How Jared Bauman Acquired a Site Averaging $2.5k Per Month & 3x’ed Earnings To $9k Within 2 Years

The tables have turned!

In this episode of the Niche Pursuits podcast, host Jared Bauman sits down with Spencer to share his latest niche site success story.

Co-founder of marketing agency 201 Creative, Jared discusses how his company acquired a 20-year-old website making $2,500/month from a client and grew it to $9,000/month (and likely more soon) within two years.

He discusses the pros and cons of the site when they decided to buy it and dives into all the changes they made to help it grow... including deleting over 3,000 articles!

He then talks about how he and his team then shifted their focus to updating and publishing more content, growing traffic, and making more money.

And as he shares in the interview, this wasn't always easy.

It took over a year before traffic started to grow consistently.

But luckily once it did, things started to take off.

And Jared shares many great insights into the creative ways they continue to grow the site's revenue alongside its traffic, emphasizing the importance of testing and tweaking strategies to find what works and produces results.

He discusses the significance and effectiveness of email marketing as a reliable source of income, estimating 25-30% of the total revenue comes from email.

The website also generates revenue from various sources:

• AdThrive (now Raptive)
• Companies advertising on the site
• Private affiliate networks
• Courses
• E-books
• Amazon Associates
• And more.

He also recommends being curious and the value of attending conferences to create new opportunities and nurture greater familiarity with a niche and its key players.

Overall it's a fascinating look into website building and improving monetization.

Whether you're a site owner or looking to start a website, Jared's experience highlights the importance of keeping on top of the technical aspects of a website, planning your content wisely, and testing and tweaking monetization strategies to find what works best for you.

So, if you're looking to grow your website and profits, make sure to check out this great interview!

Topics Jared Bauman Covers

• Jared's entrepreneurial journey
• Starting his first niche site in 2017
• Founding his agency in 2019
• What his agency does
• His agency's earnings
• Why his agency also builds niche sites
• How he found the niche site he 3x'ed
• The problems the site had
• The pros of the site
• Deleting over 3000 articles
• Fixing broken links
• How long it took to fix issues on the site
• Updating thin content and publishing new content
• Results of new content vs old
• How long it took to see results
• Its various sources of income
• Growing an email list
• Benefits of joining a niche-related conference
• His biggest source of income
• Future goals
• And a whole lot more...

Links & Resources

• 201 Creative
• Weekend Growth Newsletter
• Follow Jared on Twitter
• The Case Study Article that breaks down all the strategies shared in the podcast.
• Free Site Performance Analysis Sheet
• Jared's Weekend Growth YouTube Channel

This Episode is Sponsored by Search Intelligence

Watch The Interview

Transcription

Spencer: Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Niche Pursuits podcast. Today I am going to be your host. I'm Spencer Haws. I'm founder of niche pursuits.com, and today I'm going to actually interview the normal host of the podcast Jared Bauman is with me as a guest to tell a story about his website, his business, and everything that's going on there.

Jared, how you 

Jared: doing? I'm good. I will admit being the host of the podcast for a decent time now, I don't really get nervous before interviews. But as I realized this morning that the rules were gonna be reversed, I all of a sudden was like, oh my goodness, I don't even know how to prepare for this. 

Spencer: It's a little bit different, right?

I'm going to be asking the questions and grilling you on your business. And you, you've, you've got a lot of of great things to share. So we're excited to have you and kind of turn the tables 

Jared: here. It'll be fun. It'll be fun. I not that I don't have to bring value as a host, but I'm not the, the, the talent, right?

As they say, like, you know, I'm, I'm interviewing the talent. So I definitely took it seriously and I feel very prepared for today. 

Spencer: Excellent. So everyone of course, knows that you are the host of the Niche Pursuits Podcast. The regular listeners, you're, you're here, you've been doing it now for a little over a year, maybe a year and a half as the host.

And for long term listeners, they'll know you were a guest is like couple of years ago, two and a half years ago. Mm-hmm. And told, told a of course, a success story there. But maybe what people don't know, and we'd like to maybe clarify here, is that you actually have a whole business of your own unrelated to niche pursuits.

Unrelated to me. I'm not involved in your full-time main business. You just come onto the Niche Pursuits podcast, you know, a couple hours a week and act as a host. And other than that, you're not involved in niche pursuits at all. You, you are involved in the podcast. You do a great job. And so I appreciate that.

And of course I do pay you to be a host of the podcast, but you're quite, well, quite well. But you are not an employee of niche pursuits. Right. Just to kind of clarify, you've got a lot going on. This is just a very minor, minor part, couple hours a week that you spend on the 

Jared: podcast. It's funny because we talk so much about side hustles on the podcast, and really, I.

Podcast toasting is my side hustle. That's a great 

Spencer: way to put it. It exactly. You, you've got a little podcast side hustle going on, which we all love that you do. So, so thank you for doing that. My pleasure. Fun. It's fun. So let, let's get a little bit of your background in terms of what have you done in the past, what's some of your business experience, and then what are you doing now?

What is your main business? Yeah, 

Jared: sure thing. I, I, I, I realize for so many people who probably hear my voice every week you know, my, my past might be a bit of a, a foreign concept. I mean, yeah. So I've been I've been an entrepreneur for, for over 20 years now. Creating paychecks for myself. I started as a professional photographer.

I ran a studio in Southern California for over a decade. We grew that studio out to have many photographers on staff and, you know, shot everything from corporate events to head shots, to weddings, these types of things. I sold that company and started a company that did editing for professional photographers all over the world.

So myself and my business partner, who's another photographer, we grew that and then I exited that company. The way we grew that company though, was on the back of digital marketing. You know, this was back when inbound marketing was really new. We were obvious the first HubSpot conference ever inbound, there were like 200 of us.

Now there's I think 20,000 people that go to it, you know, so we were kind of on the front end of inbound marketing. That's how we grew the editing company, shoot, edit. And and so when I left, shoot, edit was looking at what I wanted to do next. I had a couple friends say, well, you know, you're really good at marketing.

Why don't you do that for other companies? And you know, obviously we know that nowadays as an agency. So I started 2 0 1 Creative and yeah, you're right. That's, that's my full-time job is running 2 0 1 Creative. We're a digital marketing agency that focuses on SEO and other organic traffic methods organic social media, email marketing, these kinds of things.

And you know, we work with clients all over the world doing that. 

Spencer: Yeah. So you were involved in photography as a professional photographer, you had an editing company as well. And was it kind of a clean break? Did you exit those businesses? You no longer do photography and editing but now you have 2 0 1 creative.

Was it kind of an immediate transition or was there some overlap there? Yeah, there was 

Jared: definitely some overlap. I mean, I started the editing company while I was a photographer. It actually kind of started as a solution to myself. I needed help editing as the transition of digital was being made and then, Figured that process out and everybody was saying, wait, wait, you have somebody editing your images for you.

I want some of that. Yes. So there was a couple years where I was doing both. And at some point had to decide, okay, I can't keep doing both. Which one do I want to focus on? And so I made the tough decision to sell the photography studio and do shoot dot edit full-time. And then the transition was somewhat similar.

I, I, I, I knew that I, I was looking for my next challenge and my next task and when I I slowly kind of phased my way out of shoot dot, edit and figured out that the market agency was what, what I wanted to do next, and got that going while I was still kind of phasing out and working with some, some clients on the side.

I was also trying out, I mean, I started my first niche site in 2017. Which I had to look up before this call. I still have that site. And, you know, that was back, you know, things were a lot different for niche pursuits back then. But I mean, I, I grew up on the back of the Niche Pursuits podcast. I would just so enthralled with online marketing, you know, like I talked about.

So I would listen to podcasts that were just everything from side hustles to seo to other digital marketing tactics. And so started my first website kind of at the beginnings of that transition from shoot to, to running the agency. 

Spencer: Yeah. So in 2019 is when you founded 2 0 1 Creative and that is now your main business.

That's where you're putting most of your time and, and do running that marketing agency. So can you tell us a little bit more, more about the agency? What do you focus specifically on what, what types of businesses? That sort of thing. 

Jared: Yeah. We work with small to medium sized businesses. The SMB space as it were.

And you know, I'll be honest with you, it's funny because. The majority of what we do is seo. It's just we didn't intend for that to be the case. Mm-hmm. We're, we're what I call like a full stack marketing agency. So we can do design and email and, you know, social media and stuff, but because most of our business comes from referrals, we just, you know, we get referred for SEO and then they refer us for seo.

And so that goes, so we do mostly SEO work. Recently in the last couple of years, we've also started building a small portfolio of websites inside the company as well, which I think we'll probably spend the bulk of today talking about one of those websites that, that we acquired and whatnot. So you know, but still the bulk of the revenue comes from small and medium sized businesses that hire us usually on contract to do s e o work for them on a monthly basis.

And then, like content websites and affiliate websites will hire us to either do audits and content plans or to help them actually service those audits and service those content plans to grow their websites. 

Spencer: Right. So two follow up questions there. One, are you willing to share like how well 2 0 1 creatives doing in terms of a, anything right.

In terms of, of size or anything like that? Yeah, 

Jared: sure. Yeah, I mean we are a fully distributed company, so anywhere from 25 to 30 people at the company right now. Most, the vast majority in full-time. And, you know working on all these various projects we talked about we generate mid five figures in revenue every month.

You know, I, I, some quarters are busier than not. Q4 is really busy, so Q4 that'll swell up to kind of more the high five figures. And then summer is slower. No, no. Businesses like to work during the summer. They, I wanna go on vacation, so we, we end up slowing down a little bit in the summer. But yeah, Debs and flows.

I'm hoping that this year we'll crack the $1 million mark in terms of revenue as a, as an 

Spencer: agency. Awesome. That would, that would be huge. I hope you get there. So what is really fascinating about the agency that, that you mentioned here is that of course you've got all your clients, you're working with clients, you're growing that business, but then you kind of have like an agency site hustle, if you will, right?

With additional, it sounds like resources or people you're, you're either buying or building your own niche sites. So can you explain that model? Like, and, and why are you doing 

Jared: that? Yeah. It's funny, we just had am Emil on the podcast and you know, we spent a lot of his time talking about his websites that he's growning, right?

But as he started talking about his agency and what he, I was like the whole podcast, I'm going, oh, he, wow, we got a lot in common here am Emil. You know, one of the biggest challenges to run an agency is that your workflow and your deliverables change dramatically every month depending on new clients coming, old clients going, what each client needs, whether it's a content heavy month, a PR heavy month, so, As an agency, you're kind of stuck trying to figure out what to do about that.

Like you can outsource a lot of that to keep your your staffing more flexible so that you don't have to absorb payroll that you're not needing every month. But then when you're outsourcing stuff, you lose some control of that deliverable, you lose some control of the processes, or you can kind of keep fully staffed and have a lot of control.

But then there's some months where your, your writers are gonna be scratching their heads and there's some months mm-hmm. Where they're gonna be slammed and you can't get it all that content out. And so as I was trying to crack that code for us, I liked having control and I liked being able to control the deliverables and the output quite a bit.

I think that s e o is so nuanced that for me it made sense to have a team that was trained up, but I was always worried about the payroll side of things. Building buying websites gives us a chance to use those team members to be productive for the company on months where they're not needed for clients.

And so that was the original model is let's do what, you know, what we know how to do in our side hustle. Let's start to do that as an agency, mainly as an ability to as a way to kind of manage the, the staff every month. And that way, hey, if it's a slow month on the content side of things, well cool, we'll crank out a bunch of content for one of our websites and we don't have too many of them, but we have enough that we can keep keep the team occupied and that's a win.

And then as we grow these websites, if we can exit or get them to be passive income websites, which, which we have, then that's a another win on top of that. 

Spencer: Right. And so you, you've got the agency model where you have all these employees, and the utilization rate of these employees is sometimes less than a hundred percent, of course.

And in some months, maybe summer months, right? Business is much lower. And you're like, okay, what do I do to keep my employees busy? And so, being in the niche site space, why not buy a site they can work on or build a site that they can work on, keep employees busy and, and hopefully build up an asset. It's, I love it.

It's a, it's a really cool model. And so we're gonna talk about that specifically here today. Spend most of our time of, you have a site that you found and you purchased as an agency that, you know, you and your employees have been working on. I have in my notes that it was making about $2,500 a month this site that you found and you purchased.

So first, can you tell us where you found this site that you decided, Hey, we, we should make this acquisition. 

Jared: So I did not find this site. This site found us. Another of another benefit of being an agency is you work on a lot of websites. And so we got hired to help this site with a migration, and then after the migration to a new platform, do a site audit and get everything cleaned up and make sure technically it was in sound condition.

And you know, as, as you do, you kind of get to know the people behind these brands you work with. And the owner and I had become, you know, colleagues, I guess work friends, whatever you wanna call it. And he came to me after six months after we kinda worked on this site and he said, Hey you're really good at this.

And I remember you saying that you do websites on the side and that you like this content website. Can you buy it off me? Cuz I'm really losing interest in it. It's, I'm not, I'm not that kind of a person. So anyways, you know, long story short, we worked together and found what was a very unique off market deal for us to acquire this site.

It was making about $2,500 a month at that time. Not much of it from kind of some of the more standard. You know, things we would expect most of the income was coming from vendors or companies that were related to this content website. Most of 'em were coming from them advertising on the site. Hmm.

And then just doing it on a monthly basis and it was generating a little bit of affiliate income and whatnot, but that was where most of the income was coming. And so we were able to negotiate a deal where we bought the site for a, a good, you know, a, a fair average multiple on that $2,500 a month, but we had to only had to put about a third of it down.

And then we were able to make payments basically on the income from the site for the next, I think it was like the next 15 or 16 months. 

Spencer: Yeah, that's a great, great deal. And the terms are great. You know, a small amount down, you can pay it off over time. Right. So it's a small amount of capital outta your pocket.

Of course. But I love the fact that you were essentially able to run across this deal because your agency had been working on this site for six months, right? So there was probably no questions about what you were getting yourself into. You had been working on this site already for six months, and so if there were any red flags, you probably would've run across them already, right?

Now were there red flags or Oh, were there problems? Oh, yeah. Let's jump into those. What were some of the biggest sort of red flags or problems that 

Jared: the site had? This site's nearing 20 years old, right? So, I mean, I think 2004, 2005, it was, started, it's heyday was, I don't know, 2012, 2015, these kind of time periods.

Right. And it was it's a very, it's a very popular site in its niche. It's a known site, this niche. So we talk on this podcast about building brands rather than website. Like this site has a little bit of a brand going for it. Once you get in and you see the way that the people interact with it, it gets branded searches.

Lots of homepage traffic, but this all sounds great. But most of the, this, this site and it's heyday was what old blogs were. I think back to your story, Spencer, about the old niche pursuits where the majority of of it was you posting something and then the comments were where all the conversation happened, right?

And yeah, the last decade that's moved to social media, you know, we do that on Twitter now we do that in other avenues, right? Like I think you even turned comments off on niche pursuits of our I have. Yeah, exactly. Well, that this site's like locked in time from 10 years ago. So most of the content was very thin.

It was not evergreen. It was tackling a specific situation or a specific news announcement, and then a lot of comments from that. And so there were a lot of challenges with this site in terms of thin content. Tons of pa over 4,000 articles on this site with the vast majority not getting any tr organic traffic.

And then tech debt, you know, so 17, 18, 19 year old site that just had never really had anyone over the course of almost two decades who understood WordPress and understood technical details of managing site. Never had anyone paying attention to it from that standpoint. And so there's just so much weird stuff that we surfaced in the audit.

Spencer: Well, I, I'm sold here. I mean, this sounds great, you know, of course by this site, with all this technical problems and issues. No. We're, we're gonna get into I'm gonna ask you about some of the. The positives of the site, both the strengths and then some of the weaknesses. But what I do like to do here on the show is sort of tease the, the end result here.

Hmm. Tease the success. Right? So we know you've bought a site is making about $2,500 a month. It's got all of these problems and maybe we'll even bring up some more problems here in a bit. But you were, have been able to grow the site significantly. So let's go ahead and jump to what is the site making today, roughly?

And then, then we'll fill in all the details of how you got here. 

Jared: Perfect. Yeah, I, I, I asked the same question when I have guests on, so yeah. So now fast forward you know, a little over two years later the site earned over $9,000 per month in the Q4 months. Right. And that's definitely when the site earns its most, But even now, we're recording in April of, of 2023.

So, you know, we just got done with the worst quarter of the month or the, of the year, sorry. And even then it's, you know, in the high $7,000 range and tracks continuing to go up, revenue's still continuing to go up and stuff. So hopefully we'll break that five figure a month in the coming months.

And then Q4 could be, you know, significantly larger than last year. So, yeah. But, you know, nine upwards of above $9,000 a month in its peak in Q4 and, you know, looks like it's still growing in revenue. Yeah. So 

Spencer: you've gone from $2,500 a month to $9,000 a month, or even triple, you know what it was. If you look at some of these months, around $7,000 a month in your lower months huge success to sort of triple the revenue of a site in a period of about two years.

So congratulations are in order. Thank you. And we. All want to know how you did it. Right. That's why we're here on the podcast. We wanna know what we can do to our sites to achieve similar things. And you've got such a unique story here. It's a site that I'll, I'll maybe spell out some of the positives and you help fill in, but it, it, it's a 20 year old site, right?

You've got this site with a lot of age. It's, it's got some authority, right? What, what was the, the, maybe Dr or the, you know, page authority? Yeah, I 

Jared: was like a 60, maybe like a DR. 60, somewhere around there. And, yeah. Not only just a nice high Dr, but like really great back links, like a good backlink profile of you know, yeah, DR can be manipulated, right?

And but this was one where you dug into the back links and you're like, no, this really is a good niche, relevant, great links. You know, it was really good backlink 

Spencer: profile, right? Y it, it's not spammy, right? It's, it's got good links, a lot of authority. It's got the age, it's got brand recognition. Like you said, people are coming to the homepage.

You're getting traffic there, but it, it's an older asset, you know, it's stuck in time, like you said, the old blog style, lots of you know, old content. So what do you do? What, what were some of the first steps, I guess, that you took to kind of analyze this site and develop a plan to decide, okay, what do we do first?

Jared: Yeah. I mean, you know, again, we kind of have that benefit of. Taking on sites a lot to work on at the agency. And you know, like normally you don't get a phone call from a brand or a business and they're like, Hey, we're kicking butt with our seo. It's amazing. Can you come in and help us? Normally it's like, we don't know why our SEO dropped off a cliff.

Our traffic is terrible. We've never paid attention to this. So kind of used to rolling up our sleeves and getting dirty. Like we usually take on all the projects like that. But it starts with, you know, what I typically recommend, we, we did a we'd already done a site audit six months prior. We did another site audit with the intention of, you know, not necessarily reporting on it as a client would, but rolling up our sleeves and fixing all that.

And so we started with just trying to tackle the tech debt and I think we all, my thoughts on this, like all of our websites have some problems like, Even if you pulled up niche pursuits.com and ran a, an audit today, I'm sure there's some 4 0 4 page that creeped up somehow. For sure. We all have some redirect chains and you know, but there's a certain amount of tech debt that it get when it gets to a certain point.

It, it definitely starts to hold your site back from growing and you know, it, from an audit, it was really clear that there was enough tech debt that that was, it was gonna hold this site back from growing down the road. So yeah, the stuff that kind of got flagged is we had these articles that were thin, we had tons of pages with no traffic.

I've, I've talked a lot in the past about deleting content. I've written articles actually on that and for shown case studies on what can happen when you like. Systematically with a plan, delete content in bulk. So we ended up deleting, you know, I'll just cut to the chase. We ended up deleting over 3000 of the roughly 4,000 articles.

And you know, probably not the time or place to talk about like exactly how to evaluate, what to delete and what not to delete. But we get all the URLs into one spot and we get all the information about every URL into one spreadsheet. So we get all the, the last 30 days of organic traffic, the number of back links, the number of keywords it ranks for the number of internal links that are pointing to it, and we start slicing and dicing and making decisions.

And in the end, like we just decided to delete over 3000 articles. And then when you delete those, now you have all the internal links that are now pointing to broken pages. So you have to go through and clean up all the broken links and all the broken internal links and stuff. So that was a big project that took over a month, maybe two months.

I think I should have pulled up the exact timing, but it took a while to go through and do that iteratively. Couple other things we did was we recategorized the site. We added an about page that was really fully baked out, right? Like that really substantiated this 20 year history. We redesigned the homepage to make it a lot better for, you know, sending the right traffic to the right pages and improving crawl depth.

And then it didn't even have author pages, right? So we created author pages and synced all those author pages up so that all the articles that were still live were correctly attributed to the right authors. 

Spencer: Yeah. Boy, that sounds like a lot of work, just thinking about going through 4,000 articles and deciding, Hey, we need to remove 3000 of these, and deciding which of those to remove.

Man, that, that is a ton of work. I mean, I know I, I did a lot of, of removing old content on niche pursuits and, and, you know, doing a whole audit there, but it was significantly less content than, than I was dealing with. It's tough 

Jared: to Any other, well, I was gonna say, like, you probably dealt with the same thing.

Like, you go and you look and you, you, you do a page. You have a page, right? This is what came up constantly in our meetings. Like you have a page and like Gabe, our, our content corner would be like, oh, this page looks like it's a prime candidate for an article update. But then you'd open it up and it would be like 200 words and then, 2,500 words of comments.

And so it's like, what do we update this to? It's a thin article, and all the comments are about that moment in time. They're not about like this bigger topic. And so it was really tough. You, we, we definitely used the spreadsheet as a starting point and helped get us, it's like set the stage, but there was a lot of like pulling up individual articles and just having to make a decision about it.

So it took, you're right, it took a long time. 

Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. So would you say that that was probably the most difficult part of the audit or, or, you know, implementing the audit, you know, was going through all the articles or was there anything else that you felt was either more time consuming or, or more difficult to accomplish?

Jared: That was the most difficult and I think that as we'll talk about later. We, we, I, I really, you know, I'm not like an expert in how Google crawls and understands sites, but doing what I do for a living, I really think that. By deleting three quarters or more of the content in the site, it had a lot of positives.

Like think about now Google not having to crawl 3000 pages that it didn't think had any value, right? Like it wasn't ranking them all that, but it kind of reset the whole website for Google Bot. And so you know, it took a long time to get that right and we kind of kept having to make iterations.

You know, you keep, you, you run through and you do all the work, and then you run another crawl to site and you'd find more things and then you'd do it, fix those things, then you'd find more things. And so it took months to get it right and then at that point started. From a technical standpoint, the waiting game for Google to kind of like figure out what the heck we just did, 

Spencer: right?

So it's kind of like, okay, we're cleaning house. You've got this old closet full of junk, you've got rid of all the junk. You're, you know, going back over and over again to fix broken links, right? Once you figure out, okay, here's what Google has crawled, and, oh, we forgot to add this internal link, et cetera.

Right? So a lot of like you said, going back and forth, getting all that cleaned out, just kind of starting fresh. Okay. Now we have a strong domain, an old domain, it's got content but it's really kind of like a fresh start, like you said. So at that point, what's your next step? What do you feel like was the biggest changes that you made after that?

That that had the biggest impact? 

Jared: Yeah. You know, that took a couple months, right? Yeah. So we're already a couple months into this project. Again, most of the revenue for the site is coming in and going straight back out to pay. The you know, to pay the, the, the payment terms of, of buying the, the website, right?

And so you know, we're deleting a lot of content, but most of the revenue comes in through advertising on the website. And so at that point we turned our attention to publishing content. And so we did a ton of keyword research. Again, we did keep about, you know, under a thousand articles and many of those were articles that still weren't showing a lot of signs of life, but they did rank for some keywords.

And they did seem to be about topics that we could go in and update that article over time and kind of make it about something that was more evergreen. So we started trying to make some updates to those articles and getting them more optimized for search because a lot of the articles, you know, weren't written from a search, an SEO standpoint.

But then, yeah, we just started publishing a lot of content. I think you know, we ended up publishing 300. I haven't here in front of me 317 articles in that first year, but, you know, by months four and months five and months six, we were really hitting our stride. We were publishing 70 to 80 articles a month about just the, you know, various topics that we thought this website could rank for long term, you know, and we were hoping that it would take quickly, right?

You're, you're dealing with a 20 year old site, a dr whatever it was, 60, 58, something like that. You're, you're thinking this site's never been, you know, it's not like an age domain where it was a drop domain or anything. Like you're thinking, man, we're gonna publish content and it's gonna just skyrocket in at least a couple months, right.

So, you know, we were just pumping out you know, content with high velocity good content. It wasn't churn and burn. It was, you know, content that was really focused on answering the. The, the search intent and really trying to do a good job with it. So that was the next steps and that took us all the way really, pretty much for the next six months of just publishing lots and lots of content.

Spencer: Okay. So it sounds like it was sort of two steps in terms of publishing content. It was brand new content, new keywords, getting that out the door, 317 ish I think is what you said articles and, but then it was also, I, I think you said updating old content and a lot of that was just kind of rewriting articles completely, wasn't it?

Basically, 

Jared: yeah. Yeah. Just, I mean, when you go to an article that's about a topic that you're like, okay, This is something that still has relevance, but it's only 200 words and it's all one paragraph, right? There's no images on 

Spencer: the page. Not a lot to start from you, you, you just kinda, after, 

Jared: after a few of those, you're like, you know, I don't, I think we just start over.

Spencer: Yeah. Yeah. So you basically left the old url, the page was there, but you rewrote the 

Jared: article and, and so it's basically like new content, right? Yeah. Like we're updating the article, air quotes here, but I mean, in essence, we're taking a URL that's been live for 10 years and just putting brand new content on it and adding internal links and that sort of stuff.

Spencer: Okay. And so do you feel like you saw most of the traffic increase from these old URLs? Or was it the new content that you published? 

Jared: The vast majority of the traffic is from the new content. Okay. Yeah. Today when we started seeing growth, you know, the whole time it's always been to this new content, pretty much.

And 

Spencer: why do you think that 

Jared: is? That's a really good question. I mean, we really tried to tie it all together with internal linking and really, you know, it's not, it's not like we kept the old site and the old content siloed by accident or anything. We tried to incorporate all of it. I, I, I just, I do. It's just some of these some of this content.

I, I still don't think, let me put it this way. I, even though we took what we had and worked a good keyword and a good article around it, it still was no match for starting the research process properly from the beginning, going after the best topics, going after the best keywords and producing content.

So I think, yeah, those articles that we updated did end up ranking, but it, they paled in comparison to doing proper keyword research and proper article building from the beginning. You know, actually looking at a topical keyword, a, a topical map, trying to make sure you're covering all the topics. That, that, that silo needs going about it in a, in a proper way.

I just don't think we were ever able, we still, we got lots of traffic eventually to these up articles we updated, but it just never pa, it always paled in comparison to the right approach from the beginning. Yeah, it kind 

Spencer: of sounds like with the old articles, you're kind of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Right. It never quite. You know, works. But if you can do it right from the beginning with, with new keyword research, new content, you know, that you've got your game plan in place. And it sounds like that that's what's paid off the most for you there. Which, which is ideal of course how long before you started seeing the significant traffic increases sounds like it took a little while for the, the content to age and for you to really start seeing, okay, this is 

Jared: paying off.

Yeah. So I will be very honest. This was a really slow path to growth. And you know, you always, like, whenever you're dealing with an old website, an age domain, like you just don't really know how things are gonna respond, I guess. You don't really know things are gonna respond with a new domain either.

So, but whenever you're dealing with a site light that hasn't focused on any of this stuff for a long time, you really don't know what Google's gonna, how they're gonna respond, but, Even with all this, I mean publishing, you know, 77 articles on month five, and I'm looking 75 articles on month six and all that.

Like traffic didn't move for the first year. It was basically flat for the first year. Finally by year two, so like 13th month, 14th month, 15th month, traffic finally started to bump up. But even then it was 10%, 15% over, you know, year on year growth. So, I mean, it was a full year before we even saw it didn't go down, you know, and we had updates roll through Google updates roll through, didn't, didn't go down.

Mm-hmm. It just didn't go up for over a year. 

Spencer: Yeah, that's tough. I mean, it's, that's a long waiting game. Especially when you're investing heavily, right? Yeah. In, in new content. Even though, hey, you're, you're kind of using your agency, like you still, I'm sure are kind of billing your agency and knowing, hey, this is, we're spending this much resources to, to invest in this site.

Plus we're making payments, right. To, to acquire the site. So you're kind of double in the hole for the first year. And so it took about a year and then did things start to kind of consistently grow after that? 

Jared: Yeah, it did. You know, like, we'll, we'll, we'll come back to, I think, to monetization and because I mean, by the end of the first year, I'm like, man, we gotta get creative here because if this site isn't gonna grow, we've gotta find some way to get more money out of it.

Yeah. The plan I had in my mind is probably the plan most of us use who listen to this podcast. A lot of us go like, cool, publish more content. Grow traffic and then make more money because I have more traffic. And so I was in a spot where I'm like, well just being candid, traffic's not growing. So how else can I get money from this site?

Like, I gotta, yeah, I gotta squeeze more money out of the rock I have. You know so we'll talk about it a little bit later, but let's stay on the kind of the growth pla platform. Cause that was the primary focus of the site. Yeah. So I mean, by, by by year two we're now in months like 13 and 14 and 15.

I mean, we'd kind of backed off on publishing as much content because there was a little bit of a a like, eh, like we didn't stop publishing content. We always published at least 10 articles a month on the site, but we did wind down to like 10 to 15 a month rather than that crazy content push, cuz Oh, we just didn't really know really at this point if it was gonna take.

But yeah, I mean you know, the site was getting about 20,000 organic page views a month when we bought it. And so, you know, in months 13 it was at like 24,000 month 14, 24,000, month 15. Wow. It was at 28,000, 27,878. You know, so at that point you're like 20% for 30% growth, but still no kind of hockey stick until we got to like the months 18 and 19.

That's, that's when it just finally, finally broke out. 

Spencer: Finally, things just kind of clicked and, and traffic increased there. And, and really it just sounds like it wasn't necessarily even articles that you published in month 18 or 19. It was really all the content you've been publishing for the past year.

Just finally kind of. Got picked up was it was, was there a Google update that kind of you know, helped that take off or anything? Or, or anything that you noticed in particular? 

Jared: Yeah, that's a good question. So the May, 2022 update rolled out, and that was a pretty big update, right? Mm-hmm. That one was that one just hit a lot of sites.

And so this site, and this happened to a lot of sites in the May, 2022 update. A lot of content websites a lot of screenshots got shared online. Like this site was one of those sites where it got a dip and then two weeks later, full rebound. Interesting. And so, man, I'll tell you, those two weeks were, were really rough cuz it's like we have, I mean, seriously, what else could we have done?

To try to get this like going forward. And not only has it not gone forward much, but now it's just lost like half of its traffic from this update. But that got corrected. A lot of people saw this dip and then correction kind of happen a couple weeks later and for whatever reason, like the next month was when we cranked out and started breaking through.

And it was July June or July of that, that summer where that's when we finally started seeing the page views from organic search pickup. And so, you know, July I'm looking was 33,000. August was 36,000, and then September was almost 50,000. 

Spencer: Awesome. Man. Building a website, it's not easy, is it in terms of emotional roller coaster as well.

I mean, you've got this Google update that looks like has taken out everything that, that you've done you know, taken out all the effort that you put in and luckily it, it recovered. But those, those two weeks, I have to imagine we're, we're kind of depressing. Probably looking at your traffic graph.

It's, 

Jared: you know, I mean, it's, it's emblematic of what we always talk about on the podcast. I have the luxury of, I mean, everybody gets to listen to it, but I get to interview people and like, you just interview people. And because the stories are so diverse across the success, it, it was a comforting for me to know that like, not every story is the same.

And certainly, you know, I'm not sure we would've taken this project on, if we had known it would be 12 months before anything even moved, and 18 months and a two week period of our lives where we wanted to throw the whole project out. But 18 months before we really even saw much actual upward movement.

Like, but you know, I mean it's, it's, we say this all the time, right? Like this is a long game. And the fortunes come to those who stay invested and manage their emotions. Mm-hmm. And still continue to consistently update content, publish new content, consistently focus on things like topical authority.

And and, and, and building a brand and, and making sure that you're getting talked about online and other spaces and all these things we talk about. And so it was really hard because you do start questioning if you're doing the right things. You do start questioning if it was worth all that investment.

You kind of say, maybe I should just sell this thing off and move on. And ultimately we just kept saying, Nope, I still believe in this project. I still think it's a good website. I still think we're producing good content. I still think we're doing it and we just have to trust the process. Like there's a lot of reasons when you sit back and look at it that maybe Google doesn't trust this site yet.

Like we can see those. They should have gotten over it by now. But you know, I don't have a direct line to Google's robot, so let's just keep doing what we think. We'll keep working and eventually thank goodness we, we got, we got, we, it, it came through. Yeah, 

Spencer: absolutely. So let's shift gears a little bit and go ahead and talk about how the site's making money.

And I think we're gonna spend quite a bit of time here because you've got a unique monetization strategy. The site when you acquired it, it sounds like was ads from different vendors were, were buying ad space on the site. And was, well, why don't you tell me how was the site making money when you bought it, and how is it making money now in terms of you know, the differences 

Jared: there.

Yeah, yeah. To me that's the most fun part of this story is this isn't kind of your classic, like I said earlier, like, Hey, get a site. Put out content, grow traffic, make more money because you have more traffic. Which there's nothing wrong with that, by the way. That's how I've always grown websites. This one, we were, you know, it's almost like when you get stuck, you are forced to think differently about things.

And sometimes that's where you have your most creative or your best ideas. And we were forced to think creatively about this because we're like, while we're sitting on this asset, it's not growing, so let's figure out how to monetize it. But yeah, when we bought it, most of the money, most of the 2,500 was coming in through companies in the space advertising our site.

You know, so like, let's say you're a content site about cars this one isn't. But I'm just using that as analogy like, you know, there's AutoZone and plenty of companies that sell products to people that are interested in cars. And so we had relationships with brands in the industry that we inherited.

That that we're advertising on our site every month. So that was great. And in many ways it's a, it, it's, it's interesting because I've never really monetized a site that way before. And it's a really fun thing for people to think about. It wouldn't work at every niche, but chances are in the niche you're in, there are brands that want to get in front of people that are interested in, you know, content about this.

And so that was always the mainstay. We also did inherit a small email list. And so I think it was like 1800 people that were on this email list. Now it's funny because speaking of old school the email list was only being used for one thing. It would automatically email the entire list.

Every single time a new blog post was pushed live. 

Spencer: Interesting. Okay. 

Jared: And I'm like, I don't think you're supposed to do that. Like and so we, we shut that off. And immediately one of the first things we did in the first couple months was. Because it's kind of a one time thing. And I always, I always tell people this, like, as soon as your site is generating any measurable traffic, like take the, take the half day, take the time to put together something that you can use to generate leads.

You know, whether it's an ebook, a calculator, a worksheet, something put together a simple popup and and embed that popup on your blog post. And then, you know, Put together like a simple autoresponder sequence, like three emails at, at the very minimum that just send people to your best content and just set that up and forget about it.

And we did that. And so we were, we were generating new emails subscribers throughout this whole process. So towards the end of the first year, we had another opportunity. This is something that's been interesting. People don't, I don't hear people talking about this, but I actually went to a conference in this niche towards the end of the first year to meet people, to talk to people who were speaking, to meet vendors.

We had several vendors who were advertising on our site that were gonna be having booths at this conference. There were speakers that I wanted to go talk to and see if I could get them to be content contributors to our website. And so I went to this conference and started just meeting people and, you know, walking around and and doing, doing that.

And I met someone there. Who said, Hey, I have a course that I made a while back. I don't really want anymore. Could I sell it to you? Hmm. And I was like, Hmm. He was an expert in the space. He was speaking at the conference, and he's like, yeah, I don't really want it anymore. I, I, I'm not very good at this online marketing stuff.

I made a course, got it all filmed, got it all produced and everything. And I, I just, I'm not selling it. So anyways, we came to a, a very, a good deal. It cost me way less to buy this course from him than it would've taken me to produce a course of this quality with someone of this, you know pedigree and, and, and esteem, you know?

And so we bought this course off of him and we immediately launched that to our email list. And you know, the, I think we made three or $4,000 right away on the course launch just by sending out a couple emails with a promotion. And so, you know, that was kind of when we were off to the races, when we started thinking like, okay, there's a lot of, we know this.

We all know this as we listen, right? We know there's a lot of different ways to make money, but that really got my head going, like, how many different ways are there that we can make money from this website? I 

Spencer: love that. I love that you were willing to take the initiative and actually go to a conference and meet people in person.

That's something that Not many people do with their niche site. And so a lot of interesting opportunities, of course, can be born out of that. You of course came across a, a course that you could sell to your audience. Okay, so now you've got a course you can sell to your email list. You've been building the email list, which was smart of course, all along the way.

And you're still selling some ad space on the site. What else, what other ways are you making money from the site now? 

Jared: Yeah, good question. So finally by year two, so about 14, 15 months in, we were able to get the site on Ad Thrive. We weren't getting a hundred thousand page views a month, but thankfully we have another site on Adri and so we were able to get in for a lower amount.

But that was another great shot in the arm, you know, so obviously we have, you know, throughout the first year we have these vendors that are paying us. Money every month. At the end of the first year, we do a course launch and that's a nice shot in the arm. And now we have this course we can market ongoing to to people on our email list and we can put ads and, you know, little call outs in our content.

Beginning of, of year two, we're now getting monthly revenue from Ad Thrive. And it's not a ton cuz we're only like 30, 35,000 page views a month at this time. But it's another, you know, way to generate way to generate money. Some of the new content we had published was buyer focused, right? This website didn't really have any or much buyer.

It did have some, cause we were getting some money from Amazon, but we had published a bunch of kind of buyer guides, those sorts of things. Those were starting to rank, so we were starting to get more money from Amazon. We did try out some other affiliate. Net other affiliate plans and they just didn't really work out that well.

But we were generating money from Amazon. And so we started sending out much emails every month. We started to send out emails. Really, we tried to get into a cadence of two per month. And it was also at this time that I started saying, well, we've got these vendors that are paying us to do monthly advertising.

I wonder if they'd be interested in sponsoring an email putting a tile ad in an email. I wonder if they'd be interested in, in sponsoring content on this growing website. And so in year two, we also started going to these vendors and actually marketing outside of these to other companies to say, Hey, you know, do you want to get in front of our email list?

Do you want to get you know, a specialized sponsored post and started doing that marketing? And, and that would have, you know, monthly recurring revenue from that. I've actually posted on Twitter about how I spent 47 minutes. Reaching out to a few of these brands and one person said yes, and it led to $2,000 that month just from like an email and a sponsored post and a couple other things, right?

And so we started doing these things. And then for Black Friday last year, so just a couple months ago, we put together a couple of eBooks and we, we, we put together e-books from a variety of our blog posts. We pulled them all together and made some really big eBooks, and that was our Black Friday special that we launched to our email list this year.

So in summary, now, two years later, the site makes money from Amazon affiliates and makes money from AD Thrive. It makes money from companies advertising on the site. It makes money from private affiliate networks, mostly through like emails. We'll put them private affiliates, offers and emails.

Mm-hmm. It makes money from its course, and then it makes money from an ebook. 

Spencer: Okay, so it is much more diversified quite a, quite a few ways, your own products, you know, traditional display ads, but in addition, you know, working directly with these, these vendors and other advertisers, which is, is really interesting.

I don't know that we've had a ton of interviews where we talk about, hey you know, you can sell ad space or sponsored posts as you mentioned. So it sounds like that is still the the largest source of the overall revenue. Is that correct? I think in your breakdown it was something like 43% or something was, was from these vendors, which is the largest single source of revenue for the site.

So I guess two things. One is how do you recommend that people find. People to advertise on their site and how do you work out the terms, how, how much do you charge? That sort of thing. 

Jared: Yeah. Yeah. I think first, like, just being very curious. So, you know, for me, the eyeopener for me was when I went to the conference and you're walking around the trade show floor, right?

Which most people have been to a conference and they got the education stuff and then they got the trade show floor. And I mean, I started walking the hall and I realized every one of these people are spending money to put themselves in front of the same audience. My website is put is in front of Yep.

Every one of these people, every one of these booths. I'm just gonna go ahead and write down who's here. And that became my first target list. Right? And then you can start to and again, what I would do is I'm not sure this is the best strategy. There's, this is probably one of many ways, but then to get the next round, I would take one of those companies and I go put 'em into H Refs and it would say who the top 10 competitors of that website are.

And so, you know, Agere kind of display that. And so I just grab, grab them and I go look at their website and say, okay, do they look like they're, you know, marketing to the same audience that I have? And I just make this list and I just go deeper and deeper and you can now take that company and go put them into agere.

And you gotta see how this just spirals out and just go down the rabbit hole until you have a list. That's as long as, as as makes sense, right? Like you don't wanna start reaching out to people that aren't trying to put themselves in front of your audience, but you can go down that rabbit hole until you just run dry of opportunities.

Yeah, 

Spencer: and I guess the other thing to think about is just if you have Adri or media Vine display ads on your site, all of those advertisers that show up on your site, You can reach out to them directly. Yeah. Right. I mean, they, they already are paying for ad space on your site. You, you can cut out the middle man by going direct to the 

Jared: advertiser.

You asked about how much to charge. I mean, we were lucky in that we inherited a model that was kind of already working. And my, my approach was like, well, let's not rock the boat. Like, I don't want to change what's working. Since then, you know, it's just it's, it's, we do help other brands at our agency figure this stuff out.

And there are some, like general guidelines, how much you should charge to have an email sponsored, how much you should charge to have a like a sponsored post. You know, emails is oftentimes about the size of your list, plus your average open rate. Sponsored post is generally about the number of pages you'd normally get and then what you're willing to do to share that post.

And so there's some standards you can look up, but really it comes down, I mean, my, my real recommendation is it just comes down to talking to the brand and seeing what they want. And figuring out their budget and then coming up with something that makes sense. Most of the things that we do, we start with like a, a rate sheet or a media kit, but then we just customize everything for that specific brand.

Spencer: Yeah. I was gonna ask you about media kit. So it sounds like you do have that prepared so you can send that to people. Do you send that maybe in a second email, do you kind of reach out to people and say, Hey, are you interested? And then after that send it or you just send it all in one 

Jared: email? No.

Yeah, it's definitely second or third email, you know? Yeah. It's like, Hey, here's an opportunity. If you get a reply, Hey, tell me what you, what would you want so I can make sure I get you the right information. Get a reply. Here's our media kit, but let's modify this. Or I'm thinking maybe these two things together make sense.

Maybe you wanna jump on a quick call. I like getting on phone calls. You can probably guess that I like being on the podcast. I don't, lot of people don't wanna get on phone calls and That's fine. You don't have to. You can do all that every, you can do it either way. Yeah, you can do it either way. So, 

Spencer: So are you willing to share how much your site charges for a sponsored post?

Jared: Yeah. Oh, I didn't have that booted up. I think it's seven 50 roughly. Yeah, roughly for a sponsored post. And 

Spencer: that might include some sort of sharing on social media or email list or something like that. We usually 

Jared: mention it in one of our monthly emails. We'll, like, put it as one of the, the, the, the things we share.

You can buy a whole email, I think for a thousand dollars, or you can be like an ad spot in the email for I think 500 or $600. Okay. And then there's different website placements. You know, you can do like an in-content ad, kinda like, you know, a normal ad Thrive ad would be, but you can kind of, you control the brand and the, the, the banner and stuff.

And then, you know, sidebar, homepage, different kind of advertising options on, on the website. 

Spencer: Yeah. Are our sponsored posts becoming more and more of the revenue? Are you doing quite a few of those? 

Jared: The email is the biggest driver. Okay. If we look at it, the email, like you've got the monthly, the monthly, the, the, the companies that pay monthly, that's, that's a big chunk of that revenue.

And then outside of that monthly, when people want to spend to get themselves in singular event, most go for the email. But I think it's, cuz the email is super, like, it, it, it gets great engagement. The average open rate is well over 40%. And we send several emails a month, you know, so I think people like that, they can see those, those numbers and it performs really, really well.

Spencer: So the email list size is, is a little over 5,000, I think you said? Yeah. And so that's where most sponsors are wanting to advertise, or at least that's your, your hot item right? Is to, to be interested in. 

Jared: That's where it hot right. With us. And it might be different with other, other websites, right. But like, that's where people are really loving and just keep coming back to.

Spencer: Yeah. So roughly how much revenue is coming directly from the email list? 

Jared: Let's see. So 43% of the total revenue over the last six months has come from advertisers in this capacity. i's, see, I didn't have that breakdown. I would say probably 25% of that revenue is email. 

Spencer: Okay. Yeah. 25% of the sponsored so call it fif 15 to 20% of the overall revenue of the site?

Probably, yeah, 

Jared: probably 10, 15% comes from email. Yeah. That, that'd be a good, that'd be a good estimate. 

Spencer: Okay. And then of course you sell your own course through your email list as well. So that might bump that up even more. Yep. 

Jared: Yeah. Actually, yeah, if you, if you take the course. No, that's a good point. So if you take the course sales, which course sales amount for 11% of the revenue over the last six months, and really we're selling that over email.

Yeah. And so really, you're right, you should factor that into the email. And so really the email bucket between the advertisers and the course sales is more like 25 or 30% of the total revenue. Yeah. 

Spencer: So you're talking a couple thousand dollars a month probably. Yep. From, from just the email list. And so maybe that's a lesson for, I know there's a lot of niche site creators that don't want to create that email list.

It's a lot of work. You gotta sign up for Convert Kit or Mailer Light or you know, some other service. You gotta email 'em, you gotta write the email. But there's a lot of revenue opportunities 

Jared: there. Well, we've been doing this, I mean, I say now by hand, but I mean, one of the big areas we think Chat G P T could have a big influence is.

Helping us streamline so much of that email component. Like, if you're not using chat g p t for content on your website, that's totally fine. Like, jury's still out about how we're all gonna end up using that on our website. But definitely think about it in areas like an email list and things like that.

That's just my advice, you know, I think that there's a lot more reason to overcome some concerns when it comes to an email than maybe with web content or blog content. 

Spencer: I love it. Yeah, great tip. I mean, there's tools out there to, to streamline the process, make it easier. But just having that email list and growing that email list, I think is very important as you've shown from your site.

Any final tips in terms of monetization, unique things that you've done there that you felt like, you know, were really helpful for this particular project? 

Jared: Yeah, I mean, I think that I, I just think, ma'am, my eyes have been opened up and I. It's cuz we were forced with our back against the wall. We were struggling to grow the site in terms of traffic.

But you know, once you just start exploring things, you know you, you don't know what's gonna stick. And, and so just, I would encourage everyone that even if you have tried email marketing on a different website before, like it's just so niche specific, you know? And so I, I just, I think that everybody ought to be open to trying these new things and then tweaking and modifying.

Like when we first bought the course, we did a big email blast and, you know, I think a lot of the, we'll call it the low-hanging fruit, they bought it, but after that, the course sales went dry and we weren't selling many courses and so we kind of had to go back to the drawing board and say, well, okay, we went out in a blast style email and a bunch of people bought it, but no one's buying it after we sent that email blast.

We need to do a better job of incorporating this into the website. We need to do a better job of writing emails that actually like, you know, encourage and create demand for this product. So, Even if, you know, you try it and it doesn't work great, like you can go back and try a different method and try a different way.

And that, that's been helpful for us because if we just look at the course, it did great in one promotion and then didn't sell anything for another three to six months. Like we had to go back and try something different and try something different and finally tweak until we found something that now automatically, as part of this auto-responder sequence produces sales every single month, you know?

So, 

Spencer: yeah. So that's a big part of it. Always testing, trying, tweaking strategies and seeing what works, what produces the results. I think those are some great tips. So thanks for sharing the success of your site now, making you know, in, in its highest month, over $9,000. Hopefully you'll get to $10,000 a month regularly by the end of the year.

Thanks to all the changes that you've made there. What's next for the site? Do you have any other big plans? Are you gonna hold it? Are you gonna keep it? Are you gonna sell it? 

Jared: Eventually sell it for sure. Eventually sell it. It's been, it's been super fun and I, I do think this site could continue to grow quite a bit.

It's in a, it's in a niche that has a lot of, of, you know, big opportunity and stuff. So we haven't written all the content. There's plenty more content we could write. So yeah, I mean, we're gonna just keep growing it. And I think maybe evaluator the summer about maybe selling it, but definitely sell it.

I'd like to, you know, I'd like to to move on from it and yeah, I don't really know how to put it. I, yeah. Your return strategy, you know? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Do you think a great return if we end up selling it for Yeah, if it keeps growing and stuff like that? I mean, a site we bought you know, for mid five figures making 2,500 a month and, you know, hopefully we'd be over the, the, the $10,000 a month mark when we went to sell it.

You, you wanna get that, that trail in six month at least. Over 10,000 if, if that's your goal. Right. So then we could probably get, you know, a, a really good return on it. I guess that would be maybe the long term goal there. Yeah. 

Spencer: Do you think you'd ever buy another site or start a new site as an agency?

Is that gonna be a sort of repetitive thing for your agency? 

Jared: Yes, a hundred percent. Yep. At the end of last year, we actually bought a website almost seating as our next project, you know. Nice. So we bought a website at the very end of the year actually off of a niche pursuits listener. So Even better.

Even better, right. But yeah, so that'll be a project that we also have and we're already working on right now. You know, I mean, I don't wanna say this website we talked about today, I don't wanna say it's on autopilot, but, you know, we know what we need to know now, and we have, you know, going all the way back to building the right plan outta the gate.

You know, like auditing the site, getting, getting your ship in order you know, making sure that the technical details are established. Getting a content plan put together, understanding where you need to take it. I mean, now we're two over two years in on that, that. And so we know what's in front of us and we can kind of, we can kind of start to sink our teeth into that next project.

At the same time, I ask a lot of guests like, how do you know when it's time to turn your attention on the next project? So I kind of answered that for us right now. But you know, we can keep growing this site, get it ready for a sale down the road while also sinking our teeth into another project.

Spencer: Yeah. Well, maybe we'll have to have you on again in a year and you can come tell us about this new project. Hopefully it's a success as well. And you can share what you've learned there. This is all 

Jared: fun too, boy. I'll tell you. We just keep getting ourselves into sites that have these very interesting paths.

Spencer: I like it. You're not afraid of a project. That's, that's good. Don't shy away from that. That's where you find a lot of the diamonds right in the rough. So thanks again for coming on. I know that you are also if people have read your case study perhaps already, it's on weekend growth.com. They can read about your case study.

You did a, a, a long write up where there's a lot more stats and details if they wanna do that. But that's kind of a project you're working on. We mentioned a couple times on the podcast is, is your weekend growth site, but maybe you can tell us a little bit more about that or anywhere else that you wanna send people.

Yeah, 

Jared: yeah. It's kind of you know, we talk about shiny object syndrome right on on, on the, the weekly podcast that you and I do and other guests come on. And my shiny object project for this year has been to just kinda start documenting. Some of these things that I've learned in, in building, you know, websites on the side, and a lot of people do that.

But we, we, we put together a case study on this site and just went into all the nerdy details and the charts and the graphs. And I've said it before, man, they take forever to put together these case study. Mm-hmm. Boy. And you wanna do it, right? So you, boy, but the, so it's a long one. You can go, you can go kind of read all the nitty gritty details about this website if you want.

But yeah, we also put together the tool that we use at the agency to get all of the messy data for our website together into one spreadsheet. We, we put that together as a freebie that people can go grab if they want. And so you can just go to weekend growth.com/niche niche pursuits. We'll make it easy.

Yeah. And it, yeah, basically what you do is you just make a copy of this Google sheet. And you just download your, your, you know, last 30 days of your Google Analytics traffic. You, you add keywords from H Refs or, or SEMrush. Add the number of back links. You can add internal links as well from like Link Whisper.

You know, you can go in and make a simple download of your links from Link Whisper, and this spreadsheet puts everything together into one, one view, one tab. And so then you can slice and dice it and you know, so then you can kind of go and look at all your data and say, okay, like, let's show me all the posts that have gotten zero organic searches over the last month.

They have, they rank for zero keywords and they have zero back links. Cool. I'm gonna delete all those articles. How about all of the same criteria, but they have more than one back link. Cool. I'm gonna 3 0 1 those articles to preserve the, so you can kind of slice and dice and, and kind of see your site holistically.

So yeah, you can go grab that if you want. We'll just, we'll keep it as a freebie for people to use. 

Spencer: Yeah, no, that sounds like a great tool that people can use that spreadsheet. They can go over to weekend growth.com/niche pursuits download that, and of course can follow along with Jared as he makes additional updates, I'm sure on your site [email protected].

And people can also go to 2 0 1 creative.com if they want to check out your agency and see what you're doing there. But Jared, this has been a lot of fun. It's been cool to kind of turn the tables here and me jump back into the host seat a little bit and you and the guest seat it's been a good time.

I 

Jared: appreciate it. It's my pleasure. And I'll, I'll, I'll be right back in the host seat next week. And I think I do enjoy that more. It's, it's my voice is a little hoarse. I you do a lot more talking on this side of the camera than you do on that one. That 

Spencer: is true. It's been it's been a lot of fun and I am more than happy to let you take over the hosting responsibilities for the next one.

So thank you Jared, and thank you everyone for listening to the show.

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