It has been too long since I shared a detailed post showing you a specific strategy and case study results.
In today’s short and hopefully actionable post I am going to share how I helped push one of my sites from the middle of page 2 to the top of page 1 for my target keywords within 1 week!
Stay tuned for some more tests and results. (more…)
Coming up with the right technology setup for your site can be tricky! I have been through many many iterations and I think I finally have one that I am happy with.
If you have even thought about starting an online business you know how complicated your tool/service selection can be. The decisions you make when selecting a service can impact your business for literally years!
In this post I talk about...
Not surprisingly a bunch of these links
Here is my case why I believe a modular approach to my online businesses infrastructure beats a monolithic solution.
There is an ongoing debate online (and in my head) about if an end-end solution would be better than the modular approach I now take.
For me in my businesses right now I am going with the bolted together modular option...
The benefit of this is when I start a new business/project (which I have been known to do from time to time) ie ListingEagle I can simply swap out one of the components and replicate the model.
For example, my ListingEagle SAAS business wouldn't work completely with ClickFunnels (a popular
So by having my business running off of modular components I can repeat everything but swap out Clickbank for Zaxaa for now to get going quickly and then a more robust solution with Stripe soon enough.
For me it is clear that a modular approach to my businesses infrastructure is my preferred approach!
There are 7 different types of tools/services most online businesses need to have. This post talks about those 7 tools and what they were when I started out with my online business and what they are now.
If I was starting out today and wanted to keep costs down here is the setup I would work with. It is also very close to the setup that I used when I first got started.
What are the 7 tools you use for the following needs and how do you like them?
Useful content is the single most important factor in determining your websites success (but not the only) – This is nothing new to anyone!
But turning knowledge into practical application is not always simple!
When I talked about my simple 3 step authority website traffic growth plan I received comments about wanting to see more details specifically about how I go about getting quality/useful content published inexpensively. (more…)
I had an experience over the last couple weeks that I hope by me sharing others will be able to learn from.
With my focus on selling my FBA business other unique sales opportunities have presented themselves.
Let me tell you a story about what happened with one (eventual six figure deal)…
An opportunity came up to sell one of my affiliate sites strategically with the idea that they(startup company) would improve the site and based on the strategic nature of the purchase would be able to increase the value of their business significantly.
After some initial discussions it was clear the amount of cash available in the business was too low to be able to acquire the site at market value (let alone the premium that usually goes with strategic acquisitions).
It would have been had I not been recently working with some clever private equity types who had been looking to creatively structure FBA acquisitions.
So what deal can we strike when the business will be worth more in the hands of the acquiring company but the acquiring company doesn’t have funds to purchase the site?
Our clever solution was…A domain/website lease agreement which included a modest % of any increased earnings paid to me with the purchase of an option to buy the site in 1 year for a premium price, along with an agreement on minimum standards for the site and a few rules about what they couldn’t do to the site. The domain and website stay in my control until the option to purchase is exercised.
I GREATLY overestimated my skills! With this site I spent minimal time on it but thought it had been reasonably well set up from a monetization standpoint.
The one way the deal wouldn’t make sense to do is if they were unable to improve its earnings then I would get none of the upside and it would take away their incentive to exercise the option to purchase the site.
I contemplated not doing this deal because I doubted if the improvements would make a meaningful difference – I WAS WRONG!
Bottom line – nothing crazy was done and I had to eat some humble pie that even with some pretty straightforward changes they were able to make substantial improvements to the click through rate and eventual earnings of the site!
I think it was a unique deal and the more times people can read about unique solutions to problems the more likely they will be to recognize when a unique solution may exist.
Plus, I like to share all my failures and wins…although this is certainly a win it is very clear I had failed at monetizing this site to the best of its ability!
Not everything about growing website traffic and building a profitable authority site needs to be complicated! (even though I often do a good job of making things complicated – see my attack plan document).
If you are looking to grow traffic to a website and you execute this simple 3 step process without wavering from it for a few months I would guarantee you will increase your search traffic 99% of the time! (more…)
