Happy New Year Anon,
Welcome to Week 8 of the BowTiedWookie substack. It’s crazy to think we’ve only had this site for ~2 months. This has been an incredible learning experience for us and we are ready to hit it extremely hard in 2022. Our goal is to take this from a $16k business to $100k business by December of next year.
This week we will cover
Traffic Update
Revenue Update
Costs Update
Amazon One Link
New vs. Old Content
2022 Goals
Traffic Update
We published 43 blogs since October 19th. So far not much traffic difference but things are starting to look up. Impression volume for some of our top terms went down despite maintaining roughly the same average position. This indicates that these search terms are less popular in the winter. Additionally, 11 of our top 50 posts (in terms of December traffic) were written by us.
Below you can see a breakdown of the organic clicks we have for each post we have written. As expected ~30 get virtually no traffic ( for now) and 3-5 posts have crushed it and even contributed towards sales (thanks GTM!)
Revenue Update
Time for sales! We did $486 in sales in December which is our all-time high. When you consider that we cut ads entirely this is pretty impressive in our not-so-humble opinion. We can say with confidence at this point that pulling the ads was the right move financially as well as drastically improving the user experience. Additionally, Amazon Affiliate sales were up modestly and the kindle product is still chugging along despite the fact that the only time we log in is to check sales once a month.
Digital Product: $419.86 (14 sales)
Amazon Associates: $40.53
Amazon KDP: $26.24
Costs Update
Total Costs: $716.00
Content: $681.00
Mail chimp $35.00/monthly
If you are good at math you can once again tell that we spent more than we made this month. We are continuing to pour money into content and the sooner we get the content posted the sooner indexes, drives traffic, and begins making money. We used 9 different writers this month and luckily have narrowed it down to 2 writers who will each do 3-5 blogs per week. Both make 1-2 custom graphics per article and use Grammarly Pro. We pay them $0.03 per word. Until we get revenue up closer to $1,000 per month we won’t be able to do much more than that.
Amazon One Link
If you use Amazon Associates you should make sure you are signed up for Amazon One link as well. One link allows you to monetize your website in any country. So if your Amazon Associates account is registered with a U.S. business but someone in Canada clicks to Amazon you will not get credit for the sale. There are around 10 countries that are part of the program and we signed up for all of them. You also need to make sure the product you list is available in multiple countries. Otherwise, when they click on the link they will be redirected to Amazon’s homepage in whatever country they are in. We made only made an extra $3.00 from it this month but as we scale it will become more important. Side note we anticipated this number to be a lot higher since ~50% of our traffic comes from international sources.
Revising Old Content vs. Writing New Content
As impressions started trending down earlier this month we started looking more closely at our content. Although the information is very good we still have an extremely high bounce rate. We can also tell that ~90% of our site visitors last less than 10 seconds. (sorry you may need to zoom in)
If visitors are on the page less than 10 seconds the intro sucks. Doesn’t matter what we think or how good the article as a whole is, the bottom line is that we are not hooking readers at the beginning. Because of this many of the people who visit the website are probably unaware of the digital product. Over the next month we are going to go through the top 25 blogs and rewrite the intro to do two things.
One tell a personal story
Meet the reader where they are in their journey
For example, if someone is searching “How long to bake a frozen pizza” you don’t need to define what a frozen pizza is and when you should eat it, instead you should get right into how to warm up the frozen pizza. This is a bit tricky because defining frozen pizza and giving a big preamble is probably good from a keyword perspective. Because a lot of the blogs rank well we will do our best to not delete any content. If anything we will just move it to the bottom of the page.
Email Growth & Selling Leads
We had a pretty good idea about a way to monetize the email list long-term this month. While doing some keyword research on several competitors we noticed two separate sites were offering a free consultation from a registered professional for the primary health condition our site covers. Obviously, BowTiedPlug and I aren’t going to be able to give a consultation but we could sell leads to one of these sites. I have no idea if they would be interested in doing this or if they are able to monetize a remote audience. Having said that there are a few micro-influencers on Instagram who seem to be doing the same thing. Selling a free consultation for this would be a lot easier than trying to get someone to purchase an ebook for $30. Several people recommended Black Hat Wizard’s cold email course so we will probably check that out in a few weeks.
For now we are testing a new email sequence that we hope will improve the engagement rate and hopefully get a couple of sales. We should have enough data on if this was a success or failure in 3 or 4 weeks. At that point we will hopefully have an idea if we can sell leads or not.
2022 Goals
We are coming out of the gate really really hard this year. We have around $3,200 in the bank and need to be smart about where we spend money to maximize sales. Ideally, we have the ability to exit sometime in Q4, so we have a rough trajectory of goals we want to hit throughout the year.
Our first goal is to hit $1,000 in revenue in the month of March. Ideally, we can do this by increasing digital product sales and integrating a high ticket affiliate offer in the email sequence.
Our second goal is to consistently get 600 organic clicks per day by the end of May
Our third goal is to land a consulting client that pays us $5,000 per based month. If everything goes according to plan this would allow us to quit our jobs at the end of the year and focus on website flipping full time!
Until next week anon,
BowTiedWookie
Cool stuff. What kind of consultant work are you planning on doing? Finding clients on Upwork?