Greetings anon,
It has been anything but a dry January for us. We hit another ATH in revenue & traffic. To be honest, the site is growing faster than expected. Despite this, we did a pretty good job of keeping our heads down and cranking out content and technical tweaks to put the site in the best position possible. The site is now making the equivalent of a full-time, entry-level employee, and we are confident there is still a decent amount of runway for solid growth. Initially, we wanted to get $100k for the site, but now it’s looking like we could actually get close to double that if we hold onto it for a few more months… Good problem to have.
Below is an outline of the work we did in January
Traffic & SEO Update
Revenue Update
Costs Update
Link building
Technical Updates
Brand Candy
February Sneak Peak
Traffic & SEO Update
We published 16 blogs in January. 15 were informational. 1 was commercial.
As I’ve said previously, very little of what we did in January actually contributed to traffic or revenue this month. You are constantly building for impact 2-3 months from now. I wouldn't expect much of what we did this month to have any impact until late February at the earliest.
For example, we wrote an article in October that I doubted would ever see page 1. However, about halfway through January, it hit page 1 (three months later). We are getting anywhere from 40 to 60 clicks a day from this post. Absolutely bonkers.
In February, the plan is to publish around 12 posts (2 brand reviews, 10 informational). In the background, we also rewriting what we consider to be our “lowest quality content.” This is content that has decent demand but never made it onto page 1 for the target keyword. Early on, we had a fair amount of writers churn, so the quality ranges depending on the time frame (especially from the previous owner).
I built out a potential traffic estimator in Google sheets in order to understand the opportunity of the top KW:LP pairs for every article
I do this for a lot of consulting clients, and most find it extremely helpful. I will provide a more in-depth tutorial of the process on a separate substack next week but I have the template included here. Will give a more in-depth explanation of how to pull & evaluate data next week.
As a rough estimate, I expect to “redo” 30-40 posts between now and the end of March. This will raise the “quality” of the site tremendously.
Revenue Update
We made $ 4,464.74 in January. This was $1,008 month-over-month revenue growth and the first time we broke the $4k barrier. The biggest growth was from our “Secret Affiliate,” but we saw solid gains in Amazon Affiliate and ebook revenue as well. Hard to make less money when traffic is up ~40% month over month.
I expect February’s revenue to be slightly below January’s just due to the shorter month (and a tad of softening traffic in early Feb). This is why looking at average daily revenue per month is actually a much better metric than “monthly revenue.”
Costs Update
Total costs for January were $1,278. Most of this was content related, which is exactly where we want to be. I expect content in February to jump as we will be looking to spend ~$2k on link building in addition to content costs. Likely, the links themselves we not actually be built until early March.
Link building
We finally got a refund from the link-building company! TBH, I thought we were going to get screwed here, but email #9 finally convinced them to refund us. The company has a pretty good reputation, so it was really disappointing when the 60-day guarantee went 140 days with no results.
Despite this we should get 4 legit links sometime in February. This includes two links from brands saying “featured on [SITE]” as well as two guest posts.
Once you start to get a bit of traffic to your website, you will get spammed with requests for guest posts.
If you want to maintain high-quality standards for your website, you should typically refuse these requests. However, you should not ignore all of them. Finding out what sites are willing to pay for links can be extremely useful. Sometimes, these sites are willing to let you write a guest post for them. We had two decent sites reach out over the last month, and we refused their initial request of a guest post, and asked if we could write a guest post for them instead. They agreed.
With the amount of money the site is making now, we need to have a monthly link budget and find a company that can actually deliver topically relevant links. All ears for any recommendations.
Other Updates
We (BowTiedPlug) also updated all the cover images on the site. What we had was pretty sloppy, so we paid around $100 to get some high-quality images. They were tweaked slightly to make them look unique, so they were not a copy and paste from the site we got them from.
Brand Candy
There is a virtually unlimited amount of commercial posts you can write in the form of brand reviews. You need to be careful about this because it can get really spammy really fast. In addition to driving more traffic, these types of posts can be great leverage for links and increased affiliate commission. Even if X brand doesn’t give you an affiliate deal, you could get company Y to pay you to conquest the listing for them if you can get it to rank. So you basically say brand X sucks use brand Y instead.
Luckily we haven’t had to go this route yet. We wrote two positive brand reviews in exchange for admission into their affiliate program and a backlink. Not too shabby. We may do one more of these this month, but we want to be selective.
February Sneak Peak
Sadly traffic is looking a bit soft in February, although it is still higher than December traffic by a long shot. Obviously, you never want this to happen, but over a long period of time, nothing goes straight up. You just need to trust the process and continue improving one day at a time.
❤️
BowTiedWookie & BowTiedPlug
P.S. The substack next week will be super informational on evaluating the quality of a site index and help surface low-quality content. It will definitely be worth a read if you are evaluating sites to buy or considering significant revisions.
Nice work gents!
Thanks for the detailed breakdown as always! I’m in the process of rewriting many articles that are over 2 yrs old. I noticed they dropped off page one over last few months.