Writing For Dollars: Building A Digital Asset For Sale

[BizyDad]

Goal: Build a brand new site from scratch, rank it, monetize it, using as little of my own time as possible, and sell it in 2 years for 6 figures.

Why: Why not? Because I can? Because for the last 3 years I've gone thru many ups and downs to build an agency and now my guys have a certain amount of available time to devote to something other than client work. So it is better to say, because WE can. This is intended to very much be a side project. An experiment even. But if it works well, it opens doors and possibilities

How: This is at least partially inspired by the writers thread. While reading that, it occured to me that I have a team of writers and we can produce high quality content, aided by AI. We will leverage our SEO tactics to get rankings. I have only the vaguest idea of how we will monetize it, but for starters we aren't focused on that. I want to build traffic first.

Initially, the vision is to produce on online publication. That may be all this ever is until I sell it. But it is flexible enough an idea to become an ecom store, a forum, a brand, a manufacturer, who knows? I may not even sell it, if it's spinning off sufficient monthly revenue. We'll see...

The Journey So Far: It was important that my team be on board with the game plan and have a sense of ownership of this project. So the first step was a brainstorming session. I had them read a few Authority Hacker articles to get the juices flowing. Then we all brought ideas for different niches we could target, and out of a list of roughly 60 we narrowed it down to the top five. That was 10 days ago.

We did keyword research around these five niches, and one was a clear winner. We bought a domain. We put up the basics of a site. That was last Friday.

I can't believe how excited my team is about this. Usually I'm the super excited one in the office, I'm surrounded by a bunch of laid-back dudes.

I won't reveal the niche or the website. Maybe I'll give some hints later, but for now I'll just say that we chose it because we found a host of solid keyword phrases that indicated people were definitely interested in the kinds of articles we want to produce, and we identified that there were actually very few articles of this type being produced.

In other words the interest level is high, and the competition level is low. An SEO's dream.

But my sense is we need to be moving fast in order to become an authority in this arena. This won't stay noncompetitive for long. It is an area that none of us have expertise in but we all find interesting.

I gave one writer a week of playing around with Jarvis to get really comfortable with it. That's still a work in progress, but we've got our first two articles written.

Next steps: put some finishing touches on the site. Get email/tracking/CRM set up.

Do a lot more keyword research. I have a team member working on this part.

Create 10 to 15 informational, educational type articles for the site. This is also in process.

Create a media list. I have a third team member working on that part.

Other Goals/Benefits:
1. I do have a content strategy in mind, and I'll be sharing more details on that later. My goal with this thread is to share different ideas and tactics that work. Or even what doesn't.

To date, this real estate thread is the closest I've had to a progress thread. Now I want to do one for real.

2. I also want to experiment and learn new skills. For example, I suck at emails. But this thread got my wheels turning again, and I'd like to use this new site as a way to improve my/my team's skills.

3. Frankly, having a site like this will open other doors and sales possibilities for our agency.

4. If it doesn't make a dime itself, I can always leverage the idea that we built a site that gets xx,xxx visitors per month into new client types.

5. Along the way will be testing various SEO theories that I don't feel comfortable using a client's site to test. So there's at least a small chance that this project might go nowhere because I only kinda accidentally blew it up. That's not likely, I am definitely interested in selling this site, but since as it is our own site from scratch, I'm not afraid to break my own conventions and share the results of that with you Fam.

6. Honestly, there's so many people on this forum who are just spending their wheels trying to figure out a way to make money. I'm hoping I can prove that producing a quality content for a website in an intelligently chosen niche is a way to get yourself to a sustainable income.

7. Prove "them" wrong. You know, the people who will inevitably think this idea is trash. If someone else was writing this progress thread, I would probably be one of "them".

I learned SEO tactics a decade ago by getting a blog/store to 50,000 visits a month in a low margin industry. I guess here I am 12 years later crazy enough to think that I'm going to do it all over again, but I'm telling myself that this time I'm going to be smarter about monetizing it and smarter about how to prioritize time.

To be determined...

Time tables: other than the preliminary goal of selling this at the 2-year mark, which may or may not change, I'm not putting timetables on this project. We are in the business of serving clients, and this is intended to be a side hustle of sorts for our agency, not something that distracts us from our bread and buttah.

Is It Fastlane: No. It doesn't need to be. But for all the reasons I listed above, it brings a lot of value to my agency, and we can bring value to a tens of thousands of readers a month.

But if this works, not only can you do it, my guys will be able to do it again and again. And that thought excited me enough to document this journey.

The forum has given me so many ideas and friendships, this is one way I want to give back.

One rule: Don't discuss "hidden" niches or ask what niche you should choose. These tactics are relatively easily duplicated. I'll answer most any questions as I'm able, but if you have a good idea for a niche with untapped potential, don't bring it up on a public forum. Use some common sense.

 

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[BizyDad]

Google did an update targeting AI generated content. Didn't want to post an update too soon, because I wanted to be sure.

But that is what the last several weeks showed me. My traffic down 70%. Rankings fell off the mountain.

But here's the (first) interesting thing. It's only 4 pages. I started digging into why. These 4 pages were some of the earliest pages we wrote. So I thought maybe it had to do with site structure, # of clicks from the home page, that sort of thing. But I ruled it our because some of our older content still ranks fine.

Then I talked to the writers, and one guy spotted it immediately. These were the articles he used Jarvis/Jasper to write. Early on, we were playing with that tool. And of course early on we focused on some of the higher traffic/low competition phrases, so as a result some of our best performing pages got hit, and traffic tanked.

So he gave me a list of the 8 articles he used AI to write, and I cross reference that. 7 had been showing up and all 7 had rankings drops. (The first 4 had first page rankings, the other 3 had deeper page rankings, and the last one targeted a tiny phrase that apparently never got off the ground.)

BUT... Our other pages are still ranking basically were they've been.

I find that interesting because Google said the spam/quality update was supposed to be a site-wide update, not a page update. Also, the date we got hit doesn't line up with the spam/quality update.

Feel free to check your rankings for the week of Sep 23rd. I'd love some corroboration on this.

BUT here's the second interesting thing...

They are pulling back on the update. The last 10 days or so, we are seeing rankings recovery. And thus far, we have done nothing to the site other than continue to post content. The rankings and traffic aren't all the way back, but they have shown solid improvement.

Here is a chart of the last 3 months


And here's the last interesting thing...

Google admits to a "logging error" on Sep 21.

Data anomalies in Search Console - Search Console Help

What's up with my graph?On rare occasions, there might be an event in Search Console that could affect your report data. For example, if we change our data aggregation methods or there is a logging er

support.google.com

Now that could be an explanation for all of this.

But a "logging error" that only impacted my AI generated content? And if this was a logging error, and search data just went "missing", then why did I still see some search volume for these article corresponding to a big drop in ranking?

Naw, IMO this is a sign of things to come. Google knows the difference between human written and AI written, and they are starting to draw a distinction. We cancelled Jasper a while back. Now we'll be rewriting those 8 articles. I don't want to be in the line of fire when Google drops the hammer.

---

Lastly, we lost a team member this week. She decided she's not cut out for marketing, she's going back to her previous career. So this project is up in the air ATM.

Personally, I want to pivot to a new niche that is

1-More established
2-Has more traffic. I mean WAY more. Both more phrases and higher volumes.
3-Is actually less competitive. (Surprising)

I found one. I just have to convince the team. I could just "force" it, but you get better buy in when everyone is free to draw their own conclusion.

We chose this niche because it could lead to a proper business. The thought was monetize via ads, then affiliate, and if that worked well, convert it to ecom.

But now, we don't want to be in the ecom business for this niche. We all agree on that. And I didn't realize back then how much $ one can make just off mediavine. So I want to pivot. The team is on the fence, which is better than 2 weeks ago when they wanted to keep pushing forward in this space.

I'll keep you all posted...

 

[BizyDad]

For starters on a project like this keyword research is key. I have a formula I use that I'm not totally comfortable sharing. Instead I'll give a shout out to @lludwig for this excellent share a while back.

For a new site, I would follow this technique.

Keyword Golden Ratio: Start to Rank in 2 Days | Mangools

The Keyword Golden Ratio (KGR) is a data-driven way to find keywords that are underserved on the internet. Find out how it works!

mangools.com

If you are looking to start something, this will get your gears going...

 

[BizyDad]

I see now how it really is a commitment to start one of these progress threads. Kudos to anybody who has one that has lasted even just three pages.

I did the keyword research (not that its ever "done" but its "done" for now).

OK, we launched the site today, two days off schedule. I had a personal tragedy affect some things this week, but this is when being surrounded by a team really helps buoy the entrepreneurial journey. Freelancers can't help you on that level.

My one writer got his ten articles done. We backed dated a few, and scheduled a head the next 2 weeks.

The other writer I gave an in depth article intended as a helpful resource, and another research heavy article that is more "newsy". The first one turned out to be 3-4x bigger than I thought. He says he tried to tell me, but he never actually told me.

We had a discussion about directness in communication and his owning his own deadlines or at least owning when it becomes apparent that a deadline is unreasonable. We pared down the big project and it'll be done Monday. The other by end of the week.

It's a minor bummer, because this page was going to be an anchor page to begin our SEO. I've decided we would start with a handful of forum links in appropriate locations. I'm really just looking for Google to notice the site and get a little data on how visitors to this well researched article/resource page will interact with us.

Will people even be interested in the content? Will they sign up for the newsletter? Will they submit suggestions (that's the call to action at the end of the article)? Anyways, that will be the focus of our activities for next week.

Anyways, phase 1 of the project is done.

The site loads really fast. .7 second on desktop (largest content paintful). If you don't know what that is I promise I will write a little more about it, but for now it's just a geek bragging). On mobile I get a 2.3-3.2 sec time, which isn't great but it is good. I need to train my new guy not to upload PNG files when a jpg will do. JPG files are smaller, thus load faster. Even if you convert to webp or something similar, I've found it is generally better to start with the smaller file size.

Still in the last two weeks I've been seeing the return of some really slow loading sites hitting #1 in the rankings, so Google's vaunted page speed update has, at least in the short term, had perhaps the opposite effect than I expected. I don't expect it to last. But it does mean that I don't need to obsess over speed right now.

I really really want to fix this myself, it just BUGS me, but I said I would do as little work on this as possible and fixing an image so I can report a better result to you guys probably isn't a good use of my time. Neither is the stream of consciousness I just did, but hopefully someone gets value out of that.

Anyways, 6 easy to rank pages live, 4 "in the hopper", 2 more being written, and we begin phase 2 next week, slowly promoting the site. Will need to finish creating the persona we wanted to create. Need to create a privacy policy and get it on there. Have several minor touch up issues that have come up.

That's it for now.

 

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[BizyDad]

Ok, quick update.

Not much has happened. But that opened my eyes to some more kinks in the system. It's ok, this is a side project (repeat 5 times).

The Bad News First

1. My newest team member found a higher paying job. In the short term, this means more work for me, something I hope to rectify in the coming year. I need to build more redundancy into my agency, so I don't become the bottleneck. Also, he was my "wordpress guy" and he was pretty good and fast about it, so it stinks losing that skill.

In the long run, this is a blessing. I hired him to handle all our ad campaigns as his primary job duty, and contrary to my normal modus operandi, I gave him a long leash and trusted him more than anyone I've hired for the position. Now having gone through his body of work, our campaign results decreased 10-30% overall, with only 2 campaigns actually having been made better by his being here. So that was an expensive lesson. Hopefully I've learned it.

2. I had left the putting up of article to the team. I assigned a number of articles and the WP guy was to make sure to get them on the site. My writer rightly focused on other activities, but no one communicated to me that we only put up 2 articles in the last 7 weeks.

3. We still haven't built any real links for this bad boy (and I refuse to buy links for this project, although that would really be much easier and I'm starting to consider it. Ok, I considered it. Still no.)

4. We are still months away from even thinking about monetizing this site. We only got 4 search engine visitors in December, down from 11 in November.

The Good News



1. Things are improving of their own accord. Average ranking shows most things in the page 3-page 7 range, but we are now showing up for 135 phrases (102 last month) and we had many jumps in rankings. Several phrases (about 10) are on the verge of getting to the first page.

2. After a meeting about this last week, my lead writer on the project pumped out 6 articles that I have to find the time to get scheduled on here.

3. Given that there is so little work done so far, I take this update as confirmation of 2 things.

• We chose a good niche and good keywords. (At least good in terms of traffic. Until I put affiliate links on here, who knows how good the niche actually is).
• There are dozens (hundreds) more searchers for some of these topics than my original research showed.

I expected this would be the case, but seeing it "in the wild" bring a renewed sense of confidence. These impressions are all from 6 articles. I have dozens of topics researched. (Insert fingers crossed emoji here).

4. Just want to say thanks to @MTF for his writing about Jarvis.ai.

My writer's feedback has been quite positive about it helping him write these articles, as well helping him overcome writers block on our client work. He echoed what others have said in other threads, that you really have to fact check the ai. But today he reported back that he's categorized my list of future articles into low and high fact checking. And his taking some initiative like that to do something that I hadn't asked him to do was pretty awesome.

I'm not sure when I'll next post an update...

 

[BizyDad]

Been a minute, update time. Like T Davis said, sometimes it doesn't take much to get things rolling. My chart is nowhere near as good, but we have achieved liftoff.



That's what I call it when you stop hitting 0 traffic days. This graph is just our organic search traffic chart.

We've put up a few articles. One of them got indexed and ranked on March 27th and it is ranking high.



It's a little phrase, and we've been half-assing this thing so far and the last 3 days its been #1 for the main targeted keyword.

So that's our first #1 ranking. Woo Hoo! Still only 1 link built.

I'm a little more motivated to get content on this thing. We are actually a few weeks ahead, so that's progress too.

Until next time...

 

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[BizyDad]

It has been a year. It's probably pretty close to a year to the day that we decided on the niche and moved forward.

Here's my last 3 months chart.



Here's our traffic to the site.




Still no monetization. Won't worry about it until we hit 1k visitors. But this is growth and the system we have in place continues to do the right work.

This is still the result of just writing decent articles based on carefully selected, low competition keywords, on a website that has received very little publicity (no social, and a couple of links).

I have nothing to brag about here, and I know we could have achieved this faster, but I am proud of my team for what they've done and where we are. I'm looking forward to the coming year. Unfortunately, it won't be ending with a big sales figure, that will have to come in a future year, and I'm ok with that.

 

[BizyDad]

Shoot, we got almost as many impressions this last month as we did the previous 3 months combined. Good ranking movement too. That's cool.



Nice percentage jumps in traffic too.

But I am no longer happy with where we are at. I had a chat with a friend of mine. 8 months ago she launched what is now a 2000 page blog. This past month she garnered 120k visitors, and made $3.5k in ad revenue. She isn't even doing affiliate stuff yet. It's just her and a well trained VA. She's going to launch another site soon, and she thinks her revenue should grow to $5k next month.

Her lane is so much faster than this...

Just goes to show what's possible out there.

 

[Andy Black]

James Schramko calls it an “infinity project”…

Have a project running in the background that your team loves working on, and can switch to when they’ve completed client work.

I try to always have a couple of non-client “infinity projects” on the go.

 

[BizyDad]

Well, nothing has happened. Literally, we've accomplished nothing since the last post. This is on me. I've just been so busy, I'm the bottleneck.

Impressions plummeted on Jan 13. Rankings too.

And then a week ago rankings perked back up. Our articles are ranking higher than previous. (orange line) Impressions (purple line)are coming back too.



Most are on the 2nd or 3rd page of Google. We're getting a few visitors a day. And they seem to be reading the articles. Here's the change in the time on site the last 6 days vs the previous month. I can't figure this out, because we didn't change or improve any of the content.



Anyways, I hope to have more content on there this weekend. This is still a tiny site with not even 200 daily impressions, but its funny to me how close we are to popping through to the first page considering we still have only built 1 solid link.

 

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[T. Davis]

Well, nothing has happened. Literally, we've accomplished nothing since the last post. This is on me. I've just been so busy, I'm the bottleneck.

View attachment 42186

Anyways, I hope to have more content on there this weekend. This is still a tiny site with not even 200 daily impressions, but its funny to me how close we are to popping through to the first page considering we still have only built 1 solid link.

My business uses a similar model and one key thing I've learned is: it takes time. Our Content Writing efforts usually show up in traffic growth 6 months to 1 year later. (See pic below)

Keep it up and you'll get there!

 

[GuestUser4aMPs1]

@BizyDad Sure, I'll throw the hat in the ring.

I'll admit it's been a while since I've dealt with these types of assets but I'll pull up the notes.

Do you have any general advice you'd like to share?

This may end up being a brain dump from a guy who's spent no time building a site myself, but a LOT of time selling and evaluating them. So, here goes...

— Flipping sites is very lucrative, but also very short-term and risky. Things can (and will) change on a dime. My supervisor had some affiliate sites selling insurance or something, cranking out $100k per month for about a year, and then one day the traffic just...vanished. Some Google update killed it. Should've sold at the top. He still has PTSD : )

— Basically all the SEO stuff I've forgotten by now. But listen to the Authority Hacker Podcast, they are top notch and helped me really understand the landscape much better. They'll go over how to pick a niche with a good balance of potential revenue vs competition.

— At the end of the day, Google is like a utility. Search the documentation for their ranking factors (at least what they reveal) and give them exactly what they're looking for. Their preferences evolve over time but in general: Create a site for humans to read and use, not computers.

— That means while effective to a limited extent, keyword stuffing and low-quality articles written by AI or third world writers won't get you that far. Gaming the system isn't the best strategy long-term.

— When selling, organic traffic is good as gold. Social or Paid media-dependent sites require ongoing active strategy, which can be a headache for a new owner. Therefore, sites with the majority of traffic coming organically commands a higher multiple.

— USA traffic websites usually command a higher multiple. BUT...there's a growing market of foreign-speaking content sites that are highly, HIGHLY undervalued at present. Examples: Acheter / Vendre un Site Rentable (Média, SaaS, e-Commerce, Entreprise) I DotMarket.eu

— It's better than nothing, but when it comes to monetization, Amazon Associates is the lowest IQ and most unforgiving option. During the pandemic, Amazon-only sites were killed as their rates were slashed. See if you can go direct with your affiliates to avoid this or go with non-physical products (selling leads/call connects instead).

— If you go with Amazon, use Genius Link to localize your links for the appropriate AMZ country store.

— When you're looking for companies to promote as affiliates, you can even reach out and set up custom agreements with service providers who don't have an affiliate program yet. Not only will you have exclusive access to that vendor but you can also command more favorable rates. I've seen this a few times and is a really great, creative way to make everyone more money that isn't the standard plug-and-play stuff

— If you serve ads, we've seen sites double revenue just from hooking up to Ezoic/Mediavine. That said you have to be careful; If you have a high-commission product you're selling on your site, it may LOWER your overall earnings because you're diverting visitors from high-ticket purchases via ads.

— We've seen Mediavine perform much better than Ezoic, although Mediavine has higher traffic requirements.

— One of my favorite parts of this was figuring out creative ways to get high-quality backlinks. You can always measure how search engines merit your site by checking your Domain Authority on aHrefs. For example, right now The Fastlane Forum has a DA of 48. That's incredibly good!

— One strategy people use to get a head start on rankings is to buy expired domains with some level of relevant backlinks. It's pretty clever. True example: We sold an affiliate site (selling coffee products) that was built on top of a domain that used to be a local coffee shop. The coffee shop went out of business a while ago, but someone snagged that domain and had some pretty good backlinks to local news outlets and the like.

— Speaking of backlinks. PBNs (Private Blog Networks) are very powerful tools to improve rank. But they're extremely risky. Either build your own PBN, or pay a premium for one that's with a trusted party/few sites. But NEVER buy links from places like the Hoth, it's extremely stupid and can jeopardize your rankings.

— One of the best ways to get super-high-quality backlinks is to do HARO (Help A Reporter Out). Approach someone in the media to be a subject matter expert. That's really how very small sites get on Forbes and such.

— Same goes for Press Release stuff. Do people read press releases? Not really. But if you can find a way to get your link onto one, boom you're on Forbes.com and command a higher authority.

— Guest posts are another thing. Do it legit with other sites in the space. Paid guest posts aren't good. You could get your site penalized (against Google TOS).

Do different revenue streams generate different multiples?

YES absolutely. We had a metric called traffic-to-earnings ratio that helped determine multiples. Stuff like selling insurance is extremely lucrative but also extremely competitive. Of course if they have healthy SEO metrics and nothing is shady, those signify stability and thus a higher multiple as well.

What's the thing that people wish they had done differently when they're at the finish line that they didn't know when they were at the starting point?

— Sell when traffic's going up, it won't last forever. Google updates routinely decimate sometimes *legitimate* sites, and can even rank shit sites higher. I've seen this a few times.

— Monetize sooner. Every month you don't monetize is a month of income (times 3-5x) that you won't get on the exit. So, just imagine that you could be making $2k/month right now by monetizing. Every month you don't, you're really turning down $6-12k at that moment because that's what you'll get when you sell!

I could probably go into more but will pause for now. It's a fascinating industry with a lot of nuance!

 

[Tiago]

Following this closely. By the way, just took a look at Jarvis. I actually said out loud "What the f*ck?!" when I saw what they do. Very exciting, thanks for sharing.

 

[BizyDad]

The market decides.

How will ensure quality content? The market will let me know.

How big will this thing get and what kinds of articles will it have? The market will let me know.

I wrote a thread about how MJ taught me that and I wanted to mention it early here because:

1. It explains why I don't have concrete plans on where I want to take this.

2. Since I'm writing this thread mainly for newer people, this seems like a good time as any to put a plug in for that post on entrepreneurial mindset.

3. It is a legit answer to the questions asked so far.

That said, I will come back when I have a little bit more time and give more detail answers to all the questions asked so far.

I honestly didn't expect to wake up and see this much activity on the thread. That was a pleasant surprise. And pretty awesome.

Thank you everyone for the interest in this journey. Good to know I'm not writing only for the lurkers.

 

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[BizyDad]

Ok, trying to make slow steady progress. Delegated 2 more stories. Need to come up with 5 more stories ideas to be written. Since all my guys are now maxed, the remaining keyword research falls on me. I said I'd work on it as little as possible, but I didn't say not at all. It makes sense for me to do this part anyways, because part of my goal is to test some silo tactics (sorry, SEO jargon, will explain later, or you can Google it). If the tactics work out, I'll sahre the basics here, I might make an INSIDERS post about it specifically, but that is months away yet. Silos are silos, I don't know if there's value in the details.

Had a quick discussion with the team. We are looking to create a persona for the "site owner" so when we sell, the persona goes with it. We discussed who would manage the social media accounts, as well as certain ethic implications and procedural issues that might arise from doing this. Took 15 min, have a plan to move forward that everybody is comfortable with.

Next steps: put some finishing touches on the site. Get email/tracking/CRM set up.

Do a lot more keyword research. I have a team member working on this part.

Create 10 to 15 informational, educational type articles for the site. This is also in process.

Create a media list. I have a third team member working on that part.

The finishing touches are almost done. Just need to add the articles and some blocks of text, about us pages, that kind of thing. Emails/tracking/CRM are set up.

Decided we will launch with 5 articles live and 5 scheduled ahead. At least initially I am thinking we publish posts Tuesday morning and Friday afternoon. So we'll have content 2 1/2 weeks out. Part of my goal will be publishing consistently. This will give us a minimum frequency to shoot for. If we are able to write faster (highly likely), we can always increase the frequency, but I think its better to start slow and increase than over shoot now and slow down later.

Media list got started. It is on the calendar to be worked on tomorrow also.

Adding to the list: creating social accounts, creating a list of possible revenue sources (generally meaning affiliates programs for now), and teaching my new guy my preferred method to optimize the pages.

That's it for today, I'm off to stare at data!

 

[BizyDad]

Goody! I found a competitor! Which led to me finding a half dozen more. Only one is over a year old and that's the one we have to beat.

Now I have definitive proof that we can achieve the goal. That competitor is definitely worth 6 figs based on my traffic analysis.

(Up till now I found an article here or there that discussed these topics but not the sites dedicated to only talking about it.)

So glad to make this discovery, adding to the to-do's: competitor research. This will give me link ideas, monetization tactics, story ideas, etc.

Update: Just found a great source of images by glancing at the competitor's site. Solving problems before they are problems is the best. Ok, back to keyword research.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Normally I would poo-poo something that relies entirely on 3rd parties and affiliating, but one look at digital properties for sale at Empire Flippers, Flippa and other websites, it's clear that the strategy works and can deliver 5-figures monthly nets.

 

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[BizyDad]

Any chance you could pay him to do some of this as a side hustle? He may have a higher paying job but I bet it still isn't paying him enough.

I have people who freelance WP already. It was nice not to have to go outside my agency for it, for once.

Although his WP skills were solid, my review of is main work has me questioning his ethics, and that's a deal breaker. I'm not saying he's a scammer or anything drastic like that, just that he isn't the most forthright individual and let's say his problem solving skills are lacking.

Frankly, I'd rather hire someone from the forum than give this guy another penny.

Normally I would poo-poo something that relies entirely on 3rd parties and affiliating, but one look at digital properties for sale at Empire Flippers, Flippa and other websites, it's clear that the strategy works and can deliver 5-figures monthly nets.

That's precisely how I feel/felt.

That's why I see this as a short term play, not a long term hold. Like I said at the outset, if someone else had made this thread, I'd probably be rolling my eyes. Affiliate payouts can drop or disappear at the whim of the producer, and that's just one possible risk.

Which is why the site/brand is structured in a way that it could morph into an ecommerce store if we want to go that route. Time will tell...

 

[BizyDad]

How's this been going

So far, so good.

I hired a new team member to replace the one who quit in Dec. With her on board, I am digging out of my backlog of work, and we have finally gotten on a content schedule that is working.

Oh, and we got our first #1 ranking about 4 weeks ago. It's a little phrase, about 150 searches a month. I'm on my phone and don't want to share fancy graphs this time, but I know we are getting daily traffic, I'm guessing maybe 10-30/day now.

Funny thing about the #1 is I still haven't really started doing SEO tricks. It's just good keyword research, decent articles that address the topic (search query), and like 2 or 3 links.

Still a ways from monetizing, but starting to give it actual thought.

Edit... Just realized I already mentioned the #1 ranking. And it was closer to 6 weeks. So yeah, not much new I guess. Lol.

 

[BizyDad]

Is this all organic traffic or does she use paid ads to drive traffic to the site as well?
If you are comparing your organic traffic to someone who is also using paid traffic, it's probably not a good comparison. If you're unsure what traffic she might be paying for try analysing her domain with SEMRush or Spyfu.

It's all organic. We're in an SEO mastermind together, and she doesn't have the budget for paid.

But I forgot to mention this was her first month hitting that revenue figure. The reason being she qualified for mediavine. She thinks next month will be better in part because she will have the ads on the site for the full month.

Prior to this month she was making peanuts on Google adsense and a couple other smaller ad networks.

 

[jdm667]

Goal: Build a brand new site from scratch, rank it, monetize it, using as little of my own time as possible, and sell it in 2 years for 6 figures.

Why: Why not? Because I can? Because for the last 3 years I've gone thru many ups and downs to build an agency and now my guys have a certain amount of available time to devote to something other than client work. So it is better to say, because WE can. This is intended to very much be a side project. An experiment even. But if it works well, it opens doors and possibilities

How: This is at least partially inspired by the writers thread. While reading that, it occured to me that I have a team of writers and we can produce high quality content, aided by AI. We will leverage our SEO tactics to get rankings. I have only the vaguest idea of how we will monetize it, but for starters we aren't focused on that. I want to build traffic first.

Initially, the vision is to produce on online publication. That may be all this ever is until I sell it. But it is flexible enough an idea to become an ecom store, a forum, a brand, a manufacturer, who knows? I may not even sell it, if it's spinning off sufficient monthly revenue. We'll see...

The Journey So Far: It was important that my team be on board with the game plan and have a sense of ownership of this project. So the first step was a brainstorming session. I had them read a few Authority Hacker articles to get the juices flowing. Then we all brought ideas for different niches we could target, and out of a list of roughly 60 we narrowed it down to the top five. That was 10 days ago.

We did keyword research around these five niches, and one was a clear winner. We bought a domain. We put up the basics of a site. That was last Friday.

I can't believe how excited my team is about this. Usually I'm the super excited one in the office, I'm surrounded by a bunch of laid-back dudes.

I won't reveal the niche or the website. Maybe I'll give some hints later, but for now I'll just say that we chose it because we found a host of solid keyword phrases that indicated people were definitely interested in the kinds of articles we want to produce, and we identified that there were actually very few articles of this type being produced.

In other words the interest level is high, and the competition level is low. An SEO's dream.

But my sense is we need to be moving fast in order to become an authority in this arena. This won't stay noncompetitive for long. It is an area that none of us have expertise in but we all find interesting.

I gave one writer a week of playing around with Jarvis to get really comfortable with it. That's still a work in progress, but we've got our first two articles written.

Next steps: put some finishing touches on the site. Get email/tracking/CRM set up.

Do a lot more keyword research. I have a team member working on this part.

Create 10 to 15 informational, educational type articles for the site. This is also in process.

Create a media list. I have a third team member working on that part.

Other Goals/Benefits:
1. I do have a content strategy in mind, and I'll be sharing more details on that later. My goal with this thread is to share different ideas and tactics that work. Or even what doesn't.

To date, this real estate thread is the closest I've had to a progress thread. Now I want to do one for real.

2. I also want to experiment and learn new skills. For example, I suck at emails. But this thread got my wheels turning again, and I'd like to use this new site as a way to improve my/my team's skills.

3. Frankly, having a site like this will open other doors and sales possibilities for our agency.

4. If it doesn't make a dime itself, I can always leverage the idea that we built a site that gets xx,xxx visitors per month into new client types.

5. Along the way will be testing various SEO theories that I don't feel comfortable using a client's site to test. So there's at least a small chance that this project might go nowhere because I only kinda accidentally blew it up. That's not likely, I am definitely interested in selling this site, but since as it is our own site from scratch, I'm not afraid to break my own conventions and share the results of that with you Fam.

6. Honestly, there's so many people on this forum who are just spending their wheels trying to figure out a way to make money. I'm hoping I can prove that producing a quality content for a website in an intelligently chosen niche is a way to get yourself to a sustainable income.

7. Prove "them" wrong. You know, the people who will inevitably think this idea is trash. If someone else was writing this progress thread, I would probably be one of "them".

I learned SEO tactics a decade ago by getting a blog/store to 50,000 visits a month in a low margin industry. I guess here I am 12 years later crazy enough to think that I'm going to do it all over again, but I'm telling myself that this time I'm going to be smarter about monetizing it and smarter about how to prioritize time.

To be determined...

Time tables: other than the preliminary goal of selling this at the 2-year mark, which may or may not change, I'm not putting timetables on this project. We are in the business of serving clients, and this is intended to be a side hustle of sorts for our agency, not something that distracts us from our bread and buttah.

Is It Fastlane: No. It doesn't need to be. But for all the reasons I listed above, it brings a lot of value to my agency, and we can bring value to a tens of thousands of readers a month.

But if this works, not only can you do it, my guys will be able to do it again and again. And that thought excited me enough to document this journey.

The forum has given me so many ideas and friendships, this is one way I want to give back.

One rule: Don't discuss "hidden" niches or ask what niche you should choose. These tactics are relatively easily duplicated. I'll answer most any questions as I'm able, but if you have a good idea for a niche with untapped potential, don't bring it up on a public forum. Use some common sense.

Awesome idea -this is a great way to use the excess capacity of your team.

Niche privacy is a good idea. Sadly, people will steal your ideas in a heartbeat.

Is it an evergreen topic, or one that will need new content frequently (like daily news or state of the art tech reviews)?

I think the former will be easier to sell and get a higher valuation multiple, since it is more passive for a portfolio buyer.

Also, how much content do you imagine the "finished" site having at sale: 100 articles, or more like 1000?

 

[BizyDad]

Following this closely. By the way, just took a look at Jarvis. I actually said out loud "What the f*ck?!" when I saw what they do. Very exciting, thanks for sharing.

If you haven't already, check out this thread. I had heard about it previously, but dismissed it until I saw people in there talking about it.

 

[BizyDad]

Awesome idea -this is a great way to use the excess capacity of your team.

Thank you. I thought so. On a side note, the team I am building will ultimately be geared towards launching multiple projects, ideally software platforms, but this is a good first project to expand skills and test processes.

One thing I've never understood. If you got the skills that it takes to properly grow a business, why would you only do it for clients? Why not incubate and grow your own businesses?

There are a few thread like that already on the forum, notably @GuitarManDan has pivoted and added this new pursuit in his thread.

So that's the ultimate goal, but I'm not documenting all that in this thread here.

Is it an evergreen topic, or one that will need new content frequently (like daily news or state of the art tech reviews)?

I think the former will be easier to sell and get a higher valuation multiple, since it is more passive for a portfolio buyer.

Also, how much content do you imagine the "finished" site having at sale: 100 articles, or more like 1000?

I agree on your valuation point.

The truth is, in this space, I think I could write as small as a 20-page website and make some money. I don't really have a good way to judge how much, but it doesn't need to be an ongoing thing.

But what I am thinking we're going to do is set up a multi year content plan, execute on the first couple years of it, and then sell a business with a plan that's showing increasing traffic and revenue.

Another possibility is that I actually set up a few different websites in this space, to achieve different purposes.

I'll have a much better idea of how many pages we actually will be writing, once we've completed some of the keyword research we're working on. That's going to take a little time but I'll expand more on my thoughts on this later.

Right now my goal is to get the website to 10,000 visits a month. Once I'm getting that kind of traffic, I'll be able to start making some data based decisions on the directions to go with this stuff.

 

[BizyDad]

Not much to report this week. Agency work and sales meetings took priority this week.

I've actually been enjoying the slow burn of this. Since Sept 8 we got 4 days of impressions, then Google stopped showing it for 3 days (I actually checked and couldn't find us anywhere), and since then we rank for more phrases and a higher average ranking (total average up to 41). These are tiny numbers, three to seven impressions a day.

The site is fully indexed by Google. Seven of the pages are optimized for something, and four of them have gotten at least one search impression.

We are getting search impressions all over the world, including non-English speaking countries. Obviously, some of that is normal, but the fact that only 20% of our impression so far are in the US is something I'll be keeping an eye on. Geographically, we are starting by targeting the US, and there is an opportunity for us to target at least parts of Europe, but we're not really looking to turn this into a worldwide brand.

I'm using this beginning time in a sense to learn just how little I need to do to get something to the first page. I want to stress that most people will not find a niche this low in competition. If I had any real amount of competition, we would have already been going full board at link building.

Instead, this week we got two really juicy, highly relevant links, both from the same page on an authoritative site. Google hasn't indexed that page yet, and I am content to wait and let it happen organically. I want to see what happens to rankings when you get just one good link.

Next week, I'm going to have my writers start reaching out to the industry for interviews and working on new content. And I'll have my tech guy make some tweaks to signal to Google that we are a US-based company. For starters, we will probably set up a Google maps listing and office address.

One more interesting little tidbit I gleaning which was unexpected. So there is a particular product that we mentioned in one of our articles. The article is not optimized for this product name at all, it's just mentioned in there. That article now ranks in the 20s for the "product name" + the word "price".

That is interesting because we achieved that without even trying, so my expectation is if we actually tried to rank for product name plus price we do much better. And that is interesting because ultimately one of the monetization strategies is to rank for those kind of phrases and then use affiliate links to make money.

My initial excitement about this niche is cooled a little bit. We're still likely several months away from attempting to monetize. And I'm not sure, even if we rank for product names plus price, that our recommendations will actually lead to sales.

There's this little doubt in the back of my mind, what if the guys do all this work, and then the site doesn't convert?

And then I remind myself there's only one way to find out. So shut up brain and get to work.

Fearing that outcome does no good. Cross that bridge IF we get to it.

 

[BizyDad]

What's she doing different that you can start doing?

So she puts out 8 pages onto the blog daily for last 8 months. That's pretty solid work daily! Different niche then yours?

@BizyDad did you have any major takeaways after talking with her on her process vs yours? Does she just pump out that much more content? Any outside promotion? Different Niche? More / less targeted? 120K visitors is nothing to sneeze at at such a short period of time. Did she have prior experience building up content / sites before launching this one?

First off, she would probably say she's not that experienced and doesn't know much. It is her first site that is solely a blog, but she's been around the block and she definitely doesn't give herself enough credit.

As for different tactics, I can only speak generally. I didn't bother to ask because I know she and I have different approaches to this.

1. I am sure she launched with at least 1k of those blogs written. She has a smart way of finding repeatable, low competition phrases and generating content that is unique enough for Google. I am curious how the current update will affect her site, but if it doesn't hurt her, I may look into doing something similar.

2. She buys aged domains and points them for link value. She's got method to that, but again, that's not something I do.

3. She is definitely in a different niche. That's my main takeaway. I chose a niche because I didn't want to have to rely on ad revenue. As I mentioned in my early post, my website could be turned into a store if I wanted it to.

Well, I really don't want to. Which leaves my primary focus being affiliate revenue. And like I've been saying, I'll be adding that soon.

But now that I know the kinds of dollars that can be generated of some of these ad networks, I'm much more interested in targeting a different niche entirely with easy to rank informational phrases.

Thankfully sites sell as a multiple of revenue, not EBITDA, so you'll be able to get more on your exit.

I was seriously surprised by this, it's the only industry I know where buyers really don't care if you hire a writer for $5k monthly to rank the site. They'll still pay a premium!

Wishing you the best in growing and monetizing this site. This is a very cool industry to be in...

You're sort of like a spec builder: Everyone knows you won't hold these sites longer than 16-24 months, so you build a site, develop content, monetize to fund continuous development, and eventually sell the finished web property for a premium (compared to other industries).

@BizyDad if you ever need someone to spitball ideas, let me know. I've brokered a few dozen content sites by now and have seen the good, bad, and ugly. Cheers!

So that's what you're doing. Cool man. Good for you.

When we get this built up a little bit more, I'll be in touch.

In the meantime, if you want to add some more value to the thread, I know we've got a few people on here that read and are building up their own content sites.

Do you have any general advice you'd like to share? What's a common mistake that you see people making? What's the thing that people wish they had done differently when they're at the finish line that they didn't know when they were at the starting point? Do different revenue streams generate different multiples?

----

It's funny, I told my business partner, and then I posted on here.

It wasn't enough until after that that I had a meeting with my team about this.

I was hoping the team would be supportive of running two content sites simultaneously.

But with the main goals that I have for them regarding client work, they are concerned that they don't have the bandwidth to have two content sites going.

Plus, they would rather see this one through at least to monetization before we switch gears.

I got out voted four to one. Lol. I'm good with it. Frankly, it's nice to see the rest of the team truly committed to the project. That was a cool takeaway.

This is the second time in the history of my agency when I sold the team on a vision, hit a point of educated doubt, only to have the team be resolute in their determination of achieving the goal.

I am certain we will be sacrificing money. But it's a "small" price to pay to see the team come together.

So we revisited our keyword research, and found some much bigger phrases that we probably can rank for now that we are a year into this.

We adjusted our upcoming editorial schedule for the next 2 months. And we came up with some new ideas for articles that will be relevant around the holidays and in 2023. We'll get those posted ahead of time so that we can be there when those searches actually start.

(Somebody remind me how this is just a side project please. Lol. Client work vs easy ad revenue. Decisions, decisions.)

 

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[Cameraman]

How's a cameraman know about SEMRush and Spyfu?!?

I run a reasonably sized website (65k visitors a month) teaching people how to produce better photography. I use Spyfu and SEMRush free accounts to research competitors and also research ideas for YouTube videos.

 

[GuestUser4aMPs1]

What type of sites and where? Content sites are pretty much always sold as a multiple of monthly profit, not revenue.

Normal affiliate-monetized content sites with 100% organic traffic.

Also, correct. They *are* sold by EBITDA, but with the largest ongoing cost off the P&L.

Maybe the industry has changed but at least when I was helping to broker content sites in 2020/21 at a place that specialized in it, the only costs written on the books were fixed hosting and (maybe) plugins costs. Meaning the sites would sell at ~99% profit.

I'm not an accountant, so bear with me for this next section...

The reasoning is that although Content Writing is often an expense that site owners have to cope with to maintain and grow rank, it's not recorded in the P&L/Income Statement because it doesn't directly contribute to revenue. One could argue that writing articles in hope that it'll rank is speculative in nature, so I don't think it fits in the COGS section of your P&L.

Therefore, it's categorized separately as a Capital Expenditure, which isn't on the P&L. If you write content, you might or might not make more money as a result of improved ranks/traffic. If you stop writing content, you'll still make money (for a time) if you let the site sit there. It's sort of a "passive" asset at that stage.

I don't agree with the practice because an owner will always need to pay for writers, but it is what it is.

Therefore, the multiples were, and still are *massive* due to a combination of factors:
— Somewhat "Passive" model, at least in the eyes of the buyer
— Extremely Scalable Business Model (just sell other people's stuff)
— Almost no expenses on the books (contributing to insane valuations)

Some other time-relevant factors:
— Huge outside interest during the pandemic, as it could never be shut down.
— People buying a bunch of stuff with stimulus.
— People spending WAY more time online.
— Cheap money propping up asset prices across the board.

 

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[BizyDad]

If you've been reading this thread, you probably already knew this...

Google Says They Have Algorithms To Detect & Demote AI Plagiarized Content

Duy Nguyen from Google's search quality team said in the Google office hours video that Google has "algorithms to go after" those who post AI plagiarized content, he the algorithms can "demote site scraping content from other sites."

www.seroundtable.com

My take: I don't think their systems are "fool proof" no matter what they want us to believe. But I also know once Google starts attacking some tactic, they get better and better at attacking it.

 

[MTF]

It is an area that none of us have expertise in but we all find interesting.

How are you ensuring that you'll produce good unique content considering none of you has expertise in the topic?

 

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[Antifragile]

Following.
I like that it’s an experiment as I agree, it does look fastlane.
Good luck.