We’re not too worried about all 1,108 “Warnings”, and we’ll try to get to some of them at some point. There are certainly some other things we could do to improve beyond the 11 “Errors”. We did increase the number of RDs here, but a lot of the increase also came from natural spam. Ahrefs is showing almost 3X in referring domains (RDs) here from 440 to about 1150. The content is already winning relatively easily but we want to at least give it a little gasoline in the form of links to help fuel the fire. Additionally, the niche isn’t too competitive so the content doesn’t need a ton of links. It’s not a huge increase, but we’ve seen the site react better to more content. We started building about 5 links a month just to get it going and we have now ramped it up to about 10-15. You want a good balance of links to the home page AND interior pages, as it can be a bit spammy to have too many links going to interior pages. However, this isn’t what you should do on your own projects necessarily. So we started building links entirely to interior pages – to both money pages and informational pages, which help improve rankings more than home page links. While this is good for the site’s DR the interlinking wasn’t great (more on this later) so a lot of the link juice wasn’t flowing through the site (which we improved). In fact, almost all of the links were going to the home page. The site already had some solid, natural home page links including links from Wikipedia, New York Times, and other large publications. We didn’t do anything crazy with link building here. We’ll likely keep it at 70 for another few months to see if the site will continue to grow and if it does we’ll likely bump it up to 100/month. We’re going to continue to reinvest heavily into the site as there is still a lot of room to grow and a lot of US traffic that we are targeting. In Q4 2021 we started doing 30 posts/month, and in Q1 2022 we’ve ramped that up to 70. Immediately we started doing 10 posts/month. The previous owner had essentially stopped content production. US traffic now represents 36% of our visitors, a 6x from when we acquired it. In fact, when we acquired the site it was just getting 1/3 the traffic it did in its prime of 2017 when it was getting essentially 100,000 visitors a month.Īt this point we had added 30 more posts targeting US traffic and have doubled down on targeting more lucrative US keywords. Summary of ProgressĪlthough the site had been successful it was past its prime. The site had no display ads and was just 100% affiliate and saw this as an easy opportunity to add an extra 10%-20% of revenue. With a brandable in a lucrative niche and with online learning growing, we saw that this site had so much potential to grow to new content verticals and use different lucrative affiliate programs.įinally, we saw an easy win in adding display ads. Our idea was to make more content to capture the US market, which is very large. We also saw the site was primarily just getting traffic from the UK. With plenty of pages ranking on the 2nd page and a lucrative affiliate program, we were confident we could increase rankings and improve affiliate sales. We saw that the site had peaked a few years earlier, understanding that it was possible to 3x the site. Opportunities to improve on-page and technical SEO.Good EAT with plenty of real videos made by the original owners.Most traffic from UK but also ranked for US keywords.
Evergreen education niche with plenty of room to grow.Acquiring The Site What we liked about the site: Impressively, the income has been growing despite reduced payouts. The site is currently growing, with a $10,500/month average over the past 6 months and with the most recent month (April 2022) hitting an all-time high – less than $100 shy of $13,000 despite April historically being a relatively low month.Īdditionally, in January of 2022, the affiliate program which drives 80% of the site’s income, actually reduced payouts by 20%. Over the past 14 months, we grew the site to over $9,000/month on average the past 6 months. At the time of acquisition, the site was making $4,500/month on average over the past 12 months. In January of 2021, we acquired this business for $160,743 as a result of a private deal that Colin Ma had found.