Happy Chinese New Year Anon,
Welcome to Episode 10 of the BowTiedWookie Substack. I believe this is the 13th week we have owned the site and it’s been tough to keep up with the pace of one article per week. From here on out the case study will be sent out every other week (hence the change to “Episode”).
January was an absolutely explosive month of growth for us and while it’s too early to say for sure I think we were way too conservative with our 2022 goals. (Also I’m selling another small starter site which I give info about at the end of the newsletter)
This week we will cover…
Traffic Update
Revenue Update
Costs Update
Site Redesign
Finally getting into good affiliate programs
Content strategy in light of new affiliates
Site Valuation
Selling A Starter Site
Traffic Update
We added 15 articles to the site this month. One of them is now a top 10 article in terms of traffic. Although this is great I had 25 articles planned for this month and all three of our writers had Covid issues and missed at least a week. I really want to cement 2 consistent writers but unfortunately have not gotten to that point yet.
On a brighter note, we saw a sizeable traffic uptick in the beginning of January and it has only continued to grow.
As you can see we had a pretty big uptick in the first week of January where we went from ~400 visitors per day to ~650 visitors per day. We’ve touched 698 organic clicks twice and I’m confident we will cross the 700 mark within the next few days.
Here is a breakdown of the traffic from new articles. This is accounting for about 80% of our total traffic growth. This is great to see because we have interlinked to around 12 existing posts which have also seen a small rank gain.
In February we are going for 20 new articles. This will be tough but is extremely important due to our new affiliate partners.
Revenue Update
Ok on to my favorite part. Traffic had a nice bump but revenue was even better. We had $747.15 in sales in the month of January which was massive growth and the site’s all-time high!
Amazon broke $100 dollars for the first time ever and the ebook had absolutely explosive growth. Next month I would not be shocked if both of these go down in terms of rev. We are adding offers to a few physical products from a site very closely aligned to our niche which offers a $40 CPA. These products will go on some of our top blogs so it would not surprise me if this product cannibalizes some of our existing sales.
I don’t want to get my hopes up too much but it would not shock me if we sold anywhere from 10-30 of this product over the next 30 days. Revenue growth could get really, really interesting over the next few weeks.
Costs Update
Total Spend this month: $805.25
If you’re good at math you’ll once again notice that we spent more than we made. However, several of these costs are yearly and if you look at the previous newsletters we are starting to close the gap.
Luckily revenue was great because we got nickel and dimed this month. We are getting a lot more email subscribers but still have not monetized it yet. Because of the email growth mail chimp costs went up despite the fact that email still makes basically no money. Now that we have good affiliate links that should change.
Content: $427.86
Mail Chimp: $39.40/monthly
Design Framework Plugin: $69/yearly
Google Pro Email: $10/year
Optin Monster: $29.99
New Theme: $229/yearly
Site Redesign
We currently use generate press and want to get into review articles. The current theme will make this really messy so we bought a new one that will better support blog posts. BowTiedPlug also hates the shit out of the current theme and has been talking about changing it before we even had the escrow completed when we bought the site.
(with love from BowTiedPlug)
When dealing with themes most likely you will go down three roads. Purchasing a theme directly from a company (GeneratePress, Astra, etc), Purchasing off of ThemeForest, or using a developer to build a custom theme.
With each of these, you face a couple of challenges.
Directly from a company: Usually, these themes are made without a specific niche in mind so they fall short on capabilities and require more development or extension plugins.
Themeforest: There are only a handful of well-supported themes that have a big userbase. Sometimes, these themes can fit really well with your niche and provide tons of unique features out of the box such as recipe posts. The problem is that these themes usually don’t update much. And almost all of them fall short of what you need or add pointless things such as mouse cursor animations.
Custom: Only do this is you have a good budget, a trustworthy developer, or actually have a clue what is going on in the code. (we are not there yet)
Oxygen and Automatic CSS
We like Oxygen because it cuts out the middleman of a theme. It’s actually a theme and page builder rather than a theme so you remove that dependency of the theme developer. So it puts the control back in your hands.
Features We Love About Oxygen:
Custom archives for anything: We will be adding ACF to categories for a “Mini blog post section” and then that will be referenced at the bottom of each category to boost SEO.
Dynamic data: It can support almost any kind of data and also create conditions off of it. We will be looking to move our digital product database within the site rather than the current custom-built solution on a separate server.
Gutenberg Integration: The content authors can still use WordPress as they would before. But Oxygen allows you to create Gutenburg blocks or “Components”.
You can design a quote block, where content authors can only edit the content fields, not the design. Let’s say down the road you decide to change how the quote block looks. Then you can go into Oxygen and change the design and the new design will cascade and the content will remain. No more extension plugins!
Automatic.CSS absolutely blew my mind! It’s a design framework and big companies pay huge money for a framework like this! Rather than having to set padding, margin, for everything independently within a builder, you can apply the out-of-the-box classes and variables. The power in this is within their main settings, you can change things globally that will cascade down since everything is connected through the framework css classes. The owner has an amazing YouTube channel and there is a really supportive community behind it.
We believe this will easily be one of the top WordPress plugins in the next few years as they roll out for Elementor, WooCommerce, and more.
(commentary from BowTiedWookie)
Because we now have access to around 20 giant retailers it makes sense to update the theme for review posts (along with everything BowTiedPlug said). Having said that I am very nervous to update the theme. Often times there is at least a temporary traffic drop as Google tries to understand the changes on the website. Sometimes you get a permanent hit…. Either way, the long-term vision of the site requires a new theme to support ~50 review posts we want to write in 2022. This will also become the “default template” for future sites we buy as the license supports unlimited sites for $230. (I doubt we buy another site this year but you never know).
Finally Getting Into Affiliate Programs
This was a personal vendetta for BowTiedWookie this month. I thought joining affiliate programs was going to be easy, peasy, lemon squeasy. Instead, it was difficult, difficult, lemon, difficult. Towards the end of January, we finally got into some legit programs. This is a big deal not only for revenue but also for content. We had lots of content ideas but they were really targeted towards the ebook which is hard to convert. We were trying to stay away from specific product reviews because we could only monetize with Amazon. Now we can sell relevant products for a 4x higher commission.
At the end of the day success with getting into affiliate programs came down to four things
Applying to a fuck load of programs: This is self-explanatory you need to apply for a bunch of stuff. Applying to 3 and calling it a day isn’t going to cut it unless you have a massive site.
Inflating our traffic numbers 10%-20%: Moral gray area. But we are growing fast and if I saw another rejection email I was going to lose it!
Using Flexoffers: I mainly applied to programs in Commission Junction and Share a Sale. I was met with rejections from 39/40 applications. The one acceptance was something we were not really interested in. I initially applied to a few affiliates in Flex Offers and was rejected. A few weeks ago I started applying to a bunch of programs in Flex Offers and got accepted. There were 6 programs in Flex Offers that we were accepted into that we were rejected from on Commission Junction. The commission isn’t quite as good but at least we got in.
Targeting affiliate programs in the CBD niches. This one was honestly pretty smart. CBD really has nothing to do with our niche. But we were getting emails constantly from CBD programs asking us to join their affiliate networks. I looked for CBD-specific programs and started applying to them. Once I got in I would email the affiliate manager asking to see a full list of what they offered. This is how I found what I believe our top affiliate will be this year. They offer a $40 CPA on a product that is highly relevant to our niche. ( TBH I did B.S. them a little bit that we would be doing CBD-related content later this year which we 100% will not do).
New Content Strategy
As I previously stated these new affiliate programs give us way more clarity with content. We were basically writing articles trying to target people who would buy our ebook. Even though we had 20 sales this month the conversion % is less than 0.1% of all website visitors. Creating content around specific products will give us higher earning potential due to the more conversion-oriented queries. It also diversifies our revenue and opens up to potential website and newsletter sponsors if we perform well.
Site Valuation
This may be a bit premature but the revenue increase already has me thinking about the valuation of the site. Typically, valuations are based on the last 6-8 months. However, if we just looked at the last month ($747.15) and used a 40x monthly profit valuation the site would be worth $29,886. We couldn’t sell it for this much now but if we stayed flat in terms of revenue over the next 6 months I think we would be able to sell it for this pretty easily. This is super rough math I expect site profit to at least double over the next 6 months and there are expenses that will need to be accounted for in the final valuation.
As a side note, I’m seeing the valuations of content sites rise pretty dramatically. There are complete pieces of shit on Flippa selling for $8k-$12k. These sites have 99% spam backlinks, >30% of all traffic coming from one page and are still selling for a 40x multiple. I think over the next 12 months 40x-45x multiples will go north of 50x (even more for really high-quality sites).
Due to supply chain shortages, the demand for sites selling physical products (especially from China) has definitely flatlined valuations whereas content sites seem to be going for crazy valuations. Again this is subjective I’m not an expert and don’t spend nearly as much time as I used to on the brokerage sites. But it is hard to imagine anyone wanting to buy an FBA business or Shopify DTC store when you could buy an affiliate site and fulfill the products yourself if you really want to go the physical product route.
Selling a Starter Site
I have a starter site in the petcare space I am looking to sell. I made the site in February of 2021 and it gets basically no traffic (5-10 clicks per month). It has around 200 thin posts of mostly autogenerated content (I wrote 4 long-form informational articles as well). If you like the pet space and are willing to rewrite a bunch of articles this would not be a bad domain to do it with (the kw research is basically done for you and the site is out of the sandbox). You could run the site for $25 a year with everything on there, it is extremely clean and fast. Looking to get $400 for it. Shoot me a dm or email if you are interested.
That’s it for this week I hope you enjoyed it! If you have any feedback or questions please leave a comment. It’s the only way I know if anyone is reading 🤣
Love your articles, congrats on January revenue.
What do you use to test affiliate offers? Is there a plug-in to run affiliate display ads?
I've tried doing it through Ezoic's native ads option but it's very wonky & decreases revenue.