Episode 14: April Monthly Recap
Hello Anon,
Welcome to Episode 14 of the BowTiedWookie substack. Although it is only the beginning of May it feels like the dog days of summer for us. Despite continuing to iterate, publish content, and work towards more partnerships we are still stagnant on revenue. We are going to provide an update on how this month ended up as well as what we are doing to try and scale the site and finally get revenue to $1k per month.
This week we will cover
Traffic Update
Revenue Update
Costs Update
Launching a Quiz
Scamming scammers
Final Thoughts & Looking For a CRO Consultant
Traffic Update
Traffic was pretty much flat this month. Over the last few months, we have steadily seen traffic growth decline despite posting roughly 15-20 posts per month. Here is our traffic growth rate over the last 4 months.
As you can see growth stalled tremendously in March and we barely grew in April. This isn’t unlike the first two months where we had the site where we had to write around 35 additional articles before we saw a real pop in traffic.
Although we always want to continue growing traffic the biggest learning over the last 6 weeks or so is that not all traffic is created equal. If you can’t convert the traffic it does not matter. Because of this we are going to be much more intentional with the posts we write and will potentially look to begin a link-building campaign in May for a few specific pages we believe have high revenue potential.
Revenue Update
Total revenue for April ended up at $640.15. Affiliate was horrible this month despite sending them more traffic than ever. Amazon was slightly down and the two other affiliate platforms we work with both returned $0. Revenue would have been in absolute free fall unless we agreed to do paid posts.
We’ve been hit up every week since we bought the site for backlinks. Almost all of it is total spam sites looking to pay $25 for a backlink. This month we had several legit e-com stores inquire about paid posts. We always say it’s a non-negotiable $200 per link. However, one person asked if he could do 2 for $300. We checked out the sites and they were legit so we agreed. Ultimately we hoped this could turn into an advertising partnership but they do not appear to be interested in that. We don’t want selling backlinks to make up the majority of revenue but this month it was crucial and we will take it.
On top of affiliate sales crapping the bed, our e-book sales went down as well despite sending more traffic than ever to the page. We will be split testing a new version of the landing page within the next few days in an effort to raise revenue. Our monthly high in e-book sales was 21. The last two months we have sold 15 combined.
Ebook Stats
Ebook sales continued to fall despite adding sessions. Below you can see total amount of sessions on the e-book landing page over the last three months (our IPs are removed from this view)
February Sales
March Sales
April Sales
If you have been following this substack the last few months then you know we keep sending more traffic to the landing page but sales continue to fall. Because of this we will be split testing the landing page starting next week.
Costs Update
For the first time ever we actually made more than we spent in April. While ultimately we want the site to make more than we spend it would not surprise us if we go negative for most of the summer (by a small amount). We did not get as much content posted this month because we made an extremely detailed quiz which was free to make but sucked up a tremendous amount of time resources (will provide detail in the next section).
This month continued the trend of creating more transactional posts similar to the sleepolois example. Because these posts are much more resource-heavy we only got 6 out this month. They are slowly starting to get traffic but it will take longer since the terms are extremely competitive. The key to success here is keeping our heads down and posting these consistently for 4-5 months. After that, we can begin building links and then try to sell paid placements to brands.
April Total Spend: $429.57
Content: $243.08
Mail Chimp: $66.50 (this keeps going up in price due to more subscribers but continues to make basically no money. This needs to be optimized)
Cloudways Hosting: $37.50
SVG Images: $12.99
Google Workspace: $5.99
Domain Renewal (3 years): $63.51
Launching a Quiz
As sales have continued to struggle we keep asking ourselves “How can we turn pages that do not convert into pages that convert?” The easy answer is advertisements. Although we have been reluctant to do that we are now considering it. However, we wanted to first try launching a quiz.
If you aren’t familiar quizzes are a great way for sites to lower their bounce rate and guide users to a potential purchase. Everyone on our site is there for more or less the same reason. However, where they are in the purchase funnel is vastly different. By getting the user to specify their age, gender, and specific medical condition we can hit them with a much more targeted offer that is more likely to convert. We originally got this idea from Sleepopolis. Other versions of this are personality quizzes like “what Hogwarts House would you be in?”
Basically, you need to intrigue the reader enough to where they feel forced to click. The only problem is a lot of these “popular quizzes” kind of suck. We took over two dozen quizzes from sites in our industry and found that they all recommend the same thing no matter what your answer (1 variation topps). Because of this, we went all out making a quiz. There are over 50 components that could be dynamically inserted based on the user’s answers. This is way more in-depth than anything we have seen.
Our hope is that this quiz will drastically decrease bounce rate (improving rank) and hopefully surface a product the user is actually interested in purchasing based on their customized results.
Scamming the Scammers
Although we sold two backlinks this past month we probably had 75+ people (not an exaggeration) inquire. Most of the time these are VAs asking for a link for free in broken English. When you tell them $200 they counter with $20. However, the “ask” has become more sophisticated over the last month. Other brands are definitely taking notice and although they don’t want to advertise at this point everyone wants the link juice. One backlink company hit us up several times posing as a college girl looking to grow her portfolio. If you’re curious how that went check out this Tweet 🤣
Final Thoughts
We have learned a ton building this website. We doubled revenue pretty easily (within 3 months) and have been flat to slightly down ever since. Looking back this isn’t totally surprising as we bought it from a guy who literally calls himself the website flip. However, I wouldn't change a thing. My day job is 100% SEO and buying this site let me prove my chops out in the wild. It also showed a glaring gap in my skillset: CRO. Traffic doesn't matter if you can’t get it to convert. Because of this, we are looking to hire a CRO consultant. Ideally, this person has experience with both ads-based and affiliate websites. We want them to do a “CRO audit” of our site in the health space and help guide us on potential tests and monetization strategies we could implement to ideally double revenue without worrying about additional traffic. Ideally, this should take no more than 2-3 hours. We are willing to pay anywhere from $75-$100 an hour depending on experience. If you know of someone who is a “CRO wizard” please let us know.
That’s it for this week. If you enjoyed this post please let me know in the comments or on Twitter. We are committing to getting back to a cadence of every other week so we can share more in-depth tactics we are using. Also despite the revenue challenges this site has been a huge financial success based on the following criteria. (IMO my most underrated tweet haha)
Great post and appreciate you guys providing so much detail as always. By the sounds of it...your niche is extremely competitive. There is no doubt the lessons learned from this site and systems you are creating will set you guys up for success in future site acquisitions. I obvisouly don't know your site in detail...but It seems like high quality link building is the only way to increase traffic & rankings further. I am definitely interested in hearing more about what you guys learn in terms of CRO in the future. Thanks again.
Also, was wondering if you are still offering help with the affiliate plugin you mentioned in previous posts?