Seeing Success with Side Projects - Luke Jordan

A rough blueprint for growing a successful niche site, whether you're going solo in your spare time or if you're an agency looking for a new revenue stream.

Presented at DRINK :// Digital on 26 May 2022

https://twitter.com/lr_jordan

Transcript

1. Seeing Success with Side Projects something something niche sites and other useful tidbits
2. new speaker, who dis?
3. The crazy world of casinos
4. Advantage play means you have a long-term edge.
5. To know whether you have a long-term edge, you need to understand Expected Value (EV).
6. I used to have a casino slot simulation tool to calculate EV of specific bonuses. Deposit: £200 Spin size: £5 EV: £52 Bust Rate: 93%
7. Short-term, we have a very high (93%) chance of losing. Long-term, we should be in profit.
8. If I bet you £10 that I land a coin on heads, but you only pay me £5 if it lands on tails, do you take that bet?
9. If we flip the coin 100 times, you should be up £250. The EV of each coin flip is therefore +£2.50 for you (and -£2.50 for me).
10. On my casino example, I had a high chance of losing £200, but if I could do the same offer 100 times, I should be up 100 x £52 EV = £5,200.
11. Why have I just wasted 2 minutes of your life talking like a degenerate gambler?
12. To build a successful niche site, you have to invest time at a minimum. For 99% of people, that time isn’t going to pay-off in the first 12 months.
13. …but if you find a good niche, the EV of building a niche site is highly positive.
14. In the world of advantage play, I used to speak a lot about “taking EV”. Taking EV is like delayed gratification. The more EV you take now, the greater your long- term pay-off will be.
15. You could put your time into work and get a promotion, paying £10k/y extra. In a year, you’re up £10k. On a niche site, you might have earned next to nothing in your first year.
16. But after 2 years, you might be earning £2k p/m from your niche site. A site making this amount consistently would be worth ~£90k in the current market.
17. The EV of publishing a single article might be very low, but it adds up once you’ve reached 100 articles published.
18. EV applies in life too. How many extra days will you live if you do a workout today? The EV of a single workout is very small.
19. I might bust my casino offer, you might fail in your niche site, and we might get ran over by a lorry on the way home from the gym. But all of our decisions were +EV and should pay off long-term.
20. A blueprint for building a successful niche site
22. A niche site is a website of close-to-100% informational content (in my opinion) and you make money from the content itself. They’re typically monetised with affiliate links and display advertising, but you have other options too.
24. What is an example of a good niche?
25. A good niche is something that: - Allows you to write at least 50 articles about a single topic (preferably more) - Gives you similar related topics to write about in future - Has an audience of people with money; US-based adults is the go-to target - Will be unlikely to be the target of future algorithm updates - Is not competitive
26. A low competition niche is a potential goldmine - keep it secret if you find one.
27. I’ll gladly teach you how to mine gold. I’ll occasionally share how much gold my team mined. But I don’t want to hand you the keys to my mine because finders keepers.
28. The truth about niche site Twitter…
30. This game is 50% niche selection and 50% consistent output.
31. It’s not enough to write 5 articles, give up for 18 months and cash in your profits afterwards. You (likely) won’t rank.
32. Most people start by writing 1-2 posts per week themselves. The most successful people in this space do this every week, every month, and have 50- 100 articles live at the end of their first year.
33. Every article focuses on extremely low difficulty keywords (usually no competition).
34. I used to have keyword research all wrong.
35. All you need (as a minimum) for a successful niche site is: - A good niche with lots of low competition keywords - A fast website - High quality, optimised content
36. My friend’s site is up for sale for $800,000. He targets keywords with a maximum Ahrefs KD score of THREE! (but does have over 1,000 articles)
37. To get the best long-term results, I believe you need to aim for more.
39. There are levels to this game.
42. But there are also levels within levels. Some sites publish 50 posts per year. Some publish 5,000.
43. My one site currently has around 15 writers, mostly part-time, and 2 video content creators.
44. Most sites don’t need 15 writers.
45. Our current aim is to have 125 posts going live per month. For most niche site operators, 125 posts going live per month would happen across a portfolio of 4-5 websites.
46. The difficulty of publishing 125 posts across 1 site vs 4-5 sites is pretty similar. Having 4-5 sites is also lower risk and you sound cooler when you say you own a portfolio.
47. But the difficulty in scaling and turning 4-5 sites into real brands compared to 1 is night and day. And day is still hard.
48. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket… …but the first step is to get eggs.
49. It’s totally fine to work on one website and to only publish once per week.
50. To get started with a niche site, you need to: - Research to find a niche with a lot of potential - Look at other niche sites - go to sites like Investors Club to find real sites for sale and see what they did - Buy a domain name that doesn’t limit your potential - Get a basic site live and start writing and publishing articles consistently
51. The EV of an article
52. On a new site? No idea.
53. If you have an existing site, you can roughly calculate the EV of writing an article - or paying for articles to be written.
54. 50 articles on subject X, <5 KD, 150,000 views per month, $3,000 at $20 RPM. 50 more similar articles. Cost $150 per article = $7,500.
55. 12 months to rank 2 year profit = $28,500 ($570 per article) $3,000 per month extra = +$120,000 on site valuation $120,000 / 50 articles = $2,400 per article EV per article = ???lots???
56. bye