The unique pleasure of digital marketing is the opportunity to be creative and entrepreneurial with something that is of personal interest. Each project is a bit of fun. They offer new challenges, and opportunities to learn while earning some pocket money on the side.
From the perspective of marketing, having full control over a website/project provides more room to experiment, take risks, make silly mistakes and learn from them. Some of the most brilliant SEO link-building & PR+OJECT ideas we’ve come up with have grown from 10 years of fertilising them.
This particular project is one that has been on the books for a number of years and has taken on many forms. It was at first a website to sell a high-end Spanish food product, then an informational blog with Amazon affiliate links, and back to a semi-drop ship model that ticks along in the background, usually spiking during periods of seasonal interest. To this day, it is ranked very well in its niche (quite small, but high value).
Starting something from nothing…
This project is not a great link-building case study. Why? Because it didn’t need many links to rise to the top of the niche. If the website required more, it would be published here as an example of a very challenging niche to get links in (thankfully, Sam speaks Spanish well and managed to muddle through). Instead, it represents how a well-planned SEO strategy can be; but also, how a real business can be built from the seedlings of traffic flowing from Google.
We started with a website and an interest in this product category; predominantly a fun way to learn about the products, get some free samples where we could, and see if we can’t do something interesting.
Have we turned this into a real business? Not yet.
The reason (we tell ourselves, anyway) is down to the considerable cost and time investment that is required to make this a lasting brand in its industry. The product itself is bulky, perishable and difficult to store (shipping and fulfilment is a nightmare), sourcing a supplier and applying for importation rights is a time/ money sink, and the industry is customer service intensive. There is a huge opportunity here, but we found our time better spent elsewhere, so this remained a nice little earner of pocket money.
The great thing about this project is that it is almost completely risk-free; the overheads are in the pennies, the time investment has already been spent and the profit is within the hundreds of percentile (albeit, still pocket money). So, currently, it’s working for us as a source of passive income that supports us while investing our time growing other projects in other niches.
We’ve started several businesses (real businesses) this way, so the strategy works.
How this (tiny) empire was grown.
The website is an e-commerce shop using WordPress, with 5 or 6 key product lead landing pages that focus on the top buyer intent keywords within the niche. We decided it was a waste of time to write lots of top-of-the-funnel content, so, instead, we focused on connecting those who’d like to buy the product, with the product itself. We’d tweak and refine from there (everything is downstream from leads after all).
Usually, when working with clients, an SEO agency will spend time writing content for high-traffic related search terms to pad their reporting (lovely green arrows), but the conversion from those keywords (even with Facebook retargeting) was minimal within this niche (the value of the product, specialised nature of it etc… required a different approach for us). We simply focused on which rankings offered the most value for our time.
We combined on-page SEO with a tiny bit of niche link-building. The strategies we employed:
- Broken link building (writing content to fulfil broken links – then adding internal links to key pages).
- Social media links & recommendations (interest, Reddit, that kind of thing)
- Food & drink website outreach (landed one or two lucky links from big websites in the food and drink niche).
NB: because this was an affiliate/ drop shipping website, we didn’t have some of the tactics we’d usually employ. Any kind of PR, collaborations, reviews etc.. were limited.
Once we earned the top rankings, other than maintenance work, we did not touch it and allowed the website to tick away.
For the time we invested in the project, it has delivered some fantastic returns and works well for us.
This helped us understand that a website only needs a few links, a targeted link-building strategy and some on-page SEO to get some serious results. Those results could last for years without any more effort.
When working for clients, we now take this very targeted approach. We will see what possible value we can offer within a sharp and focused section of their industry. Whether it’s a start-up, new service, or established service in a very competitive search environment. We have worked previously with a financial service provider who offered a key niche service within the larger financial sector and delivered huge results without spending too much time spinning wheels.
The bit with numbers.
As can be seen below, the website’s traffic volume is fairly low, and the traffic peaks over the Christmas period. The average monthly traffic is between 2500 and 3000 users, and the conversion makes 2 or 3 sales per day with an average order value of £45.
The revenue sits between an average of £1000- £2000 per month, and just under £10,000 during this year’s peak seasons (Christmas 2024).
The website itself is not pretty. It does the job, and has returned our investment month on month, but there is no way to deny it needs some love. We’re only scratching the surface with this project, and only in the past 2 or 3 months started implementing our learning from other (much more successful business projects).
We know that implementing some email marketing strategies, customer retention & branding improvements will pay off.
The true value that this project offers us is a seedling of a business, where we can accurately assess the value of marketing ideas, and refine processes for marketing funnels. This helps us apply ideas within somewhat of a sandbox.
What is the plan for the future?
We love the adventure as much as the destination, so for the moment, this project will continue to be a test subject for ideas before we roll them out to clients. It’s a constant fountain of learning in an industry that has huge potential.
It is proof that something can indeed be created from nothing.
