How Mads Singers Helps Companies 5x Their Business While Working Less
When you buy something through one of the links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Mads Singers has a passion for management and for helping companies increase their revenue exponentially by tweaking and improving their business practices.ย
This Danish entrepreneur travels the world, speaking publicly and consulting privately with businesses and individuals to help them think creatively and โdo more with the same.โ
He has grown his own business from 0 to 200 employees in just a few short years, and in this interview he talks about his own online experiments, how he sets up funnels, and how heโs been able to increase his revenue per visitor.
Donโt miss Madsโ expertise, especially if you want to increase your earnings without increasing your traffic.
Watch the Full Episode
Mads shares his background in business, his passion for management, and his experience helping SEOs up their management game. His focus is on โdoing better with what you haveโ and on maximizing revenue per visitor.
He starts by talking about his journey with several gardening niche websites and what he did to try to maximize revenue. After analyzing the competition, he and his team decided to focus on digital products and funnels to drive organic traffic to courses in the niche.
He shares his unique strategy to acquire courses for his websites and to offer lead magnets to his audience. He talks about using video courses to boost open rates and reusing resources on different sites instead of creating new ones.
But did these measures raise his revenue per visitor? Mads confirms that the most important metric for him is the customer lifetime value and explains why, and he talks about the importance of affiliate relationships.
Then he dives into his email funnels and explains how he sets them up and the trial and error process behind them, and he shares what people can do to accelerate this process, especially if they donโt have a lot of traffic.
Mads talks about why content sites are extremely undervalued and discusses his process of researching sites and products to determine whether theyโre good business deals.
He shares the main drivers of growth and offers his best advice for many listeners: small publishers whose traffic has been affected by algorithm changes.
Links & Resources
- SEO Mastery Summit
- His website
- His Twitter
- Udemy
Topics Mads Singers Talks About
- How to maximize revenue from visitors
- Using course funnels to boost revenue
- How he acquired different courses in his niche
- His unique lead magnet offer
- His use of video courses
- Reusing resources
- The importance of customer lifetime value
- Affiliate relationships
- His email funnels
- Trial and error
- Why content sites have so much potential
- His research process
- Different strategies to grow revenue
- His advice for small publishers
Transcript
Jared: I've been following along with, with your work for many years though. And it was good to connect in person. Your presentation there was really impactful.
Mads: I own and operate six companies and I have more than 300 staff. And the core piece behind this is. The thing is a lot of SEOs think SEO, they're always like traffic, traffic, traffic, links, content.
Most SEOs have the ability to make hundreds of millions. And they always think that what they're lacking is one more SEO hack or one more SEO tip, but really what they're lacking is more.
Jared: You share basically exactly how you take some of those same skill sets and apply them to these projects that a lot of people listening will have.
Mads: Reality is if you look at the real business, they're usually quite good at monetizing their traffic, right? So when they get a client, you know, they make a lot of money. What other ways can people accelerate some of this process? The best site we had, we acquired it, I think it was back in 2016 or 17. At the time, it was only making money on ads.
Over 17, 18 months, we took it from 200 bucks to about 10k or 11k, maybe, revenue.
Jared: What are some of the big topics we're going to get into today to better maximize revenue from visitors? So I know so many people who wasn't
Mads: affiliate marketing started ecommerce. And you know what they never did? They never went out and found affiliates.
Yeah. Good.
Jared: That done. Ironic. Digital course sales or where was that huge jump in revenue mostly
Mads: attributed to? The most important thing was because we built the funnel relatively early on and we had two relatively high cost products that people were actually buying. Because of that. All
Jared: right. Welcome back to the Knits Pursuits podcast.
My name is Jared Bauman. Today we're being joined by Mads Singers. Mads, welcome aboard.
Mads: Thank you very much, Jared. I am super excited for today's conversation.
Jared: I am too. You know, you and I first, uh, really, uh, met in person at the affiliate gathering event earlier in 2024. Obviously I've been following along with, with your work for many years though.
And it was good to connect in person. Your presentation there was really impactful. Not just for me, but for a lot of people. And I think it's set the stage for what we want to talk about today. So I'm really excited to have you on the podcast. Um, before we dig into all that though, uh, for people who don't know who you are, maybe catch people up on your background, your history, what got you to where you are today.
Yeah, for
Mads: sure. So, um, background, I'm from Denmark originally. Uh, nowadays I live pretty much all over the world, but, uh, I spend a fair chunk of time in Asia, and Europe, and typically U. S., uh, do a ton of speaking, and Yeah, I, I really love, uh, I love management. So management is sort of my background and so on.
So. I've helped, uh, many, many, many, uh, big SEOs really up their management game and so on. Right. Uh, as I always say that most SEOs have the ability to make hundreds of millions. Uh, and they always think that what they're lacking is one more SEO hack or one more SEO tip. But really what they're lacking is more business and management knowledge more than anything.
So that's typically what I spend the most time talking about. It is very rare that I actually talk about. Sort of stuff. I did that affiliate gathering, um, which was more sort of practical examples of what some of our companies have done. Um, but that was a fun conversation and, uh, yeah, I'm excited to follow up on that a little bit today.
Spencer: Hey there. Thanks so much for listening to the niche pursuits podcast. Did you know that Jared and I are members of a private group called the niche pursuits community? And today I want to share with you how you can join for just 1. The niche pursuits community is a private members area for niche online publishers to mastermind and grow their businesses together.
We hold weekly calls live with experts where you can ask questions. These experts share tips on Amazon influencer. Google Discover, building email newsletters, getting traffic from Facebook and other strategies to grow your online business. You'll also be assigned a mastermind group of four or five other people in a similar stage in business as you dive deep into your business issues and get your problem solved.
If you use coupon code podcast at checkout, you'll get your first month for just 1. Go ahead and give it a try. Come join me, Jared, and lots of other digital entrepreneurs. Inside my private group at community. nichepursuits. com and be sure to use coupon code podcast. I'll see you on the inside.
Jared: The interesting, I mean, you talk about your background in management and in efficiency and optimization and helping leadership organization structure, all that kind of stuff.
And then you talk about how, well, hey, what I shared actually was somewhat different. I think though that it's almost bringing those skill sets to the application of what a lot of our listeners have, right? Like a lot of our listeners might not be running big companies. But you share basically exactly how you take some of those same skill sets and apply them to these projects that a lot of people listening will have.
Mads: Yeah, I mean, the thing is, whenever I think about business, I think business, right? So the thing is, a lot of SEOs think SEO, they're always like traffic, traffic, traffic, links, content. Uh, but the business side of things is not always being considered much. And because of that, then obviously, yeah, I'm excited to share some more, like how I think about business.
Jared: Let me set the stage for what we're talking about today. I mean, you kind of said it a bit already. It's about doing better with what you have. I mean, I'll, I'll, maybe I'll preface it with that.
Mads: Yeah, yeah, that's a good, that's a good way of saying it. Fundamentally, we, we like looking at things slightly different, right?
So, we, we like looking at what other things that work, what other things, like how can you, How can you use what you have and, and get more out of it? Like when you look at most SEOs in general, they're good at generating traffic, but they're quite often very poor at monetizing. Right. So reality is if you look at the real business, like if you look at a law firm, or if you look at Whatever, any, any kind of real business.
Like they're usually quite good at monetizing their traffic, right? So when they get a client, you know, they make a lot of money, but many, many SEOs ourselves, uh, my, my SEO team have been part of that. And, and we still do that occasionally. Right. We. Spin up a random site about something that's, that's an interesting topic.
But the reality is we, we haven't necessarily always, or we didn't have at least a good way to monetize it. So, you know, we get a hundred K traffic and, you know, you make a couple of grand a month. So that, that happens for everyone. But we are, as soon as we start getting traffic, we really start thinking about how can we utilize this traffic better.
And how can we, yeah, how can we monetize it in a better way? I
Jared: think it applies on both sides of the coin right now. A lot of people will be interested to hear this because as they put their efforts towards growing traffic, it's like, cool, how do I make more money per visitor? But a lot of people listening, you know, no secret here, have had traffic reductions over the last couple of years or certainly at least the last year or so.
And so in a, in a weird way, learning how to maximize revenue per visitor Is almost like this weird hack for not having to worry as much about losing traffic. It's almost like the very thing that is your skill set to get you to where you're at. You can almost nullify or minimize the downsides of it with some of this.
Um, what, uh, like, let's start with this. What are some of the big topics we're going to get into today to better maximize revenue from visitors? And then you tell me the best way for us to kind of work into that. Probably talk a good
Mads: bit more about funnels. So funnels, uh, we, we really love when we look at monetization, like, like you can build funnels in many different ways.
Right. But the fundamental is really looking at the utilization, right? So specifically we, we looked at a lot of courses and we looked a lot at sort of alternative ways to work with courses. And that was something that worked really well for us. And we'll, we'll look as well, sort of high level, just talking a little bit about email and so on as well.
Jared: Let's dive in, talk, talk us through some of the examples that you want to share today, and then I'll just ask questions that I think are relevant for people.
Mads: Yeah, I, I think, um, If we start from the top, right, one of the things we did was we were, we were looking around and we were seeing, well, how people monetize in their track.
And we started by looking at competitors and generally they were, they were pretty poor. So initially when we first started out, we were looking a lot in the garden niche because we had a couple of sites that was pretty big in that niche. And we were trying to, you know, take the shortcut of looking at all our competitors.
We signed up for all their newsletters. We looked at their sites and all we got was not very much. Um, so we, we sort of got together with the team and we started thinking about how can we monetize things better. And one of the core things we started looking at was, was, uh, soft products, right, or, uh, digital products, because the benefit with digital products is you kind of pay or you, you create them once and then you keep selling.
And one of the core aspects around that was we, we saw a lot of courses and our initial approach to it was, well, why don't we just find people who have relatively expensive courses and, you know, build funds around them or, you know, without, without organic traffic, build some funds around, um, What we did find out was that, uh, 500 courses does not sell very well to, uh, home gardeners.
If, if people are, you know, hobby gardeners at home, they rarely go and spend 500 bucks on some course, right? So what we saw was that the courses I was selling was significantly cheaper. So 20, 30, 50 bucks, maybe 80 bucks, but, but it was generally the cheaper range. Now, our challenge was that even if we went and did affiliate for those kind of courses, You know, our end output was often not a lot, right?
Like if you do a 50 percent affiliate deal of a 20 course, you end up with 10. And I mean, 10 bucks times enough is still interesting, but, but it was definitely, it was a little bit hard to, to move the needle as much as we want. Right. And. The problem is sometimes when you go and find people who have affiliate deals and have courses that are not, yeah, super exaggerated and so on, then there isn't always that many to look at, right?
But what we, what we start seeing is that we, we actually saw, uh, on Udemy, we saw a lot of interesting courses. The problem with Udemy was they were being sold at like no money and their affiliate program was, you know, you've got like 20 cents per affiliate or something.
Jared: It's tough
Mads: making a
Jared: go at
Mads: the Udemy affiliate program.
I understand. Right. And, uh, one of the, one of the guys got a really good idea, which was, uh, why do we not look at some of the courses that are not selling at all? Right. And saying, Hey, we have done courses because I've done a bunch of courses and as a team, we have, we've done multiple courses in the past and.
And the concept was that, you know, these people put in sometimes hundreds of hours in producing a really good course, put it on Udemy, and then over a two year period, they generate two sales.
Spencer: Hmm.
Mads: Right. Now, for most people, that's a bummer. So what we found out was that, you know, we could connect to these people who are really struggling to sell.
And there was many options. So we, we, we sort of had many options in mind, right? The first option was to, to simply white label it. And we, because we would do everything we were, we were trying to get very high percentages. So 70, 80%, uh, and we basically could determine the price on everything, right? Uh, that was one model.
The second model we realized was that sometimes when people spend hundreds of hours or something and get nothing out of it, They're happy to sell it, right? So we actually found people who were happy to for, I think the cheapest we got was about 500 bucks, but they would literally sell us their entire course of 500 bucks and the first people, people, first reactions are like, Oh, but if they got no sale, it was a shit course.
And we're like, no, that's not necessarily how it works in Udemy. It's a question of, if you don't have sales, you don't get to the top and you don't get more sale. So. Uh, it's very much like a popularity contest. So obviously there could be some poor courses, but, um, that was not necessarily our experience.
So our experience was there was some really good courses, but people just didn't know how to market. They thought creating a course, putting it on Udemy was all they needed to do. And then they would be rich, but that was not the case. So we, we ended up buying, uh, quite a few courses, um, across multiple dishes.
And that was actually a really interesting concept. So, uh, in most cases we took it off Udemy and just had it on our own site. But we, again, we, we tried to build a funnel around it, right? So we really, you know, from the right pages and so on, we, we, um, yeah, we, we were utilizing, you know, the relevant traffic to, to get into those relevant funnels.
And, um, that, that was sort of the starting point that we realized there was a few others because we also sometimes saw people who had causes that was exceptionally popular. And obviously if they were selling really well and they were doing good, they obviously often didn't want to sell them. But what we realized was that again, there's a lot of people on YouTube, for example, who are, who haven't broken through, who are not yet influencers.
But, you know, you can see that trying and a lot of these people have very little traffic. They have very little, they had some audience, but not a lot. And what we did was when we, when we saw some courses that was super popular, we would, we'd sort of make a document that we'll kind of say, okay, you know, if we had to do a similar course, what would it include?
And we would go to an influencer in the niche who was trying to break through. And we would say, Hey, You know, do you know this topic? So for gardening, for example, we were, uh, some, I don't even know what it is, some gardening boxes or hanging boxes or whatever it's called. Uh, and we went to them and we said, hey, do you know about this?
And some of them was no and some of them was yes. And then we're like, well, you know, would you like to do a course about this topic? Right. And the deal we made with them, uh, we, we had a few different courses we bought. So some of them, it was just pure cash. So some of them was one grand, two grand or something to basically help produce it.
The, the caveat was we, we, uh, left their name on it. So they got promotion out of it as well. But we paid, when we paid up front, we basically didn't give them anything. Uh, afterwards, uh, the second aspect was trying to, uh, Um, through the other way around. So instead of paying them much, we would then give them commission, uh, along the way.
And so we found multiple different kind of deals and setups, right? And fundamentally we got influencers to produce courses that we knew the titles would be quite popular through that process. And that was really, really helpful for us to add more value to our funds because we were already at a point where like our sites were having traffic, they were making money.
Right. So what we did next was also very helpful. So basically we, we started looking at lead magnets and for a long time, we have always done eBooks, right? They used to work really well. They still kind of sometimes occasionally work. Uh, one of the things we figured out was that you could actually do multiple eBooks at a time.
So for example, for gardening, like there wasn't really any. One ebook that would be relevant for the entire audience So what we actually did with our gardening site was we the first one we were testing on We basically produced five different eBooks and we literally set them up and basically had them set up in a way that, you know, as, as an audience, it was like a banner so you could see all five eBooks.
And our, our thought process was that, you know, not every eBook is relevant to each person, but most garden interested people would be interested in one of the five, right? So instead of giving away one free eBook, we'll basically say, Hey, here's five free eBooks, sign up now. And that was something going from one to five was something that significantly increased our conversion rate.
Like I think with one ebook, it was less than a percent. And I think we got to a 3. Some percent after we, we changed up and we did the five ebooks. Right. Um, now again, that's conversion to a free email list. So it's not conversion to buyers yet, but just in terms of, you know, creative thinking and trying to see, you know, how, how can you get the most out of what you already have?
Uh, that was very, very helpful. We also did start doing quite a few of these small sort of video courses. So we'll do like, Hey, here's a five day course. And it will often be a two, three minute video with either a challenge or something for the audience to do. And then we would just send them one email every single day.
Now the thought process behind this, this was similar. So it was get value, but also get people comfortable with getting your emails. Right. If you do a five day or six day or seven day free email thing and people watch the first couple of emails and they have to go and take action and see this thing, um, most of them get very used to actually opening your emails.
So we found that when people came into our funnel through that, the open rate generally stayed significantly higher than if they came in, for example, to a free ebook or something like that, where they weren't necessarily used to To the quantity of emails. Right. So that was also a very interesting sort of concept that we, that we liked using.
And that was, again, from a business standpoint, it's all about creativity. Right. So it's all about trying to see how can you do more with less or more with the same, but I would say particularly finding the courses, sort of working with influencers, a lot of the time people try and work with influencers in a, Hey, here's a product, go sell it for me.
Right. Um, and that, uh, most people will tell you they rarely get any bang for the bucks, right? And most influencers, uh, will never do anything on affiliate. They always want a set fee because they know they're not selling it. Right. Um, so very often if you go and try and talk with influencers, they want cash.
Right. But, but if you can actually collaborate with them and particularly in the fitness niche, for example, we had a site and, um, you And that means people, the people who are like trainers and so on were very interested in having their name out there. So even though they own 0 percent of the revenue and the money we generate, they were still very interested in having their name on the calls so that people could potentially connect with them for training sessions and stuff.
And we even put that in the funnel, like the option to talk to the, the. influencer. So that was also, that was kind of, you know, we were constantly looking for ways of how do you do win win where, where we don't spend a lot of resources putting this together because reality is particularly in the early days, like we didn't know what we were doing.
So we were testing out stuff, right? So we didn't want to go spend 10 grand on something just to realize it didn't work. Um, but as we, as we built this up, we, we found out that we could actually. You can kind of copy and paste these things. So when you build a really, really solid funnel of, for example, our e books, right?
Now, when you have these five e books, you could just change the cover of those e books and then put them on another Gartnick site, right? Like you don't necessarily have to go and write five new e books. You could utilize the exact same e books on, on different sites, but just, you know, match them to the brand of the site and so on.
So fundamentally what happens is if you, if you, uh, Build a really, really solid funnel. If you have some great niche markets, what you can do is you can go and find more sites within that same niche, and you can then take the existing funnel you have, and you can do something at least very similar on a new site.
So you don't need to, you know, start all over from scratch and all that. Uh, every single time. So that was, um, yeah, that was a lot of the lessons that we learned. Let
Jared: me just recap really quickly. So people who are listening can connect the dots. We've got a website, it's got traffic, whether increasing, whether it's decreased, you, you talk specifically about a site in the gardening niche.
You added or optimized around moving some of those visitors over to an email list. You shared strategies for lead magnets, how to improve the conversion rates, how to get more bang for your buck, how to go from less than 1%, which by the way, that's a very common number, um, writing a marketing agency, like under a 1 percent is, is very common in terms of conversion rates.
And you found different ways to increase the opt in rate, move over to a free email list. You talked about some strategies to get them engaged, talked about course, you know, mini courses, a video course. A challenge something to get them opening your emails consistently and then you started offering them Courses whether it's one course or a multitude of courses and you talked about how you went out and grabbed those courses how you didn't Have to create them yourselves or how you didn't have to affiliate the courses because both of those would involve either a lot of work or lost revenue because affiliate conversions, um, or percentages are lower and about how you went out and got courses, um, that's got to have raised your revenue per visitor quite a bit.
Can you talk about how you track that? How you look at that? Is that the KPI that you're going off of? And if so, like what did that actually end up kind of doing in this case?
Mads: Yeah. I mean, it's always customer lifetime value, right? Like if you, if you run a business, the, at least for me, the number one metric is customer lifetime value because.
Um, and, and for people who don't know customer lifetime value basically means what is the profit that a person brings in to your business when you get them on board, right? So for example, if you are. Again, if you're, you know, that if you bring in one client that pay you 1, 000 a month, you know, if they stay with you for three months, then your customer lifetime value is 3, 000.
The reason why this is really, really critically important is because this determines how much you can afford to pay to acquire a customer, right? So the challenge with many niche sites is that they are, they're putting a lot of work in. So they're putting a lot of work into link building and content and all of this stuff.
And then they're hoping in the long run to get an output that's bigger than that. But they, they very rarely look at what is the, what is the value of a customer that enters their site. Right. And sometimes it's more common to do it if you run an ad, so predominantly ads, at least, right. Then you kind of, then you kind of see those kinds of numbers, right.
And you, you understand what it's worth. Uh, we always think that from a business standpoint, it's always, if you can The average spending of a customer in your business, right? Then you can basically pay twice as much money to acquire them and it even means that if you're running an seo piece And you know, you're building a funnel and so on and you actually Over time build a funnel that works really well at some point You can start running ads to it because that funnel if you know, okay Every single person who goes into my funnel, end up making us five bucks.
Well, if I can run ads and acquire customers for less than five bucks, then, you know, over time I'm going to make more money. Um, so that's, that's very much the mindset, right? The second mindset we were very keen on, um, most affiliates in particular, never use the other side of affiliates. Even when they move into different niches.
So I know so many people who wasn't affiliate marketing started e commerce. And you know what they never did? They never went out and found affiliates. Yeah, that, uh, ironic to say the least, right? Ironically. Here's the thing. Here's why we do it. It is the simplest, fastest, easiest, cheapest link building you can ever do.
It is probably the only way, or one of the few ways, where you can get your actual competitors linking to your website. It's by having products that you give out affiliate commission on. So when you own a product, even a course, even something like that, if you go to your, uh, competitors and you say, Hey, I can see you at the garden niche.
You know, we have this garden course that's 35 bucks. We are happy to give you 50, 60, 70, 80 percent commission for selling this thing. Are you interested? And a lot of people sign up. A lot of people create a couple of links and then they don't do anymore. Some of them, if you're lucky, will probably get you a bunch of sales.
But most of them will end up linking to your website. My absolute favorite links is my competitors linking to.
Jared: Which only helps your search growth, your organic traffic, which only helps add more names and add more emails to your funnel.
Mads: And, and again, traffic division, because if, if you do get traffic, like I, I think that the, particularly nowadays, right?
Like the more traffic that doesn't come in through your ISEO, The better off you are, like, if you have a site where 99 percent of the traffic is coming in through SEO on your site, like no. Uh, maybe no branded search, a very little social and so on. Right. Like even referral traffic from on the website is, is exceptionally valuable.
Uh, in my experience.
Jared: Are you struggling with internal linking on your WordPress site? Discover Link Whisper, the revolutionary tool transforming the way bloggers and SEO experts build internal links. And Jake Cain shares, I've been using Link Whisperer since the beginning. I use it on every site I own, and the internal linking process that used to be a manual, time consuming headache, now only takes a few minutes after we publish a post.
It pays for itself very quickly with all the time you save. Paradetlic remarks, Simply an amazing plugin for internal linking. Makes life way easier. Transform your website with Link Whisper. Streamline your internal linking, increase your traffic, and save time. Try Link Whisper today and use coupon code PODCAST to save 15 off.
Talk a bit about, and you did touch on the video courses and the challenges, but talk a bit about maybe what you've put together in terms of an email funnel. A lot of people listening will be familiar with, okay, get a lead magnet, get an email going, but a lot of it will break down In terms of what, what do I send them?
You know, like, and a lot of people aren't going to want to sign up for sending a daily email, how do you create these funnels? So that, again, going back to what you said, to maximize what you already have and to maximize the amount of effort you have to put in compared to the return you'll get.
Mads: Yeah, this is definitely took us a while to sort of get started with, right?
What we realized was that different niches are different. So what we mean with that is something like gardening is very depending on the time of year. And actually the hardest thing with gardening is if you take the U. S. as example, like Minnesota in December, it's a very different. Garden than, uh, Florida garden in December, right?
So in Europe, most European countries, you could kind of, you know, it's about the same weather. It's about the same, right? Winter is
Jared: winter, spring is spring, summer is summer. Right. In the U. S., not so much. Yeah, I'm in the U. S. and I know that when I, I garden in the winter, it's very different. My, you know, it's generally sunny here versus, I mean, people, Uh, I have relatives that are, you know, planting indoors and using heat lamps, and I'm outdoors just planting the winter crops that generate.
So I totally get where you're coming from.
Mads: Yeah. So with that, that honestly, we procrastinated a little bit, a lot actually in the beginning when we kind of bumped into that hurdle, because we're like, our thought process was we're going to do one session per month. So each month we have a particular topic, right?
So that will be I mean, as an example, it would be something like, okay, now it's July. It's the time to do X, Y, C. So therefore, you know, here's the kind of product you need, or, you know, here's a course on how you do it. So we, Basically, the concept was we had a topic per month and that way, like our goal was we didn't want to sell in every single email that was, we wanted to not do that because we had seen previously that work well, when you sort of give value, give value and explain and kind of pre sell what's coming.
Right. So for example, if we had some free videos of how to grow carrots and whatever, and then. At the end there's like a cause or at the end there's maybe a you know, hey, you know You can buy cheap carrot seeds here or something like that Um, so we will try to build a funnel per month and Um, particularly in the winter months, we kind of like our first thought was, Oh, we'll split up our list based on where they live, but we didn't have that data.
And we were like, Oh, let's send everyone an email, ask whether they live. Right. And you're not like 5 percent response rate or something. So, uh, that was not very useful. Uh, so we ended up kind of having to do these winter mails. That was a little bit weird. All right. And not in most niches, this will probably not be the case.
Right. Good. In, in some places we're like, Hey, you know, if you live in the North, you can get a snowplow and you can do all of these things in the snow. Uh, cause there, there are some very profitable products in the winter that are interesting to be done, but they're obviously only interesting for a part of the country, but.
We kind of had to build a very strange funnel, honestly, in the winter month. In the summer, it was a lot easier. Um, and it also enabled us to sometimes have maps of the country. And, you know, sometimes we would share our email list, say, Hey, you know, here's a map of when you should grow, what, depending on where you live and so on.
So, yeah, but, but generally setting up the email list. Initially, we always use ActiveCampaign because that was what we were used to. And the team was used to working with that. And that was what we utilized to set up these, these funnels and utilize these. Right. I would say if we had to come back and do it today, I would probably use something like GoHighLevel just because from a scale perspective, it worked exceptionally well.
So if you have many sites or if you want to copy a funnel or something, it is Incredibly easy, but yeah, so that was basically how we got set up. And, and we, we started initially, I actually, if we take some of the other side that wasn't the guns, the other side, our thought process was, we're just going to do a 12 month thing.
And then at the end of 12 months, we just repeat. And that actually came from one of my friends, Dave Haas, who was, uh, he had a side around quilting. And he basically on social media, he, I think it was three months or six months. And then he just repeated the whole thing. And it didn't seem to negatively impact because apparently people couldn't remember six months back.
So, but I think, I think for most of our sites, we kind of did 12 months and then we kind of just did a circle. Right. Uh, also what that meant was it didn't really matter when people joined, they would always just go through the same thing. Right. So it was definitely a lot easier working with other niches than the because it was more about.
Sort of the growth journey. So what we, what money affiliates do is they look at where do we make the most money, and then they say, let's push that thing first, but we really try to take, like, if you took fitness, for example, we try to take it from ground up and say, okay, you know, what's the starting point for most people.
So if you've never been to the gym, where do you start? Right. Uh, so we had maybe one month that was fully on nutrition. We had, One month I was like, Hey, you know, here's how you use the basic stuff in the gym and so on. So we would kind of do it more as a journey. Um, we did realize that like, like our sites was mostly aimed at beginners, but we did realize that when people actually came in and weren't beginners, that was not super attractive.
So we probably did put some old events away, but again, like you, you need to focus on your, your sort of. Ideal, uh, ideal avatar, right? Um, but yeah, then we, we basically build up and, and we typically did it a month at a time, right? So we sat down, we said, okay, uh, let, let's get something done. So we sat down and crafted four, five emails.
And we, we looked at, obviously, before we started crafting them, we had the offers that we had sort of in mind for it. And we tried to build the funnels so that they would hit on those particular offers. And, and it was a mix. So it was a mix between stuff we own. So courses and stuff. Uh, ebook, sometimes even, uh, affiliate products, uh, sometimes even Amazon, because again, the thing was when we, when we went in a certain direction, we might not have a super good product to provide.
So sometimes it ended up being Amazon and the likes, um, but that also makes some money.
Jared: How much trial and error was there? And again, I'm just asking this question out of curiosity for someone listening who's thinking I tried an email funnel. I didn't get very good results. Or I tried writing these emails and the open rates were bad.
Or I tried throwing a product in a course affiliate and I never sold anything. I'm not going to do it again. And yet, often I find when I interview people and talk to them about something like what you're talking about, sometimes it isn't the first, second, or third try. Where they get it, where they figure it out, where they become kind of profitable and conversion focused.
I'm just curious, was that your experience or did you guys have this nailed pretty much on the outside?
Mads: No, it definitely took some tries. So, so basically the way we look at email is when you set up a funnel or if you create a one month, uh, sort of flow, you, you want to look at all the data. Now, the problem sometimes with email is if you have a tiny list, that data can be very confusing.
Most people just write a bunch of emails, hope they generate sales. But what we typically do is we write like a sort of a sequence of emails. We then go back and look at, okay, you know, what is the open rate? What is the click through rate? What is the, what is the sales we end up getting out of this stuff?
Um, and, and then you need a tweak, like if, if it's really good, sometimes you leave it, but in most cases you want to try different things, right? AP test, uh, different emails and so on. And reality is if you have very little traffic or very little, uh, very little list, that is very difficult, right? So I would say today, the way I would do it today, if I had a tiny site, like if I had a site with, you know, a thousand visitors a month or something, uh, I, I might end up starting with the funnel.
Uh, starting doing the funnel, even with lower traffic, but I would probably sit down, I would do three months worth of emails and just to have something and that way I would collect the emails because I see many affiliate collect emails, have lead magnets, and then never send an email. So even if you just go by whatever you think will work initially.
And then as your list grows and you have data, then you can maybe start refining some of it. But I, but I think that's, I mean, there's no way of saying, you know, it'll take three times or five times or seven times. For me, it's like your, your email funnel is a constant developing thing, right? Like it's constantly a question of.
Checking your numbers and, and again, sometimes a product that used to be great and fit perfectly in your funnel, suddenly doesn't get sold anymore. And sometimes you have to go and rewrite the whole thing because this product is no longer available.
Jared: What would you recommend to people who their traffic isn't?
at the pace they want to accelerate some of the things you're talking about. Uh, even doing the math in my head, 10, 000 visitors a month. If they optimize around some of the suggestions you have for lead magnets, and they get that up to 3%, that's still only 300 people going on their list a month. Which isn't bad, by the way, because you're, you're, you're, you're growing your list from traffic you were already getting.
But at 300 people per month, They might not be able to get some of the revenue gains that they are striving for. What other, you talked about ads, you know, maybe that's part of the conversation, but what other ways can people accelerate some of this, some of
Mads: this process? Just a comment to that at first, what we found is also that if you post new posts, so if you have important posts, And you share them with your list and you have a brand new post going live and you suddenly get a lot of traffic to it.
That is not a disadvantage from an SEO standpoint. So even if like 300 people might, it's not a lot for an email list, but 300 people, if you can, let, let's say you can get 50 people to click on a link to a very interesting, a very important new blog post you made, that can be very, very valuable SEO wise.
Right? So there is, there is multiple ways and multiple benefits with driving and owning a list because Google love external traffic. So as I said earlier, like when, when all of your traffic is just SEO, SEO, SEO, uh, that is not Google's favorite. Right. But when you have traffic coming in from many places, including email list, that is very, very helpful.
And it shows Google, Hey, there's a brand new article. It's in, people are interested in it, even though it was just launched. And to your question, right? What else can you do? So fundamentally a lot of partnerships in every way, shape or form. Right. So even if you build a decent funnel, go and ask someone else in the same niche who doesn't do email and say, Hey, can we throw our lead magnets on your thing and run your emails through this funnel?
Uh, if we do it, we can split the profit 50, 50, for example, right. Um, that's also an option, but, um, fundamentally it's, it's definitely hard to get started with email, right? Like you, you, you need something, uh, because if you have five people on your email list, like you're not going to make any money, you're not going to get any data that's useful.
You're not going to get anything. Right. So I would say this is, this is typically most interesting if you have a site that have decent traffic. And I would say probably about 10 K. Um, but obviously like ideally you have a site that's growing, right? So, uh, if it's 10 K right now, then, uh, if you're building, putting in the effort and you're, you're growing the audience at the same time, then it kind of becomes a compound impact, right?
Because you don't just make the affiliate commission, but you actually start owning some of your customers, which enable you to keep selling to them. And increasing the value of the people that you already paid to acquire. And people often really misunderstand the pay to acquire, right? Like when you spend money on content and links, that also effectively ends up being a cost per visitor somehow, right?
Uh, obviously it can be spread over a longer time, but SEO traffic is not free traffic, right? Like it always costs things. So you, you are paying something per visitor. And when you can extract more value out of people who already know you and potentially like you, um, you are in a much better place.
Jared: Segue.
What kind of increased value did you get? If you could share, you know, any sort of circumstance, and again, also talking through the way you evaluate it, you talked about lifetime value. That might be a new concept for people not running like an e commerce business, for people running like a content site, like lifetime value is interesting because we kind of think is.
For visitors is almost transactional, you know, and that, um, first visitor being very, very, uh, sorry, uh, every visitor being very, very one and done. So this lifetime value idea is maybe foreign. So like, what kind of examples did you guys see and how did you evaluate the, the, the change in the lifetime value?
Mads: Yeah, I would say lifetime value can be a bit difficult. And, and honestly, if you're doing affiliate only, It's very hard to impact it because the problem is if you want to increase your customer lifetime value You actually have to remove your worst pages In an affiliate site because you have no other way of increasing the average and that that's not helpful Right, like then you're just removing traffic Um, so for us like the best site we had we Um, we acquired it, I think it was back in 2016 or 17.
And so it was a couple of years back at least. Um, and basically what we did with that started out at 200 bucks or so, uh, when we bought it. So we, we bought it for 6, 000. And so it was about 30 multiples at the time. And so it was making 200 a month, basically 200 a month. Yeah. And at the time it was only making money on ads.
Right. So ads was the only thing and we bought it. We did quite a bit of work with it, but over 17, 18 months, uh, it hit the 10 K mark in revenue, right? So we took it from 200 bucks to about 10 K or 11 K maybe, um, revenue. And that was in about 18 months. Right. So definitely when we first bought the site. Uh, it needed a lot of work, so we had to do a lot of sort of content pruning and, and so on.
Right. Um, but that was sort of one of the faster growths that we saw, but I think fundamentally the, the key thing for me is that again, from a business standpoint, when I look at content sites, it is a very cheap way to acquire eyeballs. So if you, if you go out of the affiliate world for a second, if you think more as an e commerce person, for example, or a.
Someone selling any physical products or any products, really many of them, they go and pay, you know, 5 per lead or X amount of dollars per click. Right now, sometimes you can buy a website that's getting a hundred thousand visitors a month, right? For not a lot of money. So for example, we, we bought a few sites in a particular, in a fashion niche, so, you know, these kinds of blocker sites that get a bunch of traffic, but they don't have any, they don't have any good ways to monetize them.
We, we have acquired some of those sites as at less than 5k, even if you look at it from a PPC standpoint. Most business owners in a relevant niche would love to pay five grand for a hundred thousand eyeballs a month. So from a business standpoint, content sites are still incredibly undervalued.
Obviously the challenge with content site right now is, and Google's love and hate for it is obviously making that a little bit more difficult, but when you actually look at many companies, If you look at many e commerce businesses, if they go out and buy a content site with a hundred thousand visits, uh, even if it's substantially more than 5k, quite often they can make that money back in one, two, or maybe three months.
Yeah. So, you know, with some good lead magnates, put it on us with, you know, that could be, they could have that products in the sidebar or the likes, you know, they can actually make significant revenue because the, the cost to acquire organic traffic in many niches is not super high, right? And it's similar niches where I see the potential to buy sites and I really build these better funnels that are much more profitable.
Do
Jared: you do any work to evaluate? And I'm now speaking to the audience that is appealed, is appealing, uh, or at least attracted, that's the right word, is attracted to this idea of maybe going out and targeting a site that already has traffic and then applying all your techniques. Do you do any research to determine, uh, is there a course I could buy?
Is there, you know, what are the, what type of, what types of products are already available in this, in this niche, or do you look for a good deal and then figure you'll, you'll, you'll find something some way, somehow afterwards.
Mads: Typically a mix. So we look for good deals. And then if we find good deals, we then go and look at what other offers and so on.
So again, we, we have a few things now that we can, that we know we can work with and that's okay to work with. Um, but at the same time, it's, uh, you also need the offer, right? So we, one of our best deals was, uh, was another garden site, actually not the one we originally started on, but we, we bought a garden site from, uh, in the UK.
From a fella that had, he had written 600 plus posts himself. He just loved gardening and was writing it. And suddenly he got kids and you know, he, he didn't have the time anymore. Uh, we, we sent him a cold email and we basically said, Hey, you know, we can see the site isn't updated, would it be interested in selling it?
And this was a DR65 site. So it had significant link. It had 600 plus posts. And, uh, we ended up buying the site for under a thousand pounds. Okay. And just because the guy was like, well, I haven't touched it for a few years. I have kids now, you know, if you can use it, make the best of it kind of thing. Um, so, so we found both ways, right?
So when we, when we do found a niche that's really interesting, there is potential to go and messaging people. So we basically had a very simple system where we had a VA basically go through and find sites that had a certain level of traffic and then look for sites where the blocks, for example, hadn't been updated in a certain period of time.
Right. So. You know, if a blog hadn't been updated for three years, there's probably a three years, even that's probably a good chance that their owner might consider selling. All right. Either because they give an up on it or it's just sitting there or whatever. So if you do have some good thoughts or if you could also be, you have a friend that own a particular business and you can do some kind of partnership with them and whatever.
Right. But, but, um, yeah, that there's a lot of potential. And I'll say, especially now, like so many people have really run tired in the, in the content game. And I think there's also additional protection. I mean, if you start selling your own products, if you start having products and, and making your site look less like an affiliate site, um, I don't think in today's climate that that's a bad thing.
Jared: I'm going to ask you about that. You talked about digital products, but have you ever ventured into other types of products, actually maybe white labeling a product, partnering with another brand that sells a product, building your, creating your own product? We, we,
Mads: we have, we have owned, I've owned multiple e commerce stores in the past, um, The thing is, it's a very different business model.
So we definitely, we've definitely done a fair chunk of drop shipping, but when you start doing the e com yourself, it is such a different business model. You need to have a lot of money sitting in inventory. You have to, you know, you, you, like again, having run multiple e commerce stores, like I know all the complications behind e com and it is definitely not like running a, uh, an affiliate site.
Right. It's, it's. Uh, way more complex, like there's a ton of stuff with like shipping, uh, starting by getting the products you want. Uh, nowadays, particularly if you're source in China, if you suddenly have success, what happens is that the Chinese manufacturers realize, Oh, this guy's ordering a hundred thousand units a month, let's just make a copy of it and sell it for 20 cents instead of for 20 bucks, because, you know, we know it sells.
So, so there's a lot more complications to the e commerce game and a significantly higher. Financial risk to it. So even though there's also potentially a higher gain, it is not currently my personal favorite, to be honest with you. And I would definitely much rather, I would much rather personally do drop shipping, um, probably with the exception of very, very tiny non technical products like, um, jewelry, for example, might be an exception where, where you can, you Um, you know, the, the profit margins are crazy and so on, like, but, but it's very, very few exceptions that I would consider selling as e com today.
Yeah.
Jared: If we go back to that example of the site you shared where you bought it and it was making 200 a month, fast forward, I think you said 18 months, it was making 10, 000 in that range. What was the primary driver? Were you making most of that from your digital course sales or where was that huge jump in revenue mostly attributed to
Mads: it was definitely a mix.
So we, we grew the traffic significantly, but the most important thing was because we built the funnel relatively early on and we had two relatively high cost products that people were actually buying because of that, it enabled us to invest more. That the hardest thing with, with SEO in particular affiliate is that when you have a site that's doing a hundred, 200, 500 bucks, it could be hard to go and spend five grand investment to grow.
Right. But as soon as you have a site that's growing and you're, you're making some money, It's relatively, for most people, it's easier to go and reinvest what it's already making, right? So we never ever start sites from scratch, right? And we would only buy existing sites. And we, again, we really love sites that have a lot of traffic.
And make very little money from it, because that's personally where we see the best opportunities, right? Again, if we can find models around it, that makes sense.
Jared: What, and this, we're kind of getting to the end here, so I'm going to try to start to bring this home. What specifically, in everything you've outlined, um, is most applicable to people listening who have had their traffic Decrease over the last year.
Um, and so maybe people who, for whatever reason, their site is not winning right now. They're still getting traffic, but not winning in Google's eyes. Uh, what specific advice, or maybe put a fine point on some of the specific things you talked about that would apply to someone in that situation?
Mads: I have to be honest, I have no, there's no 100%.
Right or wrong, because again, first of all, Google do change their mind, right? Left them, center, right? Like the things I would personally focus on is probably threefold. It would be find products so that you can become an affiliate and get a lot of free links. Because I just love links. Um, so that's number one.
Second thing is, we are definitely looking like any sites we work on now, we try and change the front page to be more e commerce or be more, you know, like a, like a individual coach consultant or something like that. to make it look non affiliate, right? Because, again, it's hard to evaluate how Google measures an affiliate site.
And that probably also changes over time. Uh, but, but I don't think there's any doubt that Google is not a particular fan of affiliate. The sort of, the way people used to do it. Um, so I, I, I would say trying to make things look as little affiliate as possible. Um, actually one, one of our very good friend, he, he buys old websites for physical businesses.
So a plumbing company that gone down and he basically just, you know, buy the domains, bring most of it back up and, and have a plumbing company front end. He then sell the leads at like 10 bucks a lead or something, but it's, it's very minimal, but it actually looked like a real plumbing site on the front end.
And then he basically do a ton of affiliate articles that are relevant to that niche on the backend. Um, and he have definitely had significantly less. effect of these Google updates as an example. And so again, I don't think there's a, there's not a right thing. Like I'm not telling people to go and do exactly what we are doing, but what I'm trying to do is kind of try and open people's mind a little bit.
Um, but I mean, digital products in general, uh, one of my friends, actually we, someone I met at affiliate gathering, he was selling these digital blueprints. Right. So he was selling these blueprints to his customers and so on. And, uh, one of the core things I asked him is like, have you said I run a affiliate program?
Because lots of links, lots more sales, and life is better. Right? And particularly, like, he was his own face of his brand. So, him getting credit on other people's websites is, uh, is even more powerful.
Jared: I think it's really good for everyone listening to take all this into consideration, because, you know, kind of going back to your original point, whether your traffic's increasing, whether it's decreasing, whether you're working with an existing, an existing online property, or you're looking to go out and acquire something and apply this, Like the principle to always keep in mind of maximizing the value of every visitor that comes, maximizing the value of every customer that spends, it is something that consistently gets left behind for content creators and SEOs, right?
Like it, it, the, the, the very nature of what we do can also produce the fact that we ignore some of these things. So no matter what stage your website is at, or where you're at in that, in that funnel of sorts, as we outlined today, like there's just. All these things that increase the lifetime value and the amount of revenue per visitor are going to have positive impacts on your business.
So where can people, uh, learn more about what you do, catch up with and keep track of what you're doing?
Mads: Yeah, I mean, we do lots of cool things. Uh, obviously the, we run the coolest SEO conference in the world, which is a SEO mastery summit, which is in Vietnam. And that take place next year, uh, March 10th to 14th.
And matzingers. com is a great place as well. So if you are making decent money, if you have a team or thinking of having a team, uh, I always share lots of good management stuff. Yeah, there's a ton of places, but, uh, Matzingers, I'm the only person currently in the world with that name. If you put it into any social media, you will find.
Jared: That is, that is, that is something special right there. And that, um, that conference, I mean, I've, I've attended one or two of them. It's both virtual now and in person, isn't it?
Mads: It's, uh, only in person, only in person now. Only in person. It used, it used to be virtual. Okay. But now it's only in person. I've attended the virtual ones.
Yeah.
Jared: Very good. Yep. Well good, we'll get some links in there for you, um, so people can follow along and get in touch with you. Mads. Thank you so much. Uh, and, uh, uh, you know, until I see you again next time. Appreciate it.
Mads: Thank you very much, Sharon. Awesome to have a chat.
Spencer: Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for listening to the Niche Pursuits podcast.
I just wanted to remind you that if you are ready to start building smarter, faster, and easier internal inks, sign up now. You should check out Link Whisper. You can get 15 off Link Whisper when you use the coupon code podcast at checkout, head over to link, whisper. com and use the code podcast in order to save 15.
Thanks again for listening.
Want to learn step-by-step how I built my Niche Site Empire up to a full-time income?
Yes! I Love to Learn
Learn How I Built My Niche Site Empire to a Full-time Income
- How to Pick the Right Keywords at the START, and avoid the losers
- How to Scale and Outsource 90% of the Work, Allowing Your Empire to GROW Without You
- How to Build a Site That Gets REAL TRAFFIC FROM GOOGLE (every. single. day.)
- Subscribe to the Niche Pursuits Newsletter delivered with value 3X per week
My top recommendations