Greetings anon,
We have been waiting 9 months to write this substack. We finally hit $1,000 in revenue! When we first bought the site, we predicted we would hit $1,000 within 5 to 6 months. The timeline may have been a bit off but eventually, we got here. As anyone familiar with SEO knows, July’s revenue was baked in based on the work we did in May & June. The work this month will not be fully realized revenue-wise until September.
Below is an outline of what we worked on this month as will as our site’s “vital signs”
Traffic & SEO Update
Revenue Update
Costs Update
Negotiating a Direct Ads Deal
Diversifying Revenue
Preparing For The Sale
Traffic Update
We aren’t guessing anymore. We know exactly how to rank informational and commercial content in this niche. We also know what we are not capable of ranking for (arguably more important). Every piece of content we create is targeted to fulfill a specific purpose. Because of this, it seems like we have a record traffic day multiple times per month.
We averaged 942 daily clicks in July and stayed above 1,000 daily clicks the last two weeks every single day. On August 4th, we had 1,200 organic clicks from Google. All new traffic is coming from review posts (since that is all we have been posting). As we explained in previous posts, the reviews are notoriously hard to create and have decreased the total # of posts we publish per month. In July we only published 6 posts (although we worked on 12).
I posted about this several times in July and had several people reply that posting review content is bad for SEO. This is a nuanced argument, but I think this Tweet thread is worth reading. Also worth calling out one of the reasons we liked this site was because it only had 1 review post when we bought it.
Two main things to unpack from this.
Mushfiq (who we bought the site from) expressed concern that we were spamming the site with review content. I think as long as 75% of the content is viewed as informational, you should be fine. Review posts are where most of the money is made on 95% of blogs, and quite frankly his aversion to publishing review posts is probably one of the primary reasons why he threw in the towel on this site.
A lot of people like to use this chart in Semrush as a gauge for informational vs. commercial content. However, this is a dumb chart to use. This chart measures total keywords instead of the pages. A single post could rank for all the commercial content. If you want to be a real boy scout stick to 85% informational and 15% commercial but for most sites, 75/25 should be fine. Currently, we are about 88/12 informative vs review.
Speaking of Boy Scouts, let’s talk about Brandon Saltalamacchia. I want to preface this by saying that I have nothing but respect for him, and he’s built a super cool brand. Having said that I’m going to tease him for a minute.
The convo went on a bit longer than this but you get the idea. Brandon lives in a bubble and legitimately believes you need to buy and test every product or you will get hit with an algo update. A few things to unpack here.
If everyone in your niche is using stock photos, it can’t be used as a ranking factor.
Hundreds of super competitive review blogs use stock photos because they look better than anything they could take.
99% of review posts on the internet are not written by someone who has used every product in the review.
For a lot of niches you want the review to be written by an expert not a “user”. Who do you want to write a review on the “best running shoes for back pain”. Someone who bought ten pairs of shoes and ran a mile in all of them or a physical therapist who specializes in back pain?
Quoting experts from all over the internet for different product reviews works. I’ve seen this done successfully on dozens of sites, and Google loves it.
If someone freaks out about using stock photos they probably have OCD
This is a nuanced debate, but generally speaking, your post should be better than everything on page 1. If it is you have nothing to worry about.
Revenue Update
Total revenue for July was $1,001.96 in revenue. A big part of this was updating review posts to include a high ticket ($40 CPA) offer. Another callout is that Amazon Associates paid roughly 2x the standard commission for two weeks due to Prime Day promotions. However, even in August, we still average over $10 daily from Amazon. Below is a breakdown of revenue sources for July.
The main revenue jump was adding the high CPA offer as the “best choice” for several review posts. We didn’t do this until July 12th and have 10 more review posts in the pipeline, so we have just scratched the surface with this.
Ultimately, I think this could be used as a link building tool where we email a bunch of companies and ask them for a backlink or a small fee to add their product to the list. Google would see it as periodically updating content which would keep the post fresh.
As I will get into shortly, we signed a direct ad partnership this month with a DTC company in our niche. The deal was a flat rate of $600 for an ad on every blog post. This will probably hurt conversions a tad but is a huge win for overall revenue going into next month.
Costs Update
Total expenses for July were $833.50. We finally turned a profit! Although we only published 6 posts, we paid to have 10 written. Our biggest current struggle is getting content posted in a timely manner. The formatting required to get these posts live has fallen to BowTiedPlug for the time being. While we are working on getting this completely automated a la VAs, it takes time, and we are still working out the kinks.
Content: $581.33
Hosting: $37
Email: $59
Optin Monster: $29.99
Other Plugins: $16.50
Virtual Assistant: $50
Dev Work: $60
Direct Ad Partnership
This was the biggest win from July. If you remember from our first Substack, we removed ads the day after we purchased the website. We did this because the ads spammed the site and hurt the overall user experience. We also thought ads were hurting the ebook conversions. We were right on both of these. However, in the last few months, traffic has continued to go up, and until this month, revenue lagged. We decided early in the year not to think about ads until we were eligible to get into Mediavine. Mediavine is an ad network that offers much higher payouts than Adsense or Ezoic and theoretically could be worth the conversion loss.
You need 50,000 monthly page views in Google Analytics to be accepted into Mediavine. We got ~45,000 pageviews in July, and given the bump we received over the last few weeks, I feel highly confident we could get in if we applied now. However, before applying, we decided to perform a thought exercise detailed in the thread below.
In summary
Using a normal ad network like Ezoic makes it virtually impossible to be core web vitals complaint
Being core web vitals compliant is a strategic advantage because our top competitors all run ads
Lots of DTC companies use display ads as a monetization angle. Cutting out the middle man will allow you both to make more money
You have to message a lot of people to get any leads. Then you have to schedule meetings, negotiate rates, and follow up on payments if you want to go direct.
This isn’t for the faint of heart but can pay off big time if you land a brand that meshes well with your site.
This is a one month trial and if it goes well they will sign a 4-6 month contract. Ultimately, I think it would be a perfect fit for this DTC brand to acquire us. The majority of their sales come from Facebook ads and Tik Tok. They have no SEO presence. Merging the domains would be jet fuel for the SEO, and would substantially mitigate the risk of both sites. For now we are content to rent out some real estate on the site and continue investing heavily in content.
This should give the site a 60% revenue bump vs. last month and barely intereferes with the user experience.
Diversifying Revenue
Revenue and traffic diversity are important for any cashflowing digital asset. For this site 98% of the traffic comes from SEO. The traffic is not diversified. While many see this as a liability we are comfortable because SEO is our greatest strength and we are 99% white hat.
When we bought the site over half the revenue was coming from ads. We cut it on day 1. Although we never specifically tried to diversify revenue it is now highly diversified. Although losing any revenue would be bad there is no single point of “faiulre” for the site. It’s pretty much understood that Amazon Associates will cut revenue again at some point. This hurts the valuation of sites that rely on it entirely for revenue. When you add a direct advertising deal into the mix I think the “diveristy of revenue” for our site will allow us to get a higher multiple.
Preparing For The Sale
We anticipate anywhere from $1,300-$1,800 in revenue this month. A lot depends on how much the ads on the site impact conversions. If we can get the site to ~$2k in revenue we would want to “diversify our company’s holdings”. Right now our company has 2 assets: cash & the site. If Google launches a random algo update that tanks the site we are screwed. We haven’t done anything shady but this is just part of the game. Google giveth and Google taketh away.
If we had three sites this size we wouldn’t be worried about it. However, since all the revenue is tied up in one site it makes sense to sell it and diversify into 2-3 smaller sites as the valuation approaches 6 figures. We could also stockpile cash for a few months and try to buy another smaller site in this niche. Ultimately, we are ok leaving a little bit on the table with this site to make sure we lock in a win. Because of this we are working hard to develop processes and systemitize our workflow.
August is a really big deal. We need to make the direct ads partnership a success and get this DTC site to commit to a long term advertising contract. If we can accomplish that we will have a site worth somewhere around $70k-90k in October. Not bad when you consider we bought it for $16.5k less than a year ago 😎.
That’s all for today. We have another newsletter coming out later this week detailing the changes in Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. If you are nerdy about SEO you will definitely want to check it out.
❤️
BowTiedWookie & BowTiedPlug
Great write up and Substack (and super cool you're into NFTs too). I put on acquire.gg that I have a $5K/m min to broker a site (as only charging 5%) but would be up for listing it on Flippa for you if interested.
Congrats on your success! I'm learning a lot from you & am excited to continue to follow your growth.