Howdy folks.
This is going to be a little ongoing case study for a website I started a few years ago that has slowly started making some money. Got all sorts of cool graphs to see how it has progressed even when I wasn’t working on it.
👇🏾
As you can see, It was basically a dump of about 170k words in the first few months, then an additional 100k before next to no publishing was done.
BUT, while users remained about level, revenue continued going up.
Why?
Because I’m referring people to programs that offer some sort of recurring revenue. Additionally, there are variable earnings from that recurring. 5% of $100 one month could turn into 5% of $150 from the same referral the next month.
Real talk, if the website went down tomorrow and I never received another referral sign-up, I would probably make more money in that next month.
Unfortunately, I can’t see things like churn to see how long the average sign-up lasts.
So as long as I keep adding people to the pipeline, even as some people fall out and either don’t spend/earn, I’ll keep growing.
Algorithm updates be damned.
The Idea
So, since this has turned into a decent monthly earner, it’s time to start adding fuel to the fire.
Hence the title of this post.
If it’s earning $1,500, $1,600, $1,900, $2,100 a month from 270,419 words (February 2022, not including the new push that started March 2022), what would that look like with one million words published?
Simple math (which I’m about to butcher) would put that at around $8,000 per month. BUT, the recurring aspect. So maybe the real estimate would sound something like for every 100k words on the website, it adds how much in new ‘MRR’ per month? I put MRR in quotes because it’s not truly monthly recurring revenue like a Saas because I’m just a lowly affiliate peasant.
To answer that: who fucking knows? Things are still hyper volatile at this point. From September 2021 to March 2022 a negligible amount of words were added to the site (~1,600, sans the big push in March 2022). But revenue increased from $1,300 to $2,100 per month. Do 270k words add on average $140/month? So a million words would add ~$600/month?
I use a writing agency that charges $0.025 per word. To add an additional 700k words to the website will run about* $17,500.
*exactly
Math, math, math…
It seems like a sound investment*.
*gamble
I won’t be dropping all that cash in one go. This will be a build-up to the one million, not necessarily a slow one, but slowish. For instance, February’s content order was for $372.50 and 14,900 words. March’s content order was for $607.50 and 24,300 words.
The Gameplan
Previously, I thought I had “tapped out” my niche/industry. There wasn’t much more for me to publish, after wrapping up the few additional information articles remaining.
By the way, I publish from a systematic/formulaic place and less from a keyword place. For example, what I mean by that is say my website was looking at and comparing midi controllers.
One of the midi controllers I know is popular is the Akai MPK. Google it.
A lot of SEOs go into Semrush, Ahrefs, or another tool and only produce pieces on what they find in the tools. So
- how to use akai mpk mini with fl studio
- how to update akai mpk mini
- can you use akai mpk mini without computer
and down that line.
But what about something new? Something without a lot of search volume in the tools?
What I do is translate those keywords that are known to the new product or service. Replace that blue highlighted text with the new product or service. First on the market, first to get linked to, first to win. I don’t care if they get 10 searches per month, I’m getting all 10 of those searches. But it’s also a gamble.
So, my first push of content on the site back in 2020 was pushing a lot of content that had no real search data. Using the same method as above, I took a platform that was popular and translated that keyword data to all the other sister platforms. Some won, some didn’t.
But, as I said, those platforms are more or less maxed out as far as informational content goes, so I had to branch out to sister niches/industries and brainstorm additional problems the platforms solve.
The sister niches either need to be mid-ticket or recurring as far as earnings go. Mid-ticket means $50+ cost per acquisition. That CPA could be something like they sign up and spend $100, they sign up and earn $100, or some other criteria. I don’t like the low-ticket pay-per-signup/lead model, as from what I’ve gathered that low-ticket offer is dwarfed by something like ‘earn X% of transactions’ that outweighs sign-ups when a whale is landed.
Recurring revenue takes priority over mid-ticket CPA offers. As I said previously, the more I can separate earnings from traffic to protect myself from algorithm updates, hackers, whatever the better. A lot of the offers have people sign up and use the platforms for years. Would much rather have $100/mo for a year than $1k this month and nothing for the rest of the year…
Going to use the same approach for the next 10 or so platforms promoted. Then do it again, and again, and again until I reach 1 million words published.
I will post an update at $3k/mo.