Google’s job is to serve people up what they want to read. What better way to get a gauge on that then figure out what people click on and how long they read it for. So don’t sleep on click-through rates. Oh man this is weird. I actually came to Affiliate World Asia, my first time about three years ago, and I remember seeing a class called, How to Get to Your First $50,000 Day, which is apparently a beginners class, and I was like what the f*ck is this place. But ironically, here I am today because I want to share a way that affiliate SEOs can make stupid money too. Let’s check out this graph. This is profit growth over 12 months for a website we started working on. When we started this out, we were making about $2,000 a month. In about 12 months time-frame, that jumped up to $20,000. If we expand things out, over just a few more months, we finally got up to the $50,000 a month mark, which is great, but the cool thing about a website like this is that digital properties like content websites can now sell at 40x monthly profit, which means this website that I hardly owned for very long at all, could sell for $600,000-$700,000 dollars.
Now this is the topic of today’s presentation. Now in case we haven’t met before my name is Matt. I was born in a city called Fresno, California. Is anyone here from Fresno? Yeah I didn’t think so. What? Are you serious? No! Okay. High five myself. Alright and then after that I went to UC San Diego studying electrical engineering, and I freaking hated it. 9 years or so working as a cubicle slave, 60 hours a week, so eventually I started messing around with other ways to make money online and eventually I found affiliate marketing and SEO.
Started to get enough traction with that, making enough money, quit my engineering job, sold all my sh*t, and started traveling full-time working on SEO. Since then it’s looked like this, I found DiggityMarketing.com, which is my blog and I talked about tested SEO techniques. I do SEO consulting to beginner and advanced SEOs all the way up to the agency level. I’m the CEO of a 7-figure affiliate SEO agency that’s completely dedicated to ranking, monetising, and flipping affiliate websites. I’m the director of a client-facing SEO agency called The Search Initiative, a backlink service called Authority Builders, and I’m the host of the Chiangmai SEO conference. This presentation is called a 6-figure flip story and this story goes like this. We started this website July 2017. At the beginning, this site was making $2,000 a month and some change.
11 months later, we broke through the first glass ceiling of $20,000 dollars a month. 20 months later, we broke through $50k. This website has 457 keywords on page one, over 300,000 visitors per month, and in case you’re asking yourself, what did we do to grow this website so quickly? You’re about to learn everything. You’re going to learn all the resources we used, all the on-site SEO tricks, all the backlinks we use, the mindsets, the vendors, all of it. And although you’re going to be learning about this experience that I had with this particular website, I’m going to be flipping things around. I’m going to be presenting this to you as a playbook so you can apply this to your own business. Here’s what we got on the agenda. First, why purchase a website in the first place rather than build one yourself? And then I’m going to show you audit techniques on how you can find diamonds in the rough. I’m going to talk about a technique we coin called The Super Audit, which basically takes your website and turns it into a Lamborghini.
Then we’re going to talk about some on-site SEO hacks, and then some backlink techniques are going to take your website from a grey hat strategy to a white hat Google-friendly strategy. After that, I’m gonna talk about why content is so critical to the growth of a website. And then, everyone likes talking about monetisation, conversion rate, optimisation, especially at this conference, so we’re gonna get into that stuff too. Then lastly, when everything is good to go we’ve got the website ranking. How to prepare for 6- to 7-figure flip. Let’s talk about why purchase a website in the first place rather than just building it from scratch. Now first of all, I’m pretty good at figuring out how much a niche will make before I actually starting it, but I’m wrong more than I’m right. When you buy a website you get to know all of its financials already. You get to see the P&L already so you know the bare minimum that this website and this niche could make. Secondly, you can avoid the Google sandbox. Anyone know what the Google sandbox is? Yeah, right so the Google sandbox is basically a leash that Google puts on new websites.
It sucks. You want to avoid this. Then, efficient use of your resources. The most expensive part about my business is human resources. I got two guys over there Anthony and Jay, they both working at my company. These guys are freaking expensive. Is it better use of their time and resources to be working on a website that’s in the sandbox not getting gains, or is it better be putting time and effort into a site that’s moving along and getting gains right away? At a certain point in your business’s evolution, time becomes more valuable than money, so it’s within your best interest to take these into consideration.
Next, let’s get into some selection criteria. Here’s how you can find some diamonds in the rough. I recommend doing this process with two people. You’re gonna have one of your guys be the good cop, this is the guy who’s trying to tell the other guy, let’s buy this website, let’s get into the niche, and the other guy is the bad cop. He’s gonna be the one that says, no I don’t want to get in to this niche for these reasons. Let’s start with good cop.The first thing good cop is gonna look at is niche research. He’s gonna toss the website into Google Trends to find out if this niche is growing and moving. Even if you do nothing at least the website and the niche will grow. Second, he’s gonna look and see is, this what I like to call an oh-sh*t niche. These are niches that people will do pretty much anything to resolve. Think about the big ones like, health, wealth, and relationships. These are the ones that people will get out their wallets for.
Next, he’s gonna look for some monetisation quick wins. The first thing, is the website I’m looking at have more products that I could possibly review? Let’s imagine it’s a golf website. It’s only reviewed golf drivers and golf putters, great. You can start reviewing all the other stuff and sweep up that traffic. Next, is it possible to switch out the affiliate offers? Maybe it’s just completely monetised with Amazon, which we all know has terrible commissions right. We can switch those up working directly with affiliate networks with better commissions, a quick win right off the bat.
After that, in your top 5 lists, so let’s say for example, best wireless routers are the ones in the top positions, are they actually the ones with the best reviews? Are they actually in stock? If not, get them out of there. Get the ones that have the best reviews. They’ll have the best performances, that pay the best in the top positions. Next, you’re gonna check to see is this website an authority site. What an authority site means is, whenever you publish content, it starts to rank instantly right away. This is obviously something you want to get your hands on. And then lastly, has this website just done poor keyword research? You can use a tool called Ahrefs content gap analysis to figure this out in minutes. We’ll talk about this a little bit more later. And then the bad cop okay, so here’s what bad cop looks at. Does the niche require a super geeky level amount of knowledge to be able to talk about? Does anyone here like fantasy novels? Oh come on, there’s more nerds than that here.
Okay, there’s one nerd here. I love fantasy books and I’ve really liked this website called bestfantasybooks.com, but unfortunately I would never be able to run a website like that. I would have to read every single fantasy book in order to keep up with something like that, so it’s just unscalable. What else is unscalable, it’s niches that require frequent updates. Like think of niches like technology, where new routers, new gaming equipment, new video games come out all the time. You’re just gonna have to continuously update your content all the time, hard to scale. Is this a niche that’s a fad, something that will just be a hype for a little bit, got a style? Think about hoverboards for example.
Or how about are the websites that are ranking above? It’s super old and super big. You don’t want to go head-to-head against WebMD. It’s an uphill battle, so avoid that. And then lastly, is it a YMYL niche? Your Money, Your Life. That means you’re gonna be increasingly scrutinised over time by Google’s algorithm. What about the website we got? First, we toss it into Google Trends and you can see the trend was increasing, even if we did nothing, we were gonna gain. Next it’s in the beauty niche, if you don’t think that’s a no-sh*t niche, you’re probably a dude. Next, the topic covers only about 30%.
As I mentioned before, you take that website, you put into Ahrefs content gap analysis, and then you compare against other competitors in the niche. You’ll see, here’s my keywords, and here’s all the keywords that I’m not targeting. And then lastly, it was almost an authority site. What we would do is, we compared the date of the last post versus when these posts started to pull traffic, and then we’d see, it was starting to pull ground in about a month time. We would definitely improved on this. Here is a starting line. When we got it, $2,125 per month. It was monetised completely with one-on-one deals directly with manufacturers using software like Refersion.
38,000 visitors per month, about 30 outreach links in 21 PBN links. I’m going to talk about what PBNs are later. And then 164 keywords in the top 10, 1 page of Google. Now wait till you see what we did. The first step of this process is we did what we call The Super Audit, basically turns your website into a Lamborghini and it makes sure it’s both semantically and technically sound and position of rank for as many keywords as possible. If you’re taking notes, this is the right time. In step one, what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna reverse-engineer the competition. This is super easy. Figure out the main keyword for each of your content categories. If we go back to the golf example, one content category might be, how to drive a golf ball. Another one would be, what is the salary of a caddy? Another one would be, what is the best putter? So you’re gonna take each of these guys and you’re going to put it into Ahrefs Keywords Explorer “also ranks for” feature.
What that’s gonna do, it’s gonna look up best golf drivers, and it’s gonna look at everyone on page one, and it’s gonna tell you every other keyword that these pages rank for. Export and now you’ve just done keyword research in like 10 minutes. Next, you’re going to reverse-engineer yourself. What you’re looking for is to figure out all the keywords that you’re ranking for, and even though you might have a solid idea of this, you’re looking for some surprises, and this is what you’re looking for. First look for keywords in position 5 through 10.
These are ones that are almost there, they’re doing the right things, they just need a little bit more of a nudge to get those money-making positions. What we can do here is first, send a target anchor text link. If you’re trying to rank for best wireless router, send a link with the anchor text best wireless router to it if you haven’t already. Likely that’s all it’s gonna need to take. Another thing is to look at your keyword density.
A lot of times you’re ranking for stuff but you haven’t even written those words on the page. For example, again best wireless routers. You might have the words 2019’s top wireless routers on the page right? Best wireless routers on the page and be done with it. Next, you’re looking for keywords on page two to three. These a lot of the times is accidental rankers. And what I mean by this, let me just give you an example.
Let’s say for example you have a page that’s ranked best ergonomic chairs and you find out you’re accidentally ranking for scoliosis ergonomics. Why would that be? Because you just wrote the word scoliosis on the page and Google just thinks you should rank for it. What you need to do here is just build out its own subsection for this page or build out a new page on it entirely. Google already likes you for this so just run with it.
Next, you’re gonna do some word-of-mouth research. You’re gonna put away the tools and you’re just gonna ask people who are in this niche, what the heck’s so good about it? What are the best products? What are the best topics to talk about in the niche? The places that I go. First I’ll go straight to Facebook.
Here’s me jumping in one of the Facebook groups, hey you guys have ever had any supplements for this work for you? If so, which ones? We have Quora, Reddit, and Answer the Public is absolutely awesome for figuring out topics to talk about in the niche. Then you’re gonna do some click-through rate optimisation. What we’re doing here is we’re optimising our titles and our meta descriptions to steal clicks from the SERPs.
In case you don’t know what the title and meta description is, here’s what a search result looks like in Google. The top part is your title and the bottom part is your meta description and both these things how they’re written, will highly influence how often you’re clicked from the search result. You guys, don’t sleep on click-through rate. If we think about it, what is Google’s job? Google’s job is to serve people up what they want to read. What better way to get a gauge on that than figure out what people click on and how long they read it for. So don’t sleep on click-through rate. Here’s how we can optimise it but first check out this graph. Here’s a percentage of clicks that each website gets in the various positions on page 1 through 2. As you can see, positions 1 through 4 steal most of the clicks, so it’s within your best interest to optimise the titles and meta descriptions.
Use techniques like this, use numbers in your titles. For some reason, odd numbers work better, no idea why. Add the year and the month, so people feel like this is a recent updated article. I use power words, emotions, and use brackets or parentheses to draw the eye. Here’s an example. 9 Insanely Ridiculous Ways To Trigger People on Social Media 2019. I know this sounds cheesy but this stuff works. Alright and then after that, step 5, you’re going to technical audit your website. If you need a technical audit done, I highly suggest a search initiative. Now here’s the main gains that we saw in this particular site.
Speed optimisation, I’ll talk more about this later. Indexing cleanup, so making sure that Google’s not wasting their crawl budget or anything stupid. Keyword cannibalisation, 404 error clean up with 301 redirects, and thin content issues. So just bulking up that content or just getting rid of it all together. And then, what we’re gonna do is baseline conversion rate optimisation. Instead of doing A/B testing, you’re gonna just forget all that for now, you’re just gonna do the stuff that you know works, stuff that it’s guaranteed you know just from experience, this gets better clicks, this will get better conversions. Starting with using featured images at the top of each of your articles. People on the Internet these days have massive ADD right? People browse through websites they can figure out if they want to be on a website in a matter of a split second.
If you are serving up an article on best golf drivers, put a picture of golf drivers at the top, a big headline that says, best golf drivers 2020. That’s gets people to stay. Next, use urgency and emotion in all your copy. And then this one’s a big one, have extremely strong introduction paragraphs. You guys, your first paragraph is your chance to hook people into the article, that’s your only chance. I use techniques like, teach them something new so they feel like if I continue reading I’m gonna learn, or use I just entertain them, so even if they don’t learn anything they’re just gonna have a good time, or use fear and emotion, so where do they feel if I don’t read this article I’m gonna buy the wrong product or I’m gonna waste some money. After that short paragraphs, you guys, one to two sentence paragraphs, no big walls of text, no one’s gonna read that sh*t. Use contrasting CTA colours. Guys, check this out.
If your website is green, look on the colour wheel. Find what is the opposite colour on the colour wheel from green. The answer to that is red. Red becomes your call to action colour because that’s going to pop off the page. And then don’t use red anywhere else. It’s gonna draw the eye and it’s gonna train your reader to only take action when they see red. Lastly, remember when we were looking at those products that had the sh*tty reviews or the ones that are out of stock? This is when we go ahead and replace all these guys.
Now step 7. You probably figured out a bunch of topics you need to talk about. What you’re gonna do is prioritisation at this point. Make a table like this. That’s gonna basically list out whether this topic is monetisable, whether it’s on a solid affiliate program, decent search volume, and it’s relevant to the current state of your website. Total them up and just start working from top to bottom. Now, I know this might sound like a lot of work this whole Super Audit thing but I don’t know if you recognise this, in the first month of getting a hold of this website and really starting on it, we doubled the revenue. This stuff pays off. Alright, so now let’s get into some on-site SEO stuff but as you guys know, every good story isn’t just a walk in the park for the protagonist.
The hero must encounter some kind of challenge along the way and on-site SEO is where I got my butt kicked, but we’ve prevailed, but let me just tell you the story. First, basically, we saw a lot of on-site gains at the beginning from first title tag optimisation. Remember those title tags I told you about before? Just taking the main keywords, shuffling them to the front of the title tag, and keeping them together in a string, SEO 101 still works very well today. And then internal anchor text balancing. If you’re ranking for best wireless router, you’re gonna link to this page from other pages on your website don’t always use the anchor text best wireless router.
You need have some diversity there. For this website, we clean that up and our ranking shot up. After that we got some nice ranking and conversion gains from speed optimisation. The big things here were optimising the images and reducing HTTP requests with the plug-in. I don’t quite remember the plug-in name right now but come find me after and I’m sure I’ll remember. And then the sh*tstorm hit okay. Anyone ever get slapped by a Google core algorithm update? Yeah exactly. If you’re doing SEO, if you ever been been slapped, you just haven’t been doing enough SEO.
Basically, Google likes to switch up their algorithm completely from time to time and when that happens I like to look at sites that went out, what sites that went up, and try to kind of get some commonality and figure out what went on. Here’s what I noticed. First, if a site got hit, it’s not like they were just picking on one or two pages. It’s like the whole website got f*cked up a little bit. Like this they applied some kind of muting factor to the whole website. And second, what would happen if let’s say, if I was number one for a keyword and I dropped down to number three, I would look to see okay great, who’s my number one and number two guys now, and what are they doing different than me? And most of the time it was just larger websites with more reach, older domains, big surprise, Google loves authority sites, yada yada yada. Here’s my diagnosis.
Google at the time was talking a lot about relevance. This update where we figured out relevance, we’re integrating it more into the algorithm and I kind of went like, bullsh*t. I know Google’s can’t actually read. It’s just a code reader. It’s looking at words on the page. It’s just a piece of math right. And one other thing that I noticed is at the time, so I’m a review website and I also talk about informational type stuff like, let’s say for example, I’m ranked for best protein powder, but I lost traffic.
I lost rankings for how to do a bicep curl right. I kind of just figured like Google just put me in my lane. They’re just like, you’re a review website, you’re only gonna rank for this review sh*t. But, at the time when these core algorithm updates went out and my whole website took a hit, at the same time I was testing TF*IDF keyword analysis optimisation. And while my whole website got messed up, these pages actually held their ground or went up. We’re gonna talk about TF*IDF. The great thing about doing SEO in 2019 is that we have a lot of clever software that can guide us on how to beat the algorithm based on what’s already working. TF*IDF is an algorithm that’s used to order different pages based on how often these certain words. Term frequency is basically how many times a certain word was used on the page divided by the number of the words on the page. So the density. Inverse document frequency, what that does, it offsets words that don’t matter like, of, the, or and, and stuff like that.
And the equation looks like this. But, another way to look about this is, it’s just niche-specific keyword density. What better way to figure out what I need to write about and how often than to use a piece of software to just tell me, here’s what the guys on page 1 are already doing. So there’s an awesome piece of software called Surfer SEO. I only use two pieces of software, Ahrefs and Surfer. And Surfers got this awesome feature, it’s called true density.
And what its gonna do it’s going to give you a playbook on exactly how many times you need to increase, decrease, or whatever each word on the page to blend in with the guys that are already ranking for this. It just makes it a mindless process. Easy as f*ck. Alright, so all SEO is talking about backlinks so I’m gonna get into a backlink strategy right now that’s gonna first allow you to secure the number one rankings and then migrate that backlink profile into an completely white hat Google-friendly mode before they even know what hit them. Step 1, the name of the game is to secure all the number one rankings. I’m gonna be using a technique called PBN sniping and the types of links I’m going to use here are PBNs.
Now what PBNs are, it’s a grey hat SEO technique, so take this with a grain of salt, but what you do is you buy up expired auction domains, domains like this that people gave up that have power, and links, and age going to them, and you repurpose them to use as link assets for your own website. What we’re going to do here is we’re going to take really, really strong PBNs and we’re going to use them to send target anchor text links to your pages to nudge them up to the number one positions. What that’s gonna do is gonna result in quick wins, because in the top 5 range, growth is exponential. The guy in fourth place gets twice as much traffic as number 5. Three gets twice as much traffic as number 4. You guys get the idea.
This is gonna get a recoup your investment as soon as possible. You’re gonna combine that with a strategy called burst linking. Burst linking is a technique. It relies on a concept called the golden ratio, which is a relationship between traffic, social signals, and backlinks. And basically what you want to do here is wait for a burst of traffic. Let’s say your website just jumped out of the sandbox, or you just started running Facebook ads, or you just emailed out to your list, so what then happens is, you just get a bunch of traffic and then after that you follow up with a bunch of social signals. So social shares, Facebook shares, Twitter tweets. Now guess what’s happened? You just simulated a viral situation. Your website put out some content, everyone’s reading it, everyone’s sharing on Facebook, now guess what a guy to do? Hit it with the links. You just set up a justifiable situation to hit your site with a bunch of links and now it’s gonna work like gangbusters.
Check this out. Here’s a graph over time of the number of PBNs that were appointed to this website over the lifetime of the site. You can see, we start out with 21, eventually ramped that up to about 80, and then we started peeling them off until we eventually got to zero and they were completely safe in Google’s eyes. The name of the game here is to remove 80 total PBN links in a short amount of time. Here’s the exact strategy we use, the exact backlinks, to completely white hat the site. Now I got a question for you guys, if I’m trying to rank number one for best protein powder, what do you think is a better link? A, a link from bodybuilding.com? Powerful website, super relevant, or B, how about New York Times? One of the biggest seed sites on the Internet. Who thinks it’s A, bodybuilding.com? Okay, who thinks B, New York Times? Alright, you’re both wrong. Sorry for putting you in a trap. The answer is the best links, again, if you want to rank for best protein powder is the guy in first place for best protein powder.
Google already tells you this is most powerful and relevant website for best protein powder, so these are the best links. The first links I go after is I go down the list for all the keywords I want to rank for and I see who’s number 1, 2, 3 all the way to 30, and I start reaching out to these guys, I make relationships, offer a money, bribe them, whatever it takes. These are the best links to get. That’s the sniper outreach and we got 29 of these links. Then we do what we they could like to call a shotgun outreach, where we have our VAs build a big link prospecting list. We use software like, Mail Shake, Ninja Outreach to spam them and send them emails over and over again. We’re looking for is cheap stuff here, $20 insertions into existing articles.
Then we went quite nuts with my service authority builders. Guest post offering to get links on relevant high traffic websites. These are great for building trust. And then even better for building trust, is getting editorial links, links from New York Times, links from Forbes, Inc.com. These are highly valuable for trust. And then expert roundup. There’s this girl named Minuca Elena. She does an awesome expert roundup service. What this does, it’ll get you links from influencers in the niche, so she’s built 18 of those. This was a grand total of 140 links, white hat links, that we replace the PBNs, which is in general about a 1.75 to 1 replacement rate. Here’s the replacement rates I’d normally recommend. For your regular type outreach links, you’re going to want to replace them at about a 2.5 to 1 rate. For your editorials and your high-end stuff, you can go ahead and replace these at 1 to 1. Now, let’s talk about content.
Content was a huge factor in the growth of this website. Let me first explain why. There’s basically three main stages in a website’s evolution. In stage 1, you’re in the sandbox. Google just doesn’t like you. You need to build some trust. The main characteristics here is your main keywords or outside page 5, and when you send backlinks, they don’t really do anything. You’ll send a backlink, just you won’t see a response, your rank tracker won’t move.
After that, you’re gonna jump out of the sandbox. You’ll know this because your traffic is gonna look like that, your rank graph is gonna look all green. You’ll definitely know when this happens. The key characteristics here are most your main keywords gonna jump up the pages 1 through 4. It’s gonna, it’s going to be a great day. And then links start to make a difference. You’re gonna actually send links a couple weeks later, you see some movement, great. Now stage 3, this is when you’re an authority site and the main characteristic here is that whenever you publish new content it starts to rank very quickly and very well with little to no backlinks.
How do you know you’re an authority mode? Well, every traffic analyser, this is Clicky, but Google Analytics has this too, they all have a view that can be able to compare traffic today versus traffic, let’s say a week ago. What you’re looking for is anomalies like this where you see a 400% or 600% increase in traffic. What that probably means is this article didn’t exist before you publish it. It’s pulling a lot of traffic, great. You’re in authority mode. Now that you’re in authority mode, what do you think is the best use of your time to grow this website, any ideas? Front row? Exactly. You publish your freaking ass off. The 80/20 of SEO just became publishing, so this is what you need to focus on, and here’s where to get some awesome content ideas deliver to you on autopilot. Now check this out, there’s Ahrefs Content Explorer. This is an awesome feature. What you’re gonna do is you’re going to take your niche and you’re going to type in it right here.
Then you’re going to click this in title feature. What that’s going to return is a bunch of articles that have your keyword in the title. Set a maximum amount of referring domains to 5, a minimum amount of traffic, and then you export. Now you got a list of content ideas that take less than 5 backlinks to rank and pull a big chunk of traffic. Super easy. After that, Ahrefs’s newly discovered feature. What you do is you type in your keyword and anytime any new variation of that keyword comes out, they’ll email you and let you know. Type in keto, and let’s say new some new keto supplement comes out, boom, they email you right away. You can be the first to write about it.
Then we have Awario. Awario is awesome because they don’t monitor social media. If you want to figure out something’s gonna go viral, monitor Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss. And then Mention.com and Google Alerts are quite awesome for getting these ideas delivered to you as well. Alright so now, it’s time to monetise. And everyone likes talking about monetisation. What I hope to do at this point in time is introduce you to a few new ways of thinking outside the box for monetisation. But first let me start off with a story. There’s this big brand in our niche. They got the biggest product, they got all the marketing behind them, they’re just the behemoth in the niche. We joined their affiliate program, we’re doing good, but we’re good at SEO and we started ranking above them for their own brand name.
Like imagine being an affiliate for tissue paper and you start ranking for Kleenex above Kleenex, so obviously they didn’t like that and they sent me an email saying we’re gonna kick you out the affiliate program unless you delete the page. I wasn’t even thinking about doing that. It was the most trafficked page on my entire website. Here’s what we did instead. Now, just because you review product doesn’t mean it needs to be a good review. What we decided to do is review these guys and every other product in the niche, steal their traffic, and then cross-sell them into a preferred product.
What does the preferred product? It’s the one that converts the best and pays the best. Now check this out. Here’s a traffic report. At the top we have product ABC. These are the bad guys. These guys that kicked us out of the program. They have more traffic than the homepage, you see the homepage in number two. That’s why I’m not thinking about deleting this page. Now check out the bottom. That’s product XYZ. That’s the preferred product. They’re just not that popular so here’s what we decided to do, we started cross-selling. Here’s the statistics. Before they kicked us out, product ABC, the bad guys, are making us $500 a month okay. Product XYZ is making $1,400 a month, but after they kicked us out, product XYZ jumps up to $6,200 a month for a 227% increase.
Now we eventually kept applying this more and more and then product XYZ maxed out at $12,000 a month. If you take a look at any big supplement sites on the internet or especially content review ranking with SEO, they’re cross-selling all the time. Why? Because this sh*t works. Now, has anyone heard of a concept called the sales cycle? Okay a few of you. Basically what it is, it’s a model to try to be able to gauge where a lead is in the process of buying something. I can illustrate this with an example. I don’t know if you notice this but I’m a short guy and I have no problem with it. I’m in phase one, the latent pain stage. I don’t even know there’s an issue but let’s say, I go out tonight and I hit on a girl, and she’s like get the f*ck out of here shorty.
Boom, phase two. I’m an acknowledged pain phase. I don’t like this. I go home and I get on my computer, I moved to phase three seeking a solution. I Google, how can short guys look taller. And then I read a website and the website says, okay the best way short guys can look taller is to wear high heels. Alright, here we go phase four. Best high heels for men. What are the best high heels I can get my hands on. Here’s another list. It says the best high heels for men are from Steve Madden. Okay, where to buy Steve Madden shoes? I’ve actively seeking the best place to buy the best solution, the next thing you know, I’m a man walking around in high heels.
This illustrates just how important knowing where your customers in the lead cycle. If someone Googles best juicer, guess what, they want to buy a juicer. Don’t bore them with content like, oh well juicer is a piece of machinery that can make your — yeah. Don’t get into that, just show them the best juicer. But if someone Googles something like, the benefits of juicing, they don’t want to buy a juicer yet, but maybe you can try to get them into something easier like an ebook on 15 juicing recipes to boost your immune system.
That’s much more likely. This is my on-site SEO guide. It’s also a lead magnet. What a lead magnet allows you to do is collect emails and then over time to continue to deliver them value and then eventually monetise that with an email follow-up series that delivers value but eventually pitches them something like an offer to your favorite product, an info product, an event like conference, whatever you might have. If you want to build a funnel like this, here’s my playbook. You start with creating the lead magnet in the first place. The first thing you got to do is just think of a topic. Go to Buzzsumo for this. You just type in your niche, it’s gonna tell you the most popular articles in the niche, easy. Then you got to get the thing written. I’d use a writer named Stefan. Here’s his email address. Go ahead and email him. He’s great. Then you got to get the PDF design. I use this guy named Jeff.
Jeff is amazing. Both these guys together should not cost you more than the ticket to this conference. After that, you need to capture the leads, for that I’m using Thrive Leads. I’m gonna place call to action in three different spots. First, in line called action sees to disrupt the content itself. It’s a button right in the middle of the content. These will convert the best. After that, exit pop-ups, when people are about to leave the screen, and then sticky sidebar widgets that follow someone down the page. After that, you got to write the email follow-up series, so you can either do it yourself or hire someone out to do it. If you decide to do it yourself, I have some tips for you.
First, show a lot of personalities. If you can introduce a character that people can connect to, then they’re much more likely to click your offers later. One technique I like to do is just kind of introduce myself, talk about my struggles that I had in the niche, what it was like breaking through those struggles, and how excited I am to share them with you over time. Next, use the P.S. at the bottom to lead people into the next email. So something like, check out my email tomorrow. I’m gonna be sharing with you how to lose 15 pounds without having to give up your favorite foods, it just works. After that, I recommend daily emails, so email them everyday, and then eventually after you built some kind of rapport, pitch them in the third or fourth email.
Here’s some results that we got from this email final follow-up series. Basically, we built up the list about 5,000 in a few months. The passive revenue increased from this funnel $2,500 per month. It sounds like a little bit but remember with the 40x flipping multiple, I just increased the value of my website by $100,000 for less than the cost of the ticket to this conference. That’s what this compact compounding effect is all about. And then there’s nice little perks like this. Once you have a list, you can send them a mass email and just say, okay we have this Black Friday coupon. I got this email from my affiliate providers saying, where can we send your iPad? You just won the Black Friday contest.
I had no idea. Cool. Here’s a website traffic over time for this website. Obviously this traffic is very valuable for myself because I can you know get them to click affiliate links, but who else might this traffic be useful to? How about the affiliate provider themselves, the advertiser themselves? Why? Because they can retarget these guys on Facebook. I had this idea to rent out the Facebook pixel for some time but I’d never seen it before in the SEO world so I was kind of winging it, but here’s how I pitched it. Hey John, do you guys do any Facebook advertisements? In July, this website had made 31,000 visitors. Your competitor has approached me about buying access to the retargeting pixel. I wanted to talk to you about it first. And then he replies, thanks for thinking of us. We’re definitely up for that, what are you looking for? John, your competitor hasn’t made any offer yet but typically for pixels with this level of traffic, they go for about $1,000 a month.
If traffic 2x’s down the road, we can renegotiate, but I’m okay with locking that in. Right on Matt, sounds great. We’re flexible down the road. We can do $1,000 one month. At this point I can tell this is going to convert. I get a little bit more abrupt trying to seal the deal. John, sounds good. Here’s a PayPal subscription link to get this started. Click here. Boom. Done. As soon as that’s paid I’ll let your competitor know it’s not for sale. Injecting a little bit more emotion. Send me your PayPal pixel code and I’ll get it installed today. Instant satisfaction. And then if you don’t mind doing retargeting myself, I want to see how you’re getting along with this. So they know they have a partner in this, not just someone profiting from them. 30 minutes of work, just increased the flip price by $40,000. Easy-breezy. Alright so, we’ve taken the website, we audited it, we did the on-site SEO, we built the backlinks, got all the number one rankings, monetise the hell out of it.
Now let’s talk about how to go for that flip, how to make as much money as possible. Here’s your to-do list. We’re gonna start with removing yourself from everything. Try to take your SOP and make it as good as possible. you want to be able to truthfully tell the new buyer that they don’t have to do sh*t when they buy the website. Investors who are buying up the website these days love this kind of stuff. And this is a nice thing to do. Queue up the next six months of content. The new buyer just knows they really don’t have to do anything for quite some time. Then slow down on the link building. Remember it’s a website’s profit that determines the sales price, not the revenue.
Slow down to the link building and maybe just go for cheap outreach links during this point in time. Utilise your email list to boost profit. You built that email list, email out a little bit more. Try to get more profit at the end. And then lastly, this is the most important. Figure out the best time to sell. What I like to do is I like to use Google Trends and I’ll toss in a niche that’s kind of similar to mine that’s had its lifetime before, and I’ll try to predict how long I could have. We toss in a similar niche. Let’s imagine you’re in the hoverboard niche before they went out of style. You would throw in segways. This other niche had a 3-year rise before it started to go out of style and ours was about 2 and 1/2. We had a little bit of time but it was about time to start packing things up. And then after that, I recommend making a table like this. What this is gonna do is gonna try to predict your sales price if things keep going the same based on a 12-month average.
It basically looks at the last 12 months, figure out the average profit, and then you multiply it by a multiplier to figure out how much would you sell it for. I see the guy with the Empire Flippers shirt going, yup that’s right. We ended up holding out a little bit longer and we finally got this valuation, $711,000 for a website, we just owned for 20 months. We were super, super happy about this. Let’s talk about what we learned. I talked about how to vet a website for purchase, The Super Audit technique making a Lamborghini out of your website, explanation of core algorithm updates how to beat it with TF*IDF, a great white hat backlink strategy, how to flood your website with new instant ranking content and where to get these content ideas delivered towards you, also some creative monetisation hacks, and how to prepare for a big ass flip. If you guys are pumped up for trying this model, I got some resources for you.
First, go to diggitymarking.com/AWA2019. Here you get all my PDFs. This is my on-site guide, off-site site guide, got a bunch of case studies. So download them all, they’re all for free. If you want to learn affiliate SEO, check out the Affiliate Lab. We got a bunch of 6/7-figure earners in there that are killing it with this exact same model. And if you want me to do your SEO for you, my agency specialises in affiliate, so we’d be happy to take a look. You guys, thank you so much. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Open for questions. Alright, thank you Matt. I think we have a few more minutes for Q&A. You guys raise your hands. There’s a mic if you have any questions Where do you recommend reaching out to actually sell your website? Do you do something like Empire Flippers or Flippa, or do you go towards actual individuals that you have connections with? Basically I have a list of curated buyers that I’ve worked with before so they’re gonna get first dibs, and if that doesn’t work out, they’re just not in the niche or they’re not looking to add to their portfolio, first place I’m gonna go is Empire Flippers.
Do we have any more questions, guys? Alright, over there. What do you do when you’re in a niche where it’s like really difficult to develop content? Sorry it’s hard to hear. Difficult to write content? Yeah, if you’re in let’s say a really boring niche, like the examples you gave are like kind of quite interesting topics, but if you’re in a product like an app or something where it’s like it’s quite difficult to develop content ideas or build that blog or starting. So that’s why I always like go for niches that are very broad.
If you’re in health, there’s a lot of things that do with health. But if you’re into like, how to play Pokemon Go, there’s only so much you can talk about. So that’s a challenge. In a big challenge I would say is, don’t write for writing sake only, write content that has key word volume to it, because otherwise it’s kind of like a dead weight. It will serve you no value and it’ll just be something that’s painful on your site. If you want some ideas, like this is what I do all the time, I’m happy to help brainstorm with you but I’m not sure how I can answer this from here.
Awesome questions. Any more questions guys? Over there. Hello, so I just paid about $50 to have a 1,500 word article written by Ineedarticles.com. Is that a good price and do you have any other suggestions? $15 for 1,500? No, $50. You got a good deal. It’s at the range where it makes me a little bit afraid about the quality, so you don’t get enough to check it out. But my best resource for content is go to a place a Facebook group called, The Cult of Copy, like cult of copy. And what it has it has a bunch of writers there, and you can get dedicated people that are actually into your niche, like let’s say you want to talk about wine.
So you get wine aficionados and what you’re looking for there is about $0.04 to $0.06 cents a word, and then you get them to be your dedicated writer for the website. They’re gonna start to master that topic and they’re gonna give you a good deal, and that the quality is gonna be much better. Excellent, thank you. I guess we have time for a little bit more questions.
Do we have any more questions? Over here. You mentioned cross-selling. How do you pick which competitor you would use? Because you said the top guy wanted to replace you. Did you just go through a whole list and then figure out who was the most minimal? Typically you would know your numbers. So like let’s imagine, I don’t know I can’t think of an example on top my head, but you will know on your website which offers making you the most money right. And in this case, there was multiple offers on my website or multiple of the same product on the website. These bad guys were just one of them, so I already knew which is my best performer and just start shuffling all the guys to the one I knew worked the best. If you don’t know, that’s where experimentation comes in. You should always be out trying to optimise and try to see like just because you did find a particular offer that’s paying you EPC of $3, it doesn’t mean there’s not another one that exists that gives you $10.
This is a constant job, you have to look at. Second question, you mentioned switching off from Amazon affiliate traffic to off Amazon affiliates, do you find that because you have a lower conversion rate off Amazon versus on Amazon that that drops your overall sales or are you using different tactics? That’s a really good question. I won’t go off Amazon unless the product that we’re going to work with gives us about 12% commission. 12% seems to be at the breaking point where it’s worth losing the Amazon conversion. Thank you. Alright, well thank you guys. I think time is up for the questions. Alright, give it up for Matt one more time..
