate links, was lightweight, and CONVERTED.
Side note from BowTiedWookie. We wanted links from multiple stores because Google has overtly said (and shown through the recent product review update) that they prefer sites that give customers multiple options to buy from.
After searching and not finding anything, we decided to go the custom route which we rarely ever do. (Not a fan of debt, including technical!) we needed a custom plugin since Gutenberg blocks are built through custom plugins.
This was the final result. Hopefully, this inspires you to get creative with a block to solve a custom use case!
Summary of steps:
Mockup and inspiration
Requirements of fields
Passing off to a developer
Putting it all together
I utilized two plugins along with the custom widget
ACF Pro - To add custom fields such as secondary links, product rating, features, and other fields.
Woocommerce - The best way to handle products using the products post type and external type of product. A huge benefit: Utilizing Woocommerce opens you to utilize all the plugins that work with woo-commerce for your affiliate products. Such as product Quiz plugins.
Mock Up and Requirements
There are so many things online now. Most times, it’s just best to copy something and tweak it! The inspiration was AAWP and another affiliate website. I used the inspector tool to tweak CSS from the inspirations, then photoshop to put it all together. Throw that into PowerPoint and map the fields so the developer knows where everything should go.
Mappings (ACF is a turbo plugin! Extremely solid!)
Within ACF, I created two field groups.
Affiliate Products - This is where all of the product-specific fields are created
Feature Product - This is where the Gutenberg block fields are created.
Within Affiliate Products, these fields should only show when it’s a product post type, and the taxonomy is External.
It’s crucial to think through your fields and what type you use. For example, ingredients is a Wysiwyg Editor type because there may be a need for formatting capabilities. For features, I wanted a max of 6. So I set a parent field as a repeater and then three subfields for each part of a feature (Thumbnail, headline, and text). Then set the max to 6 repeaters.
There are some fields you can utilize out of the box rather than creating custom ones. For this block, I also used the native WordPress Featured Image box, native Woocommerce main URL, and Main button text.
Now, this is where the requirements are crucial to think through. I needed a heading and description field at the block level rather than the product. There may be times we use the same product for different use cases, so we need to be able to tweak the header and description to fit the content of the page. Lastly, we needed a relational field to link the product to the block. The preview was turned off in the editor to ensure the content editor speed was not affected. This is the editor view of the block.
2.) Developer
Not much magic was here other than doing the due diligence and providing detailed requirements and communication. I used Upwork and stressed using clean CSS and Jquery for the accordion since it’s already used on the site. The total cost was $175, and done in a week. The plugin was made with PHP, jQuery, and HTML.
3.) Putting it all together
All that was left to do now was install the plugin and load products. Loading products looks like this.
Now a content author can simply drag the block within Gutenberg and select the product. This way of handling products ensures scalability in multiple ways.
Can easily change links and product content centrally
Can utilize other WooCommerce plugins with your Affiliate Products
Can change design and functionality centrally
Easy for the content editor
Lightweight
Can manage products in bulk with an Import/Export plugin
The final result again :)
Congrulations if you made it all the way through 🤣. You’re a real turbo!
We (mostly BowTiedPlug) thought through this a lot and have the ability to add it to any Wordpress site using Gutenberg. If you are interested in adding this kind of capability to any of your sites let us know and we can set it up for you :)
The second part of the CRO improvements we did were to make a Test in our niche. This will be advertised on all the pages that do not drive revenue. However, this post is already incredibly long so we will save that for next week!
Cheers!
❤️ BowTiedWookie & BowTiedPlug
That madress post is sick.
I'm just starting to learn about all this stuff and really have enjoyed reading through your substack