Here’s how I generated almost 30,000 visitors in 2 months with a $0 marketing budget, AND no previous experience (I just graduated).
You can do the same. How?
By setting up a content creation process and streamlining your SEO and promotion, so you can write without thinking, publish every damn day and turbocharge your site’s growth (even if it’s brand new).
Note: For a more in-depth guide, read this: How To Publish Like A Huge Content Creation Team (When It’s Really Just You)
Step 1: Figure out your “why” → crunch the numbers to meet the goal → validate
My goal was “$1000/month in passive income” and to meet it, I decided to pursue affiliate marketing.
I would sell books and make a commission for each one I sold.
Validating which books to promote/sell is tricky. To choose the best books to sell for my affiliate income, I used two methods:
Method 1) Using a tool called NerdyData, I could see a list of other affiliate marketers promoting the product I was targeting. I would then look for the affiliate marketers who pay to promote (e.g. banner ads) the affiliate product.
By searching for the banner’s web archives, I could see how long the banner ads were up. If the banner ads are up for a few months, it must be selling enough to justify the banner ad costs.
For example, Mike Vardy had this banner ad for the same affiliate product up for several months:
This informed me that the affiliate product is providing income to Mike. So I’d prioritize selling the same book on my own website because it was already proven based on my competition.
Method 2) I would tell my friends about the product, and for the friends who were interested, I’d send them the affiliate link. Imade 3 sales by doing this, which was enough to validate.
Once it was validated, I spent the time to build a website and drive traffic to it.
Step 2: Build a content log and streamline SEO, email collection and your promotion process.
To sell my affiliate book products, I created a site that would provide short book summaries and reviews. There were four parts to it:
Part 1: Content Creation
I wanted to publish content everyday to promote his affiliate books. To do so, I set a limit for each article to <1000 words by following a framework:
Part 2: SEO
Since I was creating a piece of content each day (30/month), I started to rank for certain keywords by using Google’s Keyword Planner. I would then add targeted keywords into my content headlines.
Part 3: Email Collection
I was now creating a bunch of content, and several of the content pieces started to rank in the first page of google on popular keywords. I started to see quite a bit of traffic going to my website.
I would make the most of the website visitors by collecting emails using SumoMe.
By collecting their emails, I would send them my best hand-picked summaries (more affiliate products).
Just by doing this, I would collect over 8% of all website visitors into email subscribers
Part 4: Promotion
Every day, I would spend ~1.5 hours writing the content piece, and another 90 minutes promoting it.
Here’s the exact promo checklist I used every single morning:
1. Submit to StumbleUpon
2. Submit to Hacker News
3. Post to relevant Slack groups
4. Send post to 1 person via email
5. Tweet at input creator
6. Buffer tweets
7. Check in on Coach.me (or another community you’re a part of)
By doing this for 10–15 minutes a day, it adds up to over 5 hours a month, which makes your promotional efforts manageable on a daily basis, but the effects compound fast
Step 3: Publish every day until you hit your goal
Create content every single day. By doing so, eventually you’ll have several articles that start to rank high in google. Create a content creation structure so you publish at the same time everyday.
And that’s how I got 30,000 visits in 2 months using a content marketing strategy.
If you want the templates and more in-depth walkthroughs related to this guide, you can download them by clicking here.
Update: I’ve continued to publish every day in 2016, which resulted in over 100,000 people visiting the site in its first year. This works.
