[Journey] Fast publishing & CPA empire

Let's document the journey

My vision:

1. Quickly build a lot of niche and authority blogs / social media
2. Build email lists to promote products
3. Run CPA ads to products & $$
4. Hire SEOs & Email Marketers once I can justify the cost.
5. Take those learnings and media assets to launch my own products.
   

We can realistically launch a blog every day. Will be trying to maintain a cadence of 1 per week.

Click to expand...

Why me?
- Vertical expertise: I’ve led marketing teams (CMO, VP, HOM) for a long time now. Some brands I’ve taken from basically 0 to $300-500,000/mo. These companies just happen to be in the same verticals that I’m focusing on first. In fact, I added both companies to various CPA networks before I left. I’m approved, and I know I can scale ads.
- Ad budget: I’m already spending $5000/mo on 2 CPA offers and I’m prepared to spend more.

- Software advantage: Basically, if I need something, I have the resources to build a tool for it.

- Marketing Experience: 9 years working in growth teams. Now doing it for myself.


Steps taken so far:

• Chose brand names
• Setup 2X wordpress blogs logos etc.
• Setup Social Media pages & Ad Accounts
• Connected Wordpress to the AI tool
• Setup email capture tool
• Keyword research (will be ongoing, but I’ve prioritized which I’m focusing on first)
• Basic Content Marketing Strategy (Pillar topics, sub branches)
• Submitted ads for approval to a CPA offer

Next Steps:

• Publish Content on blog - will be launching with 80 articles per blog, and publishing 1 per day afterwards
• Setup internal linking tool to align with content strategy
• Update and edit 1-2 articles per day + improve meta tags
• Launch approved Meta ads for new CPA offer @ $100/day spend.
• Create a lead magnet

Good luck on your journey.

good luck!

noragrets69 said:

brands I’ve taken from basically 0 to $300-500,000/mo

Click to expand...

How are you sourcing those products and have you done this before ..

GoSocial said:

How are you sourcing those products and have you done this before ..

Click to expand...

I've worked in Marketing for 9 years, and was the marketing leader for a few ecommerce brands.

I've never sourced my own products. But I do imagine I'll need to custom make a few products.

Weekly recap:​

I didn't do much work on the blogs and publishing side of things. I spent most of my time on Meta campaigns.

Overall - wasn't a profitable week. No big deal.
- 11 Sales @ $1,328.38 revenue. $1441.08 Ad spend
- I ran into issues getting articles launched for the blogs.
- 1 offer seemed super promising last week but Meta performance fell off a cliff around Tuesday when I started to run Google & Pinterest ads for it. I've paused Google Ads on this offer as I'm reallocating money towards a product roundup article.

Blog 1​

Done
- Built Product Roundup Landing Page for Google Ads. Contains 2 offers I'm running ads too, plus 3 other offers I have affiliate links for.
- Setup tracking
- Setup Google Ads @ $40/day for the product roundup
- Launched Pinterest Ads @ $15/day to expand TOF for 1 offer -- going to run for another week to see if Meta retargeting converts any of this traffic.

Did not do:
- Get articles published
- Create Lead Magnet

Blog 2:​

Done
- Launched some meta ads for a new offer that I did some minor testing.

(had a few sales earlier in the week with the companies own creative, but I'm not counting those since it was an ASC+ campaign)

Did not do:
- Get articles published (decided to launch with only 40 articles instead of 80)
- Create Lead Magnet

Need to do:
- Keep testing the current ads.
- Fix integration with the AI content writer
- Create lead magnets for both blogs.

gl

Weekly Recap - 24th June - 30th June 2024​

Summary:

• $3,157.54 revenue. (138% increase compared to last week)
• $2163 spend total (50% increase)
• 25 sales. (127% increase compared to last week)

Advertising Test Results:

• I paused Pinterest ads. Felt like it wasn't worth it at this time + Meta was starting to pick up = a smarter allocation of capital is going all in on Meta ads for now.
  
  $97.60 spent on Pinterest. 151 Landing Page Clicks. Strangely, the day I turned off spend here, the Meta Campaign for the corresponding offer turned around and become very profitable.
  
  
• I paused Google Ads. Same deal: pushed the spend to Meta only. Will come back to this later. $211 spent, no conversions. Not even click throughs. Microsoft clarity shows a strong scroll depth on the landing page. I'll investigate this further and grab some learnings when I turn the campaigns back on.
  
  
• New offer I began testing the previous week is working well. $68 Conversions at $150 payouts. Increased the budget to $155/day and will continue increasing budget. I can get the CAC down too, and already have a few creative tests being designed to launch for next weeks testing.
  
  
• Began testing 2 more offers which have $200+ payouts. Haven't spent much and just testing the waters for now. If I start seeing some Add-To-Carts and Initiate Checkouts, I'll start putting time into it.

If I didn't spend money on Google, Pinterest, and the 2 test offers, I would have only spent $1775.



Blog Summary:

• No content published due to technical issue.
  
  
• Setup MailerLite and Popups for Google Ads landing page.
  
  
• MailerLite popups are terrible and don't display most of the time, so I may consider another tool. Any suggestions?

Good luck, following!

Advertising Summary:

• Revenue: $2,739.18 (down from $3,157.54 last week)
• Spend: $3939 (up from $2163 spend last week)
• Sales: 20 (down from 25 sales last week)
• Profits: -$1200

Advertising Insights:

• I was testing 2 new offers last week, and it resulted in 2 sales on each (payouts from $150-215 each). I’m going to keep testing these as I know I can get them profitable, but I ran into some issues around spend and tracking.
  
  
• Saturday: I had 3 ad accounts that spent between 50-90% more than the daily allocated budget - only made 3 sales that day, so it was deeply unprofitable.
  
  This is weird, as I believe Meta says they’ll only spend 20% higher than the daily budget. I’m hoping they’ll give me a reimbursement for overspending by such a large amount. 1 Account spent $950 on Saturday with a $500 budget and got 1 sale.
  
  
• I turned off Cost Caps for an offer because spend was low. I gathered good data, but CPA was unprofitable after 5 days. After turned them back on on Sunday. Immediately results picked up. I believe the account needs some more data and winning ads to do Highest Volume efficiently.
  
  
• I’m turning all ad accounts to cost caps only. I’m not a fan of doing this as I believe it hurts business incrementality (it’s not something I’d recommend for clients), but I’m starting to think it’s the best way as an affiliate advertiser.

Next steps on ads:

• Now since I’m using Cost Caps exclusively, creative testing can be scaled up without destabilising Meta’s campaigns. I’m going to try to launch 3-5 new ad concepts per ad account. This’ll require a ton of customer research, but should result in some winners.
  
  
• It’s only Tuesday, but I’m already at 50% of the revenue from last week.
  
  
• I won’t be testing any more offers until I give up on, or crack the 2 I’m working on right now.

Blog Summary:

• 15 posts published on both blogs (30 total)
  
  
• Very, very happy with the output from the AI Content tool: http://www.intelliminds.ai
  
  I’ve been comparing the articles against the top articles for the same keywords, and the quality is around the same/sometimes better. Still need to make some minor changes, but the human-editing is minimal.
  
  
• I purchased GeneratePress Premium and set it up on both stores. I’m considering buying the Blocks and theme access to build out proper websites that isn’t just a stream of articles.
  
  Before I do that, I’m open to hearing from others if there’s a better Wordpress framework to build websites with, and if it’s worth switching from GeneratePress?

Next steps on blogs:

• Buy some foundational link packs for both websites. Both blogs are in the health niche, so ranking will be difficult. Both packs should include citations, brand mentions (linked & unlinked), forum links, social media mentions etc. The usual things that won’t get me penalized on Google.
  
  
• My SEO Plan:
  • Foundational link packs
  • 2-3 Niche Edits
  • 1-3 guest posts/mo
  • Social posting for each article.
• Automate Pinterest & social media content creation. I want to connect Canva up to Wordpress to autogenerate creatives based on templates + auto-share.
  
  
• Once I start seeing results, I’m going to find a way to expand both sites beyond a content site since I know that Google is prioritising business sites. I’m thinking of a directory, a service, a mobile app, membership, or anything to position the site better in Googles eyes.

Good luck! Thanks for the little insights into your strategies.

I see you do cpa ads with big scale.
3k spent and negative profit
This means it's pointless to advertise cpa offers.

Either in pinterest, fb or Google ads.
Nice to know.
I wanted to try this but I see its just throwing money away method

good luck bro, maybe you can optimize your campaigns for better results

olivier said:

I see you do cpa ads with big scale.
3k spent and negative profit
This means it's pointless to advertise cpa offers.

Either in pinterest, fb or Google ads.
Nice to know.
I wanted to try this but I see its just throwing money away method

Click to expand...

I think part of negative profit was from FB over spending his ads. Overall he should be positive.

Monday 8th - 21st July (14 days since last update)​

Advertising Updates:​

Summary:

• $5,869.16 Revenue
• Ad Spend: $5801.02

I hit breakeven the last 2 weeks. Not a bad thing, but I aim to start making some profits now rather than breaking even all the time.

2 of my prior-winning campaigns died out on me. I’m going to try and revive one of them - that offer just moved to Everflow, so the tracking and data should be much more accurate now.

I still have another winning campaigns that did $1220 in profits that I’ll be really doubling down on over the next week. I submitted 4 new ad concepts with a few variations each to the brand for legal approval. These should at the very least help me improve with consistency.

The last 2 weeks, both weeks started off really strong on each offer, with a taper down in sales & increase in spend from Thursday-Saturday. Quite frustrating as last week I was on track to my best and most profitable week ever.

There are also 2 ad accounts which amounted to $1200 spend with almost no revenue. I paused those.

Next Steps:

• Clean up ad spend & remove anything that’s wasting money,
• Double down on the offer that’s working.
• Try to revive one of the offers that I’m getting consistent sales for, just seeing minor unprofitability.
• Launch 3 more ad concepts for each of the 2 offers.
• Do a lot of market and customer research to improve the hit rates of my ads.

Niche Site Updates:​

Both of my sites are starting to rank. They’re in the health niche, so I expect it’ll take some serious SEO work to get them pumping.

Both sites are at 35 articles now, and I’m going to take SEO really seriously once I the 50 article mark. Until then, I’m just trying to get some solid content on the website.

I updated the website themes so the sites look far more professional, and I probably won’t need to do much once I turn them into actual businesses.

Website 1 is the site that I believe has the most opportunity. Immediately ranking and getting impressions on keywords that I can find a $30-50+ CPA offer for.

I have a few keywords I want to prioritise next for $100-$215 CPA offers.

I’ve yet to do any SEO beyond what the content writer AI does automatically.





Website 2 isn’t doing anywhere near as good. It turns out there’s a bunch of businesses with brand names that are similar to my domain name (though my domain name is way better) and it’s only ranking for those branded search. I might have to be careful here, and I should have foreseen that.

I’ve yet to do any SEO beyond what the content writer AI does automatically.

My SEO Strategy​

Onsite SEO Plan:​

• Every article has at least 2 internal links to the page (Pillar/Cornerstone articles will have 5-10).
• Every article has 2+ images with keywords or semantic keywords in the alt-text
• Every article has a visually engaging featured image with text on it, similar to a Youtube Thumbnail
• Every article has a youtube video inserted where applicable
• Every article has quotes from an expert where applicable
• Every article has a table of contents

Offsite SEO:​

Step 1. Purchase foundational SEO packs.​

• This should cost around $50 from a marketplace.
• I also want to buy a small amount of brand mentions (both linked AND unlinked). Maybe 10-20.

Step 2. Social media mentions​

• Reddit mentions (do 10 manually)
  • Comment on relevant reddit threads (google search, follow subreddits)
  • List the URLs on a spreadsheet.
  • Edit the comment 1 week later and add the link.
• Twitter mentions
  • Pay someone a few $ to get brand mentions and author mentions
• Facebook mentions
  • Pay someone a few $ to get brand links and author mentions
  • Post articles on Facebook page
• Pinterest mentions
  • Post articles on pinterest page
• Quora mentions
  • Find relevant quora threads (Google search)
  • Answer a post on quora, insert link.

Step 3. Niche edits​

These are editing currently live articles where you insert your keyword into and link back to the relevant site.

Look for:

• High referring domains
• High domain authority

Avoid PBNs and Content mills.
Cycle between vendors to get links.
Don’t build links too fast.

There’s multiple vendors that I’ve heard good things about from one of the SEOs at Typeform and a few other large SaaS that you might have heard of. I don’t know if I can link them. But in general, I’m avoiding vendors that are cheap or from randoms on twitter/reddit etc. I expect to pay between $70-$150 per link.

​

Step 4. Parasite SEO/Guest Posting​

These are posting unique articles on relevant websites, where you insert your keyword into the article, link back to your site and also with the author linking back to the site.

I’m looking for:

• High referring domains
• High domain authority
• High traffic

Try to avoid PBNs and Content mills.
Cycle between vendors to get links.

Same deal: have a few vendors that have been recommended, but won’t be linking unless I get approval. But I expect to pay between $70-$150 per link.

QuantumSoul said:

I think part of negative profit was from FB over spending his ads. Overall he should be positive.

Click to expand...

Exactly.

I was also testing an offer on that account. Offer didn't pan out for me with how much effort and money I put into testing.

I want to dig deeper with this kind of topic too, thanks for sharing. keep us posted please.

Summary: 22-28th July​

Revenue: $2,769.63
Spend: $1612.68
Profits: $1156.95(41% margins)

Advertising Summary:​

• I should have done over $3000 revenue last week, but I ran out of money for ads on Thursday evening, so my ads were paused for the last 3 days of the week (Fri-Sunday) until I got paid this morning.
• I’m going to reach out to my CPA network and try to get a 2X monthly payouts so I don't run into cashflow issues again.
• Regardless, I had a profitable week, so that’s a win. 41% is a good margin. Most successful ecom stores operate on lower margins (Sub 30%).

Blog Summary:​

Blog 1:


No progress in rankings yet. I believe I need to do offsite SEO to get any article high enough in the SERPs to receive impressions.


Actions done for Blog 1:

• Launched 14 new blog posts
• Internal linking to main posts..

Need to do for Blog 1:

• Start offsite SEO strategy
• More internal linking
• Blog post optimization (introduction, images, youtube videos).

Blog 2:


3X’d my total impressions in the last week. Pretty happy.

Something interesting popped up: I’m getting impressions and pretty good rankings for keywords that align with the CPA offer I’m promoting. So I’m going to double down on keywords and offsite SEO that can get me traffic to offer.

Actions done for Blog 2:

• Launched 15 new blog posts
• Internal linking throughout the website
• Small design updates to blog.
• A couple blog post updates.

Need to do for Blog 2:

• Start offsite SEO strategy
• Learn more about internal linking and best practices.
• Keyword research for a CPA offer.
• Publish blog posts for those new keywords.
• Blog post optimization on the posts that are ranking (improve introduction, images, youtube videos).

29th July - 4th August 2024​

Advertising summary:​

Revenue: $4,229.99
Spend: $2906
Profits: $1323
% Profit: 31%

Reflections:
Happy for the week. My network payout should come this Friday/Monday which will take a lot of stress off my shoulders.

Didn't launch any new ads this week as I'm still waiting for approval from the brands legal team.

Unfortunately, spend almost doubled for a similar amount of profits.

This was after having ads turned off after a few days, so Meta was pretty slow getting the wheels turning on the ads.

I'm going to turn my cost controls down as Meta has been spending my daily budget ($420/day) every single day, which means that I could get away with tighter cost caps (especially when my new ads get approved by legal.

Blogs:​

Not much happened on the blogs this week: no new posts were uploaded, but will have a bunch to schedule this week.

Updates on Blog 1:
Nothing changed here. No change in rankings or impressions.


Updates on Blog 2:

1. Identified high-potential articles from search console.
2. For these articles, I optimized them to improve keyword density, internal linking, formatting, introductions and imagery.
3. Decided on the future of this site: it's going to sell products in it's niche: I know 2 easy-to-whitelabel products that I can scale. Will be working on this in the few weeks.

Questions:
Any good low cost SEO tools? I've used Ubersuggest before and thought it covered 80% of my needs. Maybe there's something better out there?