This is a cool strategy that I stumbled upon a few years ago.
Why is it cool? Cause I put 550$ into a site that’s now making 300-500$ each month almost passively.
Sounds too good to be true? Well it is 🙂 But here’s the strategy anyways:
How I Found the Strategy
When doing outreach for my first site, I started to realise that every blogger and their dog is asking money in exchange for a link on their site.
I read Brian Dean’s stuff on link building and thought that people will just link to really good content. I spent two and a half weeks crafting a really long article, then paid 250$ to a designer on Upwork to make me a cool infographic to go with the article.
Everything seemed great until I started to do outreach only to realise that 90% of the people that respond, don’t give a flying f about my article and just want money.
1000 outreach e-mails later, I decided that it might be easier to make money by doing what everyone else is doing. Just buy a site with some decent DR/DA metrics, put some basic content on it.. craft a “write for us” page and start looking for link-hungry SEO-s to find me.
I found a site from what is now called ODYS that was for sale for 380$. It was a site in an obscure niche, but it was related to finance, which got me interested. I put 10 random personal finance articles on it that I ordered from iWriter. I paid 13$ per article.
About 2-3 months after I’d uploaded the articles and had actually forgot about the idea, guest post pitches started to suddenly roll in. I started to get 2-3 e-mails per day to which I first responded by asking 100$ for a guest post. Almost no one took that offer so I had to lower my price.
I found a sweet spot at 30-40$ per guest post or link insert. Made a few template answers on gmail and started to earn 100-150$ a month.
It wasn’t passive, but it was awesome to find e-mails in my inbox asking for a guest post. I knew that 20% of them would end up paying.
After a little while I manage to get a few regular buyers (some agencies and link sellers) who kept on buying. At some point I started to earn a stable 400-500 each month. I then decided to outsource the whole site to my VA.
She now checks all the e-mails, responds, negotiates and uploads the articles. She gets 20% of whatever I make at the end of each month. I now make 20% less, but do absolutely nothing myself, still netting 350-400 each month.
EXAMPLE:
This is just one example of a templated response that I got today. The webmaster has a site that’s DR 31 and is getting a little over 1K monthly organic traffic. Sites that are DR 30+ are sold starting from 500$ on ODYS or other marketplaces.
Getting to 1K$ organic traffic is a bit trickier, but the site I have only has 50 organic traffic according to ahrefs, so it’s not a dealbreaker.
They are asking for 150$ for a GP. I managed to negotiate it down to 60$.
Why Not Expand?
I think that this strategy won’t work long term. It’s a good way to make some additional income, but over time, the site is going to be filled with shitty links and articles.
I’m guessing that people are not going to keep on buying links on the site if they see that all other articles are random guest posts to various topics.
My goal is to be able to depend on my website’s income to be able to quit my full time gig, but I’m too conservative to be willing to depend on this kind of strategy.
With affiliate niche sites I’m making, I’m trying to build them in a way that provides value to the visitors and that would be around in 5-10 years as well. By trying my best to add value, I’m hoping to make the sites (and my income) grow with age.
When doing outreach, I’ve seen a fair share of webmasters that respond with asking for money and saying that they have another 50 sites or so. I’m guessing these people are making a killing with their link farms. One VA can probably handle all 50 websites and you could make more than 500 per site, if you’re smart about it.