How the Alleys make $2k MRR with no product, no service, and no technical expertise

The Deep Dive: Harrison and Jasmine Alley of JasmineAlley.com

It's your typical love story. Boy meets girl in college. Boy and girl graduate and get married. Boy uses his knowledge of marketing and girl's love of travel photography to create a $2k MRR website.

Okay, well, maybe this is just an Indie Hackers kind of love story.

But it's real life for Harrison and Jasmine Alley who run Jasminealley.com - a travel, photography, and lifestyle website with 100K monthly views that is making $2k MRR.

But life wasn't always rosy for the young couple. Upon finishing college at University of Southern California, Harrison Alley found himself sitting on over $70,000 worth of student loans. To pay it down, Harrison got a job in real estate finance (not exactly his passion) and spent his down time launching side projects in the hopes of becoming a full-time founder.

None of his early ideas gained any traction, but his failures did teach him a lot about managing and marketing content using social media.

Jasmine brought different skills to their business. She had a Neuroscience degree, but discovered her true passions were travel and photography while in college. To practice her skills, Jasmine ran an Instagram on the side that focused on travel and photography. Once the two decided to team up - each focusing on their strengths - Jasmine's account was going viral on a regularly basis.

Before long Jasmine was getting sponsorship deals with companies like Mane & Tail and Southwest Airlines - and Harrison saw an opportunity for more. The couple agreed that with Jasmine's photography and travel knowledge, and Harrison's knowledge of SEO and no-code site building, they could not only create a good website, but make a living off of it.

So in 2017, they launched JasmineAlley.com!

Neither of the team had any coding experience, so the site was built with Wordpress plus Elementor's Hello Theme to host the site. Other than that, they keep track of performance using Google Analytics, Search Console, Tailwind, Bluehost, and WP Engine and leverage Instagram and Pinterest to further drive traffic.

To get started, Harrison handled keyword research and Jasmine crafted blogs post around the search terms they were likely to rank for.

Like all content campaigns, progress was slow at first, and it took time to build up a following - most SEO and content campaigns take six months at minimum before the results start rolling in. The fact that they had no product to push also slowed things down; all they had was content, so they had to make that content work.

Their revenue stream starts with Instagram sponsorships, where Jasmine earned a solid five figures in brand promotion in 2019 and 2020. But Harrison wasn't happy with that alone, because that type of income is so inconsistent and doesn't scale well due to social media's inherent unpredictability. He wanted to see what else they could do to create a steady, stable income stream.

When they hit 100,000 monthly page views in October 2020, they were accepted into an exclusive ad network called Ad Thrive, which pays content creators around $20 for every 1k views. As long as their growth increases, Jasmine and Harrison note, their MRR should be more stable.

Because ad networks typically pay higher revenue per mille (RPM, meaning revenue per thousand page views) around the American holiday season, they've gotten a nice boost in the past few months as well.

"I recommend display advertising with a premium ad network like Mediavine or Ad Thrive to anyone with a relatively high-traffic blog. I think it's a great way to monetize your content especially as you think of a product or service to offer your audience."

Despite their arduous journey, Jasmine and Harrison have been building in public since the start. Reports on monthly web traffic and ad income are always shared on the blog's income report page.

By mid-2019, Harrison's loans were fully paid off. This gave Jasmine the chance to quit her day job and work on the website full time.

Of course, COVID-19 put a damper on pretty much all things traveling, but working from home gave Harrison a chance to truly dig into optimizing the site's SEO. Since people are planning their dream trips for post-COVID, they're expecting a huge traffic boom in 2021.

The couple is now seeing better results than ever which means they have a new goal: full-time. Jasmine is already there, and they are both hoping Harrison can join her soon! Their other goal is to create a product to sell using their existing content audience.

We asked Harrison what advice he had for others interested in launching a content machine, and he had plenty to say:

1. You don't need a product or service, startup capital, employees, office space, or even to form a legal business entity to start a business. If you have an audience, the rest can follow.

2. Most people put a lot of artificial constraints on entrepreneurship I.e needing to be able to code, investing a lot of money in your startup, or even have a product or service to sell. But with a blog, you can simply start writing great content that serves what people are already searching in search engines. And if you do enough of that, you can make money from advertising.

"Fellow Indie Hacker @jdnoc describes a similar philosophy in his tweet: "Obsessed with this idea: Pick a niche I'm interested in. Write/study daily about the topic. Write 100 articles in a year. Get SEO traffic. Build email list. Ask them what they want and build it. Sell products (physical or digital). Start fresh with a new niche next year.""

3. SEO is hard. Jasmine and Harrison had to write at least 100 SEO-optimized posts for low competition keywords before they got any traction. Harrison estimates it took them at least one year from the date of publishing the 100th post to see any material search engine traffic.

4. You can go viral, but it's never guaranteed, so prepare to wait

And here's the duo's media recommendations:

• Tim Ferriss' Four Hour Workweek
• Peter Thiel's Zero to One
• Pieter Levels' Make: The Bootstrapper Handbook
• Naval Ravikant's blog post about how to build wealth
• John Lee Dumas Entrepreneurs on Fire podcast

Harrison also notes that Jasmine has followed all of his advice and has seen great results... unlike Harrison himself.

"If I could do it all over again, I would have put all my part-time focus outside of my day job into Jasmine's brand instead of trying to build a bunch of other brands too."

Interested in learning more? Other than their website, you can see Harrison's Twitter or join their Email list.

"I'm happy to answer any questions about my journey or what I've learned in the comments!"