Welcome to the fourth iteration of my Q&A on all things digital. Ask any question below and I’ll answer over the weekend. If I don’t know, I’ll do my best to point you in the right direction or state that I don’t know.
This Q&A will be open for 48 hours and I’ll be answering them intermittently throughout Saturday-Sunday.
Questions asked tonight will be answered tomorrow when I get back to my computer. (I’m actually taking a hiatus away from my computer to have dinner and drinks.)
Working on my first affiliate site and I'm working on a sustainable content strategy to be able to keep up growth over the next few months. How do you suggest we balance word counts, affiliate or "sales" posts vs information-only content, and research.
I've watched a few videos from guys like Miles Beckler that give a general idea on how to balance those things, but I'm curious what your take is.
If you've just started recently, here's some hard advice to swallow.
My take is you are thinking *WAY* to far ahead. Thinking/researching on how you're going to sell a product before you've even gotten traffic is a giant waste of time. It's mental masturbation equivalent to planning out how you're going to spend all of the money you're going to make off of the site. - I mean this in the nicest way possible. ;)
I would also watch less youtube. It is by far the slowest form of learning. You want to move fast in digital.
If you've built sites before, know how to rank them, know how to write SEO friendly content, and have sites that are going to link to you to push you up in the SERPs, then yes plan your sales pages at the same time as your info pages.
But that's not your first website. Your first website should be 100% focused on how you're going to get traffic. Period. The next few months after you start posting content, Google won't even know you exist. You'll get almost 0 clicks.
All of your energy in the first 6 months+ should be focused on information-only content. Keyword research, learning how to structure your articles, *writing content*, *getting links*/interlinking, building structured data, getting the UX right, did I mention writing content and getting links?
Then once you start growing in traffic, work on monetization. Assuming you already have traffic, I'll answer your question a little more direct.
Balancing word count - This can only be answered by what you're wanting to rank for and how many links you can get. Write the word count to match the user intent and what others in the SERPs are doing.
Information-only content & research - This is the main focus. Spend 60%+ of your time writing, 10% max UX and design, 10% of your time doing KW research, 20% of your time with links. Links and writing can go up and down in percentages depending. Research problems only when they come up.
Sales posts - Focus only on this when you have enough traffic and content that you can link to these pages to make them rank and/or pass them traffic. Then it's a balance of your time vs benefit.
If you spend 8 hours writing information posts that will bring in an extra 2000 visitors a month that will convert at 1% times what ever you make per conversion. Then compare that to what you think you'll get spending 8 hours writing a sales post. Whatever math wins is what you spend your time on.
I have a couple of sites I am planning. Have silos mapped out and kw research done. What are your thoughts on purchasing an existing site or expired domain to build on? I have built an affiliate site so I have at least some experience.
If purchasing a site is worth considering, are there any good places besides flippa and empire builders to look?
Never bought. Only built. I have redirected existing personally owned domains and it has worked out well thus far.
I'm looking to buy in the future, but the difficult part is so many "cheap/(<$30k)" websites are pump and dumps that have a high risk of getting burned on. If you find an aged website with crappy monetization, definitely do it.
Those two sites seem to have the most sites to choose from so I'd stick to them. I have found 1-2 FB groups that had some decent small sites but were bought up before I had a chance to bid. Those groups also have the worst of the worst in terms of pump and dumps so beware and do your due diligence.
I'm a physician. Financially stable/well off. We've moved my 10 yo daughter into homeschooling and I want to work with her to start an online revenue stream. I know next to nothing about online biz, but I can work night and day to learn. What is the easiest business model/strategy/topics/skill sets to start researching?
Congrats on getting your daughter engaged at such a young age! My kids are a bit younger than yours so I'm trying to imagine what I'd do to get them started.
Social media would be the easiest but I'd never subject my young children to something like that that will fundamentally change their brain and as you probably already know wouldn't advise anyone to do it either.
If you're not actually worried about her making any real money for a few years, affiliate is going to be the easiest for her to wrap her head around. It'll give her a foundation of how technology works, how business relationships are struck, how marketing is done, copy, etc.
While affiliate isn't easy (takes a ton of work), once you get good, there's a ton of core concepts that you'll need to learn that are applicable to a wide variety of digital businesses. Once someone has built an affiliate site;
They'll know how to build a website which will help in well, building anything internet related. Understanding the basic structure of the internet will help in the transition to Web 3.0.
They should know how to rank a website which will help in lead generation for small businesses, ecommerce, SaaS, service based businesses, etc.
Understanding how to write and break down a concept into a structure that is easy for the layman to understand AND rank in Google. That alone will build a very functional/logical thought process. I'll let you guess who has the most logical and structured thinking - affiliate writers or journalists.
Understanding how money flows between businesses and the incentive structure of people on the internet. Incentives matter. IE why websites that rely on display ads vs affiliate or ecommerce have to write shocking/misleading titles and articles.
How marketing works. This is absolutely huge and 97% (I made this percentage up) of the population doesn't even come close to grasping.
Data collection and analysis. This is important for obvious reasons but once you dive into this rabbit hole, you'll realize how far it goes and why privacy is important. (my primary background is analytics and data tracking)
I'd start with going through my and BowTiedTetra's tweet history/Substacks/Websites and selectively feeding that info to your daughter. Not everything is obviously 10 y/o friendly...
We mostly write for beginners. I could give you other resources but it'd be like drinking from a firehose.
Then from there, you could have her strike deals with local business owners to redo their crappy website (or lead gen) like an agency model. Feel free to reach out any time on Twitter. This is interesting to me since I'll be doing the same in the next 4-5 years.
"How marketing works. This is absolutely huge and 97% (I made this percentage up) of the population doesn't even come close to grasping." - elaborate pls :)
Do you write content yourself or outsource? If the former - what is the process from start to finish and what tools do you use (KW research/writing/publish etc.)
Both. For this Substack and website, 100% me. I'm trying to create a community of people and would never outsource this. I care about this topic too much and have too high of standards for this to outsource. (bucket 1)
For other projects that I'm not as knowledgeable on or care less about, I have a writer or two.
Bucket 2 is sites that are still deeply important to me but less so. I will do the KW research, outline a list of articles and pass to the writer 1 at a time. For our first few engagements, I laid out the structure of the pages and critiqued hard. After she understood what I wanted on the site, I don't have to critique anymore. I send it to her, she sends it back, I fix any minor spelling/structure and post myself. She *does not* have access to post on the site.
Bucket 3 is sites that I have less of an attachment to perfection on. Same as bucket 2 but the writer has access to post on the site without my review. I've had less success doing this. I think without the ownership aspect review and the focus on interlinking, it just doesn't work as well. Once I get a VA (on my to do list) that will work with me regularly to do these things, I think this will work out better.
You may have more *short term* success with #2 but I don't recommend it.
I don't know what your skillset is but #1 and #3 together is your best bet. #3 won't take a ton of time to get to $100/m while you're building out #1.
If you can learn how to write for SEO, you can undercut people on price on Upwork and do 4-5 engagements a month to hit that number. The key is to do really good work to find a good client and find someone that needs repeat purchases. All the while writing for your own site.
I have a writer that I pass $200 of work to a month because she knows a very niche topic that I don't and I can't write about it. So when you create your profile, make sure you include all of the topics you're knowledgeable about. You never know who needs a writer for a niche topic like basket weaving.
As for niche, aim for something that you know more about than the average website owner. Without knowing you, it's hard to say, but it could be something as mundane as brick laying and teaching DIYers how to build that retaining wall.
At my job, I do media buying for big corporations via programmatic advertising, although there is lot of free lance work for media buying out there it's all on platforms such as Google ads or Facebook that I don't use at my job. Also most freelance job require us to design ads, which I don't know how to do. I can setup campaigns and optimizate them. Do you know course that I can use to teach myself ad design ? Or should I learn seo instead as you said. I can dedicate 6months-1yr learning
Can't recommend a course. I've never taken a course on anything in my life outside of university.
If you're going to start your own anything, you should just focus on learning SEO. Stick to 1 and 3 and use 3 to help you with 1.
You could start a site around programmatic advertising, learn SEO, work jobs on upwork for writing, AND post yourself as a programmatic expert on upwork. The jobs may not roll in since you'll refuse to create ads but you'll likely get some while your main focus will be writing.
I haven't done a ton of research, but the research I have done, there doesn't seem to be a lot of websites that fully explain programmatic advertising. That may be your opportunity for a site.
NGMI question but using one of your examples from the starting your first website article, if you found a good affiliate marketing offer for a lamp, is the idea to basically just make a website with one page that raves about that lamp? Do you just keep getting different AM offers for different lamps and turn the whole site into a bunch of lamp reviews? Or is it just a one-and-done webpage for the one offer?
For lamps, no. You'd have to create a ton of content about different lamps and keep reviewing and writing about lamps. Then sign up for a ton of different lamp affiliate programs. For lamps, lol, that's why most of these sites are Amazon affiliates, they have one affiliate program and a plethora of different lamps to write about.
The above is the only way you're going to be able to write enough and drive enough traffic to make it worthwhile. A one page lamp page isn't going to be able to get enough links and rank for enough keywords to be worthwhile.
Let's take a broader offering like Tableau or any software product. You're going to be able to write a lot more about that software program than you are about a single lamp. In this example, you can write a ton of how to guides. You can also write comparisons - Tableau vs Power BI, Tableau vs Google Data Studio, etc. Once your Tableau expertise is established, you can then expand into another software niche.
If I want to go down the path of affiliate marketing, is there a need to validate my site at all with paid traffic and what would the purpose be? Drive specific affiliate conversions or test if effort put forth on the site going forward is worth it?
At this point, I want to only write content and see where this takes me. Is any type of validation necessary if I am just blogging and creating content with numerous posts to promote various product or service offers and why?
Based on what I understand, I believe driving traffic is more relevant for potential development of a unique app, product or service rather than being an affiliate. Am I thinking about the validation step / process correctly?
1st paragraph - No on the paid traffic. You're going to want to validate whether you can rank for the topics you write about. An affiliate site is going to be SEO focused. If your offers don't convert, there's always ways to try to cross sell/upsell/email capture that audience.
2nd - If you're just blogging, you're never going to rank for anything. Your posts need to be focused to 1-2 specific KW. Your KW should match searcher intent. Your KW need to be focused to low KD (keyword difficulty) KWs. Your site needs to be focused on a narrow niche and not random various products. You need to grow it to have topical authority.
3rd - I don't know what this means. Driving traffic is 1000% important for being an affiliate. Once you get this traffic, you can add on other services to better monetize. Please rephrase and I'll do my best to answer.
Thank you for clarifying and your responses to #1 and #2 align with my current understanding.
For #3, I was really trying to verify where *validating an idea* is applicable as BTB recommends it. It seems it's necessary more so when validating a SaaS endeavor or an E-commerce store rather an affiliate site. Do you agree?
Yes. validating an idea is important for ecommerce as your audience is there for a physical product and you're throwing a lot of money down for inventory. If no one wants your product, you've wasted a lot of money.
BTB advocates for ecommerce and hence why they talk about validating. You should go into ecommerce if you can, unfortunately many of my readers don't have the capital saved up to immediately start an ecommerce journey initially.
When I send a link to my posts (e.g. submit to a newsletter), should I always add UTM parameters myself in the link I send? Is there an easy way to build the full link without doing it by hand?
You should always use UTM parameters when driving traffic to a site that you're tracking with GA. You need to know where your traffic is coming from to decide what's working and what's not so you can press the gas on what's working.
If you're adding the same UTM parameter to multiple links constantly, just copy the old UTM parameter to the new link.
Fortunately Twitter and *some* email providers will do this automatically. May be able to save you some time by checking if they do and you won't have to manually do it.
Hey Opossum - Recently started my first site and have been spending time backlogging content to post. Do you recommend posting everything I have at once (~10 articles), or should I create some sort of regular posting schedule?
Definitely create a regular posting schedule. If you have a surplus of content and you know you're going to be able to keep up with the regular posting, then post the backlog at a faster schedule but not all at once.
Don't forget to go back through your old articles constantly to interlink the articles.
That's an interesting concept that I haven't put too much thought into developing a process for.
Everyone does this on a KW/site level (the tools too). The difficult part would be defining what KW's are in a niche. A way to do this, albeit expensive would be to pay SEMrush/Ahrefs for a custom report that breaks out their custom categories, what sites are ranking in those categories and what the average KW difficulty is for the categories.
The question really becomes is a niche easy to rank compared to what. What's the baseline for your alternative choice.
A cheaper way to do this is to compare niches. Look at X industry and find top sites, utilizing SEMRush/Ahrefs look at what they're ranking for in top 5 for search volume 1000-10,000 and look at what the average KW difficulty is. Then do this for site Y and compare.
If I find a good process, I'll write a post about it.
Very interesting perspective mate. “Easy to rank compared to what” turned a few screws in my head. Basically, start and find out. Not my first wifi money, but trying to evaluate a new venture in the skincare industry. Appreciate your writing and views as always.
Yeah... Your question turned a few screws in my head. I'm sure a behemoth like Red Ventures has a process, but I haven't spent a lot of time looking at it like that.
Another thing that might help in competitive analysis (if ecommerce and not affiliate) is looking at the Amazon metrics for comparable products with tools like Jungle Scout. Or Merchant Center's "Best Sellers" report.
Started off as a mechanical engineer. At the time (I'm older than a lot of the jungle), most of the software products for engineering only worked on PC. That and the industry I worked in for the first few years of my career mandated a PC. So I never made the switch to Mac.
As for my workstation, 1 laptop with two monitors for my day job. Right beside that is my personal laptop with another monitor for personal. So I've got an L shaped desk in my home office with 5 screens.
Thanks!! Quick follow-up, is your work laptop provided to you by your employer? Currently I have 1 laptop with a 32” curved monitor that I use for work and personal use. My employer does not provide me with contact computer… debating on whether or not I need 2 different machines so I can separate work/personal. I don’t run anything for work that tracks activity, it’s all cloud based crm… thoughts on the need for a split setup?
Yes. Work laptop provided by employer. Used to run both on my work laptop but I don't trust my employer not to spy on me and use the fact that there is personal info during "work hours" as an excuse to break any contractual agreements we have.
I don't have the best resource for you. But I do have the below.
Truly understanding your analytics/studying other sites/testing.
Analytics - This should be your first step. If you don't understand what your users are doing on your site, you can't understand why they're leaving. Start with Google Analytics and a session recording tool like Hotjar.
Studying other sites - Study your competitors funnels and other random sites to see what they're doing. I sign up for a lot of mailing lists to see what their marketing tactics are. If you know absolutely nothing about Conversion Rate Optimization, just start Googling and reading. Take what you learn from that and compare it to every site you visit. Then compare it to yours. I may actually write a CRO best practices stack to expand on this.
Testing - There's no roadmap for a completely optimized conversion path that works for everybody. If there was, it would be called best practices and not CRO. There are best practices like reducing friction/steps in your funnel that work for most everybody, but what works for grandma buying a new hearing aid may not work for selling Nikes to a 21 y/o.
Once you get the above down, install Google Optimize (free) and start testing different layouts and tactics on your site. Most of CRO is a creative and iterative process by specialists called growth hackers.
Thanks some of this I’m doing some I need to learn and research. I appreciate the response! Going from a purely technical background and an mechanical engineer into marketing is a big shift but I’ll keep at it. Thanks again.
That was exactly my background too. Studied ME then worked in engineering for 4.5 years before I made the switch. That background will be more useful in CRO or digital than any business or marketing degree.
Great idea. I'll work on another one. Thanks for the idea!
I do have a few case studies that will be coming out in a few months of some of my paid subscribers websites. I worked with one of them to audit and fix some things. Waiting for the SEO improvements to kick in. This case study won't show his domain for privacy reasons.
Another case study that will come out is a new brand launch of another jungle member. This domain won't be private.
Working on my first affiliate site and I'm working on a sustainable content strategy to be able to keep up growth over the next few months. How do you suggest we balance word counts, affiliate or "sales" posts vs information-only content, and research.
I've watched a few videos from guys like Miles Beckler that give a general idea on how to balance those things, but I'm curious what your take is.
If you've just started recently, here's some hard advice to swallow.
My take is you are thinking *WAY* to far ahead. Thinking/researching on how you're going to sell a product before you've even gotten traffic is a giant waste of time. It's mental masturbation equivalent to planning out how you're going to spend all of the money you're going to make off of the site. - I mean this in the nicest way possible. ;)
I would also watch less youtube. It is by far the slowest form of learning. You want to move fast in digital.
If you've built sites before, know how to rank them, know how to write SEO friendly content, and have sites that are going to link to you to push you up in the SERPs, then yes plan your sales pages at the same time as your info pages.
But that's not your first website. Your first website should be 100% focused on how you're going to get traffic. Period. The next few months after you start posting content, Google won't even know you exist. You'll get almost 0 clicks.
All of your energy in the first 6 months+ should be focused on information-only content. Keyword research, learning how to structure your articles, *writing content*, *getting links*/interlinking, building structured data, getting the UX right, did I mention writing content and getting links?
Then once you start growing in traffic, work on monetization. Assuming you already have traffic, I'll answer your question a little more direct.
Balancing word count - This can only be answered by what you're wanting to rank for and how many links you can get. Write the word count to match the user intent and what others in the SERPs are doing.
Information-only content & research - This is the main focus. Spend 60%+ of your time writing, 10% max UX and design, 10% of your time doing KW research, 20% of your time with links. Links and writing can go up and down in percentages depending. Research problems only when they come up.
Sales posts - Focus only on this when you have enough traffic and content that you can link to these pages to make them rank and/or pass them traffic. Then it's a balance of your time vs benefit.
If you spend 8 hours writing information posts that will bring in an extra 2000 visitors a month that will convert at 1% times what ever you make per conversion. Then compare that to what you think you'll get spending 8 hours writing a sales post. Whatever math wins is what you spend your time on.
Just purchased Nano S….is it enough storage for BTC,ETH,LINK? Or should i just purchase Nano X?
Uhh. I don't think I'm the right person to ask about that.
I'd direct you to 50+ jungle members that I'd feel more comfortable in answering that than I.
Haha no worries then….thanks again tho!
I have a couple of sites I am planning. Have silos mapped out and kw research done. What are your thoughts on purchasing an existing site or expired domain to build on? I have built an affiliate site so I have at least some experience.
If purchasing a site is worth considering, are there any good places besides flippa and empire builders to look?
Never bought. Only built. I have redirected existing personally owned domains and it has worked out well thus far.
I'm looking to buy in the future, but the difficult part is so many "cheap/(<$30k)" websites are pump and dumps that have a high risk of getting burned on. If you find an aged website with crappy monetization, definitely do it.
Those two sites seem to have the most sites to choose from so I'd stick to them. I have found 1-2 FB groups that had some decent small sites but were bought up before I had a chance to bid. Those groups also have the worst of the worst in terms of pump and dumps so beware and do your due diligence.
I'm a physician. Financially stable/well off. We've moved my 10 yo daughter into homeschooling and I want to work with her to start an online revenue stream. I know next to nothing about online biz, but I can work night and day to learn. What is the easiest business model/strategy/topics/skill sets to start researching?
Congrats on getting your daughter engaged at such a young age! My kids are a bit younger than yours so I'm trying to imagine what I'd do to get them started.
Social media would be the easiest but I'd never subject my young children to something like that that will fundamentally change their brain and as you probably already know wouldn't advise anyone to do it either.
If you're not actually worried about her making any real money for a few years, affiliate is going to be the easiest for her to wrap her head around. It'll give her a foundation of how technology works, how business relationships are struck, how marketing is done, copy, etc.
While affiliate isn't easy (takes a ton of work), once you get good, there's a ton of core concepts that you'll need to learn that are applicable to a wide variety of digital businesses. Once someone has built an affiliate site;
They'll know how to build a website which will help in well, building anything internet related. Understanding the basic structure of the internet will help in the transition to Web 3.0.
They should know how to rank a website which will help in lead generation for small businesses, ecommerce, SaaS, service based businesses, etc.
Understanding how to write and break down a concept into a structure that is easy for the layman to understand AND rank in Google. That alone will build a very functional/logical thought process. I'll let you guess who has the most logical and structured thinking - affiliate writers or journalists.
Understanding how money flows between businesses and the incentive structure of people on the internet. Incentives matter. IE why websites that rely on display ads vs affiliate or ecommerce have to write shocking/misleading titles and articles.
How marketing works. This is absolutely huge and 97% (I made this percentage up) of the population doesn't even come close to grasping.
Data collection and analysis. This is important for obvious reasons but once you dive into this rabbit hole, you'll realize how far it goes and why privacy is important. (my primary background is analytics and data tracking)
I'd start with going through my and BowTiedTetra's tweet history/Substacks/Websites and selectively feeding that info to your daughter. Not everything is obviously 10 y/o friendly...
We mostly write for beginners. I could give you other resources but it'd be like drinking from a firehose.
Then from there, you could have her strike deals with local business owners to redo their crappy website (or lead gen) like an agency model. Feel free to reach out any time on Twitter. This is interesting to me since I'll be doing the same in the next 4-5 years.
"How marketing works. This is absolutely huge and 97% (I made this percentage up) of the population doesn't even come close to grasping." - elaborate pls :)
Do you write content yourself or outsource? If the former - what is the process from start to finish and what tools do you use (KW research/writing/publish etc.)
Both. For this Substack and website, 100% me. I'm trying to create a community of people and would never outsource this. I care about this topic too much and have too high of standards for this to outsource. (bucket 1)
For other projects that I'm not as knowledgeable on or care less about, I have a writer or two.
Bucket 2 is sites that are still deeply important to me but less so. I will do the KW research, outline a list of articles and pass to the writer 1 at a time. For our first few engagements, I laid out the structure of the pages and critiqued hard. After she understood what I wanted on the site, I don't have to critique anymore. I send it to her, she sends it back, I fix any minor spelling/structure and post myself. She *does not* have access to post on the site.
Bucket 3 is sites that I have less of an attachment to perfection on. Same as bucket 2 but the writer has access to post on the site without my review. I've had less success doing this. I think without the ownership aspect review and the focus on interlinking, it just doesn't work as well. Once I get a VA (on my to do list) that will work with me regularly to do these things, I think this will work out better.
I'm from India, and I'm trying to figure out how to start earning money online.
I have three options:
1) start affiliate website - but I have no clue how to pick a niche
2) start an anon twitter account and try to sell (as an affiliate) product of top influencers
3) learn a skill and try freelancing on upwork
Any suggestions? Since I'm in India even $100 a month on the side (I have a job) is good money.
You may have more *short term* success with #2 but I don't recommend it.
I don't know what your skillset is but #1 and #3 together is your best bet. #3 won't take a ton of time to get to $100/m while you're building out #1.
If you can learn how to write for SEO, you can undercut people on price on Upwork and do 4-5 engagements a month to hit that number. The key is to do really good work to find a good client and find someone that needs repeat purchases. All the while writing for your own site.
I have a writer that I pass $200 of work to a month because she knows a very niche topic that I don't and I can't write about it. So when you create your profile, make sure you include all of the topics you're knowledgeable about. You never know who needs a writer for a niche topic like basket weaving.
As for niche, aim for something that you know more about than the average website owner. Without knowing you, it's hard to say, but it could be something as mundane as brick laying and teaching DIYers how to build that retaining wall.
At my job, I do media buying for big corporations via programmatic advertising, although there is lot of free lance work for media buying out there it's all on platforms such as Google ads or Facebook that I don't use at my job. Also most freelance job require us to design ads, which I don't know how to do. I can setup campaigns and optimizate them. Do you know course that I can use to teach myself ad design ? Or should I learn seo instead as you said. I can dedicate 6months-1yr learning
Can't recommend a course. I've never taken a course on anything in my life outside of university.
If you're going to start your own anything, you should just focus on learning SEO. Stick to 1 and 3 and use 3 to help you with 1.
You could start a site around programmatic advertising, learn SEO, work jobs on upwork for writing, AND post yourself as a programmatic expert on upwork. The jobs may not roll in since you'll refuse to create ads but you'll likely get some while your main focus will be writing.
I haven't done a ton of research, but the research I have done, there doesn't seem to be a lot of websites that fully explain programmatic advertising. That may be your opportunity for a site.
Awsome.
NGMI question but using one of your examples from the starting your first website article, if you found a good affiliate marketing offer for a lamp, is the idea to basically just make a website with one page that raves about that lamp? Do you just keep getting different AM offers for different lamps and turn the whole site into a bunch of lamp reviews? Or is it just a one-and-done webpage for the one offer?
For lamps, no. You'd have to create a ton of content about different lamps and keep reviewing and writing about lamps. Then sign up for a ton of different lamp affiliate programs. For lamps, lol, that's why most of these sites are Amazon affiliates, they have one affiliate program and a plethora of different lamps to write about.
The above is the only way you're going to be able to write enough and drive enough traffic to make it worthwhile. A one page lamp page isn't going to be able to get enough links and rank for enough keywords to be worthwhile.
Let's take a broader offering like Tableau or any software product. You're going to be able to write a lot more about that software program than you are about a single lamp. In this example, you can write a ton of how to guides. You can also write comparisons - Tableau vs Power BI, Tableau vs Google Data Studio, etc. Once your Tableau expertise is established, you can then expand into another software niche.
Look at G2.com as an example of this.
If I want to go down the path of affiliate marketing, is there a need to validate my site at all with paid traffic and what would the purpose be? Drive specific affiliate conversions or test if effort put forth on the site going forward is worth it?
At this point, I want to only write content and see where this takes me. Is any type of validation necessary if I am just blogging and creating content with numerous posts to promote various product or service offers and why?
Based on what I understand, I believe driving traffic is more relevant for potential development of a unique app, product or service rather than being an affiliate. Am I thinking about the validation step / process correctly?
1st paragraph - No on the paid traffic. You're going to want to validate whether you can rank for the topics you write about. An affiliate site is going to be SEO focused. If your offers don't convert, there's always ways to try to cross sell/upsell/email capture that audience.
2nd - If you're just blogging, you're never going to rank for anything. Your posts need to be focused to 1-2 specific KW. Your KW should match searcher intent. Your KW need to be focused to low KD (keyword difficulty) KWs. Your site needs to be focused on a narrow niche and not random various products. You need to grow it to have topical authority.
3rd - I don't know what this means. Driving traffic is 1000% important for being an affiliate. Once you get this traffic, you can add on other services to better monetize. Please rephrase and I'll do my best to answer.
Thank you for clarifying and your responses to #1 and #2 align with my current understanding.
For #3, I was really trying to verify where *validating an idea* is applicable as BTB recommends it. It seems it's necessary more so when validating a SaaS endeavor or an E-commerce store rather an affiliate site. Do you agree?
Yes. validating an idea is important for ecommerce as your audience is there for a physical product and you're throwing a lot of money down for inventory. If no one wants your product, you've wasted a lot of money.
BTB advocates for ecommerce and hence why they talk about validating. You should go into ecommerce if you can, unfortunately many of my readers don't have the capital saved up to immediately start an ecommerce journey initially.
When I send a link to my posts (e.g. submit to a newsletter), should I always add UTM parameters myself in the link I send? Is there an easy way to build the full link without doing it by hand?
You should always use UTM parameters when driving traffic to a site that you're tracking with GA. You need to know where your traffic is coming from to decide what's working and what's not so you can press the gas on what's working.
https://ga-dev-tools.web.app/campaign-url-builder/
If you're adding the same UTM parameter to multiple links constantly, just copy the old UTM parameter to the new link.
Fortunately Twitter and *some* email providers will do this automatically. May be able to save you some time by checking if they do and you won't have to manually do it.
Hey Opossum - Recently started my first site and have been spending time backlogging content to post. Do you recommend posting everything I have at once (~10 articles), or should I create some sort of regular posting schedule?
Definitely create a regular posting schedule. If you have a surplus of content and you know you're going to be able to keep up with the regular posting, then post the backlog at a faster schedule but not all at once.
Don't forget to go back through your old articles constantly to interlink the articles.
Any recommendations on how to analyze a niche to see how quickly you can rank on the SERP?
That's an interesting concept that I haven't put too much thought into developing a process for.
Everyone does this on a KW/site level (the tools too). The difficult part would be defining what KW's are in a niche. A way to do this, albeit expensive would be to pay SEMrush/Ahrefs for a custom report that breaks out their custom categories, what sites are ranking in those categories and what the average KW difficulty is for the categories.
The question really becomes is a niche easy to rank compared to what. What's the baseline for your alternative choice.
A cheaper way to do this is to compare niches. Look at X industry and find top sites, utilizing SEMRush/Ahrefs look at what they're ranking for in top 5 for search volume 1000-10,000 and look at what the average KW difficulty is. Then do this for site Y and compare.
If I find a good process, I'll write a post about it.
Very interesting perspective mate. “Easy to rank compared to what” turned a few screws in my head. Basically, start and find out. Not my first wifi money, but trying to evaluate a new venture in the skincare industry. Appreciate your writing and views as always.
Yeah... Your question turned a few screws in my head. I'm sure a behemoth like Red Ventures has a process, but I haven't spent a lot of time looking at it like that.
Another thing that might help in competitive analysis (if ecommerce and not affiliate) is looking at the Amazon metrics for comparable products with tools like Jungle Scout. Or Merchant Center's "Best Sellers" report.
You are still sharing premium Generatepass theme?
Yes. Hit my Twitter DMs.
What is your daily workstation? Mac or PC and why?
Started off as a mechanical engineer. At the time (I'm older than a lot of the jungle), most of the software products for engineering only worked on PC. That and the industry I worked in for the first few years of my career mandated a PC. So I never made the switch to Mac.
As for my workstation, 1 laptop with two monitors for my day job. Right beside that is my personal laptop with another monitor for personal. So I've got an L shaped desk in my home office with 5 screens.
Thanks!! Quick follow-up, is your work laptop provided to you by your employer? Currently I have 1 laptop with a 32” curved monitor that I use for work and personal use. My employer does not provide me with contact computer… debating on whether or not I need 2 different machines so I can separate work/personal. I don’t run anything for work that tracks activity, it’s all cloud based crm… thoughts on the need for a split setup?
Yes. Work laptop provided by employer. Used to run both on my work laptop but I don't trust my employer not to spy on me and use the fact that there is personal info during "work hours" as an excuse to break any contractual agreements we have.
what's best resource for landing page conversion improvement?
I don't have the best resource for you. But I do have the below.
Truly understanding your analytics/studying other sites/testing.
Analytics - This should be your first step. If you don't understand what your users are doing on your site, you can't understand why they're leaving. Start with Google Analytics and a session recording tool like Hotjar.
Studying other sites - Study your competitors funnels and other random sites to see what they're doing. I sign up for a lot of mailing lists to see what their marketing tactics are. If you know absolutely nothing about Conversion Rate Optimization, just start Googling and reading. Take what you learn from that and compare it to every site you visit. Then compare it to yours. I may actually write a CRO best practices stack to expand on this.
Testing - There's no roadmap for a completely optimized conversion path that works for everybody. If there was, it would be called best practices and not CRO. There are best practices like reducing friction/steps in your funnel that work for most everybody, but what works for grandma buying a new hearing aid may not work for selling Nikes to a 21 y/o.
Once you get the above down, install Google Optimize (free) and start testing different layouts and tactics on your site. Most of CRO is a creative and iterative process by specialists called growth hackers.
Thanks some of this I’m doing some I need to learn and research. I appreciate the response! Going from a purely technical background and an mechanical engineer into marketing is a big shift but I’ll keep at it. Thanks again.
That was exactly my background too. Studied ME then worked in engineering for 4.5 years before I made the switch. That background will be more useful in CRO or digital than any business or marketing degree.
Great idea. I'll work on another one. Thanks for the idea!
I do have a few case studies that will be coming out in a few months of some of my paid subscribers websites. I worked with one of them to audit and fix some things. Waiting for the SEO improvements to kick in. This case study won't show his domain for privacy reasons.
Another case study that will come out is a new brand launch of another jungle member. This domain won't be private.