Sites that sell VS sites that attract traffic – which ones to build and why? (5)
Sites that sell VS sites that attract traffic – which ones to build and why?
Many people, including myself, don't really like the fact that working with paid traffic equals to riding a roller coaster at times. It's all fine when you got a few good campaigns that pull in solid profits, but once the campaigns die, you gotta start again from scratch basically.
We all know that any campaign will die at some point, even the best ones have their lifespan … and when the end comes, the profits end too. I would say that we all have our systems in place, in order to prevent a complete income dry-out, for example : running multiple campaigns, multiple offers, multiple niches or traffic types … basically not having all eggs in one basket. So when something dies, the rest can still keep on running. If you don't do any of this, you definitely should start now!
However, even though I do all the above mentioned, from some reason I still find myself operating in a limited amount of verticals or niches … so my media buying efforts are still not as safe as I would like them to be. I guess many of you face the same problem, we simply tend to focus on a limited amount of things.
This made me realize I need to put part of my focus in a totally different area – so something that has nothing to do with media buying and paid traffic. That's why I started to work on building websites again. This is nothing new with me, that's how I actually started in AM, I used to run my own sites for maaaany years and quite a few of them are still alive and making some $$$. I just neglected them for a few years, and didn't build any new one for a few years already. And that's about to change now.
Couple weeks ago, I went over my collection of sites, did some major stats checking and tried to figure out which ones of them could be brought back to life etc … While doing this, I realized a few things and now I would like to share the findings with you.
WHY SHOULD YOU BE BUILDING SITES?
You might ask, why should you build any sites at all? Well the answer is pretty easy : properly built sites are like passive money makers, they don't require as much maintenance as paid traffic campaigns. Some of my sites are still making money, even thou I didn't touch them since 2013 or so … it's less money than it was back then, but they're running on autopilot.
This passive income gives me the much needed peace of mind, whenever my campaigns die I don't have to freak out, because the sites are still making money… this is the main positive in my opinion. On top of that, I'm constantly getting offers for selling the sites, so by building yours, you are crating a sell-able asset.
OK SO WHAT SHOULD I BUILD?
While looking at my sites, I realized one thing – there are basically two types of sites that you can build. Sites that are made to sell and sites that are made to attract traffic. By analyzing years of traffic and revenue, I can safely state that I have made WAY more money with sites that are made to sell compared to those that were made to attract traffic.
Let's take a look at what defines each type. We can start with the “traffic attracting” sites.
1. Sites that attract traffic : The typical example of this would be youtube, 9gag, … celeb buzz sites, webs with jokes, all the adult tube sites … All of these have one thing in common, there is no clear business model behind those. There is a ton of broad appeal content, mostly to entertain the users. None of these sites actually sells anything and pretty much any of them is monetized via ADs.
All these sites share one pattern – you need a MASSIVE amount of traffic in order to make a lot of money with them. Take an adult tube site as an example, it's very easy to grow it to 10.000 users per day for example, but that kind of traffic will make you pretty much nothing, the hosting bill will eat up large part of the revenue and you'll be left with some “coffee money” 
The SEO strategy for such sites also reflects this, you are targeting as broad terms as possible, not making any precise targeting or doing a detailed keyword research. You pretty much want any traffic, even from the most “cheap” GEOs, because if nothing else, you can still setup a traffic trade with other similar sites and trade your own visitors for fresh eyeballs.
Running sites like these is a numbers game, you want to shoot as high as possible and fight the poor quality with large volume. The default monetization method for sites like these are the various ad networks – adsense for better quality sites, native networks for the rest … and the adult ones for the adult webs.
2. Sites that are build to sell something: With these sites, it's more about a specific business model, the goal is to sell something and not to attract just ANY traffic. The thing you are selling can be a tangible product or a digital one. You can own it but you don't have to.
A great example of such sites are niche blogs that sell some course/guide, e-commerce sites that sell targeted/niche goods, educational webs that promote their own course, content locking sites that give access to part of their content for free but the rest is locked (with a premium SMS for example).
But you don't have to sell a product directly on the site, there is one more type that I've had the most success with and that's Review Sites. This is the perfect example of utilizing the affiliate model and still building your own asset. Review sites can be true gold mines, users are actually looking for this type of content, so they actively search for it. If you manage to rank for keywords that are related to the products/services you have reviewed … you will laugh on your way to bank.
Just to give you an idea about what is possible – the largest review site I've been involved with was an – surprise – adult review sites which was making $50.000 pure profit per month at it's peak. We didn't do any paid promotion for it, it was all from SEO traffic and returning visitors. And our site was not the biggest one in the niche by FAR.
When working on SEO for these “selling” sites, you need to focus on completely different keywords. You want the “selling” ones, not those that just attract traffic. This means that you need to be very focused, use long tails, focus on keywords with product names in it, established competitors brands, stay away from the word FREE as much as possible.
We are playing a completely different game here, we don't care about the amount of visitors, it's all about quality, targeting and relevancy. The adult review site I just mentioned a while ago, never had more than 10.000 visits per day, the standard amount of traffic was about 5.000 visits per day and that was enough for that profit I mentioned.
3. I know I said there were two types, but there is actually one more that I used to work with Let's call them SPAM sites, these serve the only purpose, to trick the Search Engines to rank your pages. The standard strategy is to build a network of small sites/blogs and dedicate each of them to some part of the niche that you are targeting.
The value of the content of such sites is “questionable” at best, most of it is written by freelancers who are willing to fire up pages of content for cheap. You can also produce the content yourself, by basically rewriting articles that you can find on other sites related to your niche. Whatever method you choose, make sure to write long articles, 500-1000 words is the recommended size these days.
In case this type of sites is something you'd be interested in, check this article on my blog too, I wrote more about it there with a real life example of one small network I've built at some point : http://www.matuloo.com/small-niche-sites-with-huge-roi/
This setup can still work and many affiliates are building sites like these on the fly. The profit potential is usually in the lower-mid $X.XXX range per month. It's not gonna make you a millionaire, but it can be a solid supplemental income. Don't expect to make enough $ with a few sites too, it takes dozens or hundreds of them in most cases.
OK, QUICK SUMMARY NOW:
The question is not whether you should be building some sites, which you definitely should, but what type of sites you should focus on.
I have personally worked with 3 main types, 2 are based around content that people actually want to see, the last one was all about tricking google and the other Search Engines.
If you decide to build sites for people, you have to options : hunt for numbers, go for high traffic numbers and let the traffic networks monetize the eyeballs for you. Or form a proper business model first, come up with a project or form a strategy to sell products of others. Then focus on the right traffic and bank on it, quality wins over quantity in this case.
Or build sites for the search engine bots, give them the food they are looking for, do proper KW research and write content for it. These sites can be monetized via traffic networks (adsense is used the most) or by selling something, in case you manage to rank for the right keywords.
Whatever approach you choose, do not delay the start too much. All sites benefit from SE traffic and google takes pretty long to rank sites lately, in some cases in can take months.
Thanks for reading
Great that you brought this topic up Matej!
Building sites was my bread and butter few years ago (not only for clients, but also for myself and monetising them as publisher).
Most of them was hit by Google penalisations, but some survived and are making money till today.
These days when many people cry how mobile is slowly dying and it's not as good as it used to be it's good to realise that there is still light at the end of the tunnel.
Building or buying and growing your own sites could be a good and longterm strategy even it's slow and boring.
Good thing about it is that it can be easily outsourced and it's a good investment of your affiliate money.
Also with the affiliate perspective and skills it's should be much easier to monetise those sites than for people who never been on the other side.
Erik
Originally Posted by erikgyepes
Good post matuloo. I've gotten back into building sites as well. In my mind this is a more sustainable business model than paid traffic to affiliate offers. It can be pretty much set and forget as well, which is pretty much why I'm in this business...passive income. Lately I've been working mainly on list building. I love this model because it doesn't rely so heavily on Google. You build the squeeze page and giveaway, set up the autoresponder sequence, and then it's just a matter of getting traffic to the squeeze page. The traffic can be automated quite easily using tools to drive Twitter/Facebook/Instagram traffic to your squeeze page. Once that is all set up you can basically let it run perpetually, and then move on to setting up another one.
Originally Posted by priest
I think that we should simply combine both the paid and free traffic generation methods and work with both affiliate offers and for example list building. The more diverse setups we can create, the more sustainable they usually are.
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