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How We Tripled Personal Income’s Traffic & More Than Doubled Revenue & Visitor Value in 8 Months

Background

In July 2016, Wired Investors purchased Personal Income.

We built traffic and revenue for the site, and in this article, we’ll pull back the curtain and walk you through the background, processes and results.

What is Personal Income?

Personal Income is a retirement and investing blog that helps readers improve their finances via alternative investments strategies such as precious metals.

Why we bought the website was due to several factors. First, it had a clean backlink profile. We didn’t want to take a risk on websites that might get slapped by Google.

Apart from this, PersonalIncome.org was an aged domain, so to us, this was huge plus for pleasing the Google gods.

Not only that, it was already ranking for some notoriously competitive long tail keywords related to Gold IRA.

Monetization-wise, it had an existing relationship with one of the biggest affiliates in the industry, Regal Assets, and a favorable custom payout rate with the affiliate.

Lastly, we saw this as a good chance to expand into a new industry (finance).

The Risks

Of course, there were some risks as well. Most of its traffic (approx 84%) came from organic Google search. On top of this, 3 pages drove more than half of this organic search traffic.

In other words, we were at the mercy of Google. If we lost the rankings for our keywords in Google, we’d be screwed.

Another risk was that roughly 70% of the site’s revenue came from one affiliate program.

If the program changed its payout, terms and conditions, or even worse, shut down, our revenue would take a beating.

Deal Structure

Something that differentiated this site from the rest of the sites in our portfolio was its lumpy earnings. To illustrate, here’s a snapshot of its historical financials from Jan 2015 to Apr 2016.

Its revenue could swing from $3k to $30k per month, with the average average earnings per month around $12k.

At the time of purchase, the site generated $146k in earnings the last 12 months.

Our short term goal was to double the revenue within 6 months. And our long term goal was to ladder up and target increasingly competitive keywords (eg credit cards) in the finance space.

We had our sights set on an eventual 8-figure exit.

The Opportunities

When we did our due diligence, we spotted several opportunities for growing traffic by adding more new content and link building.

We could better monetize the website—there were many existing pages which didn’t have any affiliate offers/ads on them.

Also, we could diversify our sources of revenue and instead of relying only on one affiliate program to be our main revenue driver.

What We Focused On

I. Building Backlinks via Infographics

Being in such a competitive space, we wanted to get more backlinks to boost the authority of our site so we could target increasingly difficult keywords.

We employed a white hat strategy for our link building efforts—infographics link building. The chart below shows how many infographics we created in the past few months.

Although it didn’t seem like we created many infographics, we spent a lot of time and energy on promoting them.

Here’s how many emails we sent and how many contact forms we submitted to contact relevant blogs and websites about our infographics.

At the peak in Dec, we sent out and submitted 69k emails and contact forms in total!

We created and sent customized introductions to every blog/site that expressed an interest in publishing our infographics.

This was to make it easy for the blog/site owners to hit publish and remove potential excuses to procrastinate.

Creating infographics and promoting them proved to be a huge success for us. Here’s how many links we got via promoting our infographics.

On average, the links we got were of very decent quality. The Domain Authority (DA) ranged from high 20s to low 30s.

Results

Overall, our link building efforts paid off and we managed to get 300+ links in the past 6 months. This was in addition to the 250+ new links we got between Jul and Sep (not shown in the charts).

Note: The data for Apr is not for the complete month but only 1-10 Apr.

Many of these links we got in the past 6 months had an average Domain Authority around 30.

II. Creating More Content

Because we focused most of our resources on link building, we didn’t publish many new articles on the site in the past 6 months.

But we had already published 30+ new articles between Jul and Sep (not shown in these charts).

These older articles included top list posts, which also served as a link magnet via the image link “badges” that influencers added to their home pages.

Each new article published in the last 6 months was around 800+ words long.

III. Our Keyword Rankings

The combination of new content and link building resulted in our rankings for valuable keywords to rise. For example,

• We now occupy the top 4 positions for major finance keywords and we’re in the first position for a major finance affiliate review.
• We rank on the first page for stocks related keywords, jumping 50+ positions.
• Precious metals related keywords have jumped 90+ positions to rank on the first page.

IV. Our Traffic Numbers

Here’s a screenshot of our Google Analytics dashboard.

Since we bought the site in Jul, traffic had been on upward trend. And we 3x the baseline traffic from 28,066 to 83,540 in Mar!

Note:

• Because the month is incomplete as of the time of writing, we don’t have figures for Apr.
• All baseline figures in the charts are based on the average from Jan to Apr 2016.

V. Improving Our Site’s Monetization

Monetizing Existing Pages That Were Not Monetized

There were many pages which did not have any affiliate links or ads on them so we added call-to-actions and soft sells on these pages with our affiliate links.

Adding Advertising

To mitigate the risks of relying on one type of revenue stream, we started accepting direct pay per click advertising from Agora Financial on our penny stocks pages.

We started with one page and because of our high conversion rates, the advertiser was willing to sponsor ads on other pages of our site.

Joining Better Paying Affiliate Programs

To avoid over relying on Regal Assets as our key revenue source, we established relationships with new affiliates like Advantage Gold and negotiated favorable affiliate commision rates.

This had an immediate impact on earnings in Sep.

Thanks to the increase in traffic and the change in affiliate programs, we managed to 2.6x our baseline revenue from $12,389 to $32,207 in Mar.

Earnings for one major Gold IRA program, Advantage Gold, increased substantially from Aug to Sep. This program has a higher commission than any other Gold IRA partner, and we increased earnings from this program even more in Dec by moving it into the #1 recommended spot on all Gold IRA content pages.

Earnings from the Penny Stocks affiliate programs were also strong, mainly from the Jason Bond picks program, which added a “profit maximizer” to their funnel. We saw a noticeable spike in Jan/Feb traffic and Mar earnings thanks to that launch.

“Other Revenue” here refers to revenue from all other affiliate programs added up together.

By joining new affiliates that had a higher revenue per visitor (RPV), we also managed to 2.3x our visitor value from $0.11 in July to $0.25 in Mar.

Bottom Line

We bought Personal Income in Jul 2016 and managed to

3x

the baseline traffic

 

2.6x

the baseline revenue

 

2.3x

the visitor value

in 8 months. The site is now earning $30k/mo.

Here’s what we did:

 

Growing traffic

 

• Building more backlinks via infographics
• Creating more content such as top lists

Improving site monetization

 

• Monetizing existing pages which were not monetized
• Adding advertising
• Joining higher paying affiliate programs

Moving forward, we’ll optimize the page and site layout for more advertiser and affiliate clicks.

Our goal is to target increasingly competitive keywords (eg credit cards) in the finance space. We’ll do this by adding new content and links at scale in the coming years.

Eventually, we aim to have an 8-figure exit.

We’re always on the lookout for good businesses that want to be great, and we’ve got the experience and infrastructure to create a custom team of fulltime and freelance experts to improve businesses. You’ve built it and brought it this far, if you want to grow, let us help you take it to the next level. If you think you have a great business and need a partner, contact us.

Contact Us Now

Author Bio

Karen Foo is a deal flow expert and digital marketer with experience in a wide range of industries from finance to education. She is a National University of Singapore Business School graduate and her corporate career spans Europe and Asia. You can tweet her here.

How We Doubled HerePup’s Revenue, Visitor Value & Earnings Per Page in 4 Months

Background

In late Sep/early Oct 2016, WiredInvestors purchased HerePup from Perrin Carrell. Those who are in the internet marketing circle might find this name familiar.

Yes, it’s the same Perrin who used to work with Niche Pursuits and is now working with Authority Hacker.

We built traffic and revenue for HerePup, and in this article, we’ll pull back the curtain and walk you through the background, processes and results of this endeavor.

What is HerePup?

For the uninitiated, HerePup is a content website founded in 2015 that gives dog owners advice on how to care for their pets.

The site relies quite heavily on organic traffic with about 87% of its traffic coming from Google. It tended to experience a peak after Christmas, when people bought pets as presents.

Its strategy was to have an army of original (not spun) keyword-optimized articles on the site. No PBNs were used and the content quality and backlink profile had a clean bill.

When we started work on the site, it mainly earned revenue through Amazon affiliates, Google AdSense (paid per impression) and Media.net advertising.

 

Media.net is a contextual ad network with more than 90% of its total revenue coming from the US. Since its tie up with Yahoo! Bing Network, it has been touted as an effective alternative to Google Adsense. Forbes, New York Times, Elle, Reuters, Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping are among sites running Media.net ads.

 

The business generated the majority of its income from the Amazon affiliate program, promoting dog food specifically.

In our experience, depending on your niche, Amazon affiliates and AdSense were not necessarily always the best way to monetize.

The site also had a mailing list of approx 3000 subscribers but this was a cold list, i.e. subscribers were rarely or never emailed.

Deal Structure

At the point of sale, the site generated $46k in earnings in the last 12 months.

Our goal was to implement a growth plan (details below) and generate over $125k in earnings per year. We believed we could 2x revenue in 12 months.

The Opportunities

Right off the bet, we saw a potential to 2x the revenue in 12 months by:

1. Growing traffic
   • Increasing organic rankings for highest potential terms through SEO and link building
   • Scaling the content production to increase the amount of traffic and potential ranking opportunities
2. Changing monetization method
   • Switching to a better paying affiliate program
   • Introducing high-value upsells eg; pet insurance offers
3. Milking the email list
   • Focusing on growing the email list in order to promote affiliate programs and brokering email advertising deals
4. Improving conversion rates
   • Optimizing the page and site layout to maximize visitor value through a higher email optin rate and increasing advertiser/affiliate clicks

What We Focused On

Drilling down further, we decided to hone in on the first two aspects (growing traffic and changing monetization method).

We felt these were quicker wins and matched our available resources then. Also, we didn’t want to spread ourselves too thin by pursuing too many different things at once.

“He who runs after two hares catches neither”

Note:

• We started implementing the changes below in mid/late Oct 2016.
• The baseline number in the charts is the average from Jun to Aug 2016.

I. Growing Traffic

Building More Quality Backlinks

We had the ability and existing resources to scale backlink creation so this was one of the first things we tackled.

For HerePup, we felt that infographics would work well in the pet niche, so we started and focused our link building efforts around infographics.

Here’s the number of infographics we created monthly. Didn’t seem like many, right?

Well, this was because we spent much more time and effort on promoting our infographics. We did a ton of outreach.

In Jan alone, we sent and submitted nearly 30k of emails and contact forms combined!

For those who reacted positively, we wrote customized introductions, tailor made for each blog/site, to go with the infographic. So no two blogs/sites have the same introductory paragraph.

The result? We got 54 new links since we started our link building exercise.

The absolute number of links isn’t the whole story though, check out the average DA of the links we got. Even though we only got 1 link in Nov, it came with a DA of 33.

II. Creating More Content Targeting Keywords

Perrin’s strategy of creating keyword-optimized content worked. And we discovered many more competition keywords we could go after.

Creating keyword-optimized content was something we had lots of experience doing and had existing systems for. We got to work pronto.

Apart from Nov, we published 70+ articles monthly. We optimized all of these articles to rank for keywords.

Every article we published was more than 1000 words long. Thin content just didn’t cut it anymore.

Here’s a screenshot taken on 22 Nov of our new articles ranking within a week of publishing.

Our goal was to quickly improve rankings that were low on the first page or second page. We accomplished that and more!

We started publishing new articles in Nov and they started earning several hundred dollars each month and contributing to our revenue immediately.

Since we’ve taken over the site, we’ve 1.7x earnings per existing page from $20.80 in Sep to $35.90 in Jan.

We calculated the earnings per page by dividing the revenue by the number of pages.

The revenue from new content has been growing each month since we wrote the case study so we expect the earnings per new page to be on an upward trend too.

III. Our Traffic Numbers

Here’s a screenshot from our Google Analytics dashboard. There were a couple of days in Nov when tracking didn’t work, thus the graph showed 0 traffic.

Here’s our traffic broken down by month.

IV. Changing Monetization Methods

Switching to a Better Paying Affiliate Program

We knew of another affiliate program that paid a lot better than Amazon called Chewy so we changed our affiliate program pretty fast once we owned the site!

Chewy is an online retailer of pet food and other pet-related products based in Florida. The company offers around 30,000 items for dogs and cats and serves the US market. Its primary product is pet food, and it offers a range of options from gourmet to discount food. Other products include leashes, grooming tools, toys, strollers, etc.

 

We implemented an exit popup with a Chewy coupon in the first month and added Chewy affiliate links to the top pages in Dec.

We also added Chewy affiliate links to some posts which were not monetized.

Due to Amazon’s strong brand recognition, one concern was whether switching from Amazon to another affiliate program might result in fewer clicks.

We didn’t find that to be the case, the total number of clicks hovered around the same level.

Instead of a measly payout rate from Amazon, we negotiated a more attractive payout rate from Chewy.

After the change, we 2x our baseline revenue from $6988 to $14,677 in Jan and we even surpassed our own initial projections!

Here’s the revenue breakdown by program.

Thanks to the increase in revenue, our visitor value also leapfrogged! We 1.8x the visitor value from $0.062 in Sep to $0.114 in Jan.

The visitor values were calculated by dividing the revenue by the number of unique visitors (instead of the number of sessions).

Introducing an Upsell

We also introduced an upsell for pet insurance after any dog food purchase. At the time of writing, this was not a significant contributor to our revenues.

Bottom Line

We bought HerePup in Sep/Oct 2016 and managed to

 

2x

the baseline revenue

 

1.8x

the visitor value

 

1.7x

the earnings/existing page

in 4 months by making these changes:

Here’s what we did:

Growing traffic

• Building more backlinks
• Creating more content targeting keywords

Changing monetization method

• Switching to a higher paying affiliate program
• Introducing an upsell (not a major revenue earner currently)

Moving forward, we’ll:

1. Test the upsell to see if we can optimize it better.
2. Optimize the page and site layout for more advertiser and affiliate clicks.
   • For example, our recent test in March to remove Media.net ads increased the CTR to our affiliates and increased site revenue by $560 for the week.

The goal is to hit $125k earnings per year and it looks like we’re on track!

 

We’re always on the lookout for good businesses that want to be great, and we’ve got the experience and infrastructure to create a custom team of fulltime and freelance experts to improve businesses. You’ve built it and brought it this far, if you want to grow, let us help you take it to the next level. If you think you have a great business and need a partner, contact us.

Contact Us Now

Author Bio

Karen Foo is a deal flow expert and digital marketer with experience in a wide range of industries from finance to education. She is a National University of Singapore Business School graduate and her corporate career spans Europe and Asia. You can tweet her here.