Fin vs Fin
Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) Wellness Product Reviews
In January 2022 Google hit our site with a manual penalty. As a business that relies heavily on SEO, this was a heart-stopping notification to see suddenly in Search Console. In my 10+ years as a digital marketer, I've only heard horror stories, never dealt with one personally.
A manual penalty occurs when one of Google's employees -- yes, a living and breathing human being -- identifies your site as out of compliance with one or more of Google's guidelines. In our case, the error message read: "Structured data found on elements that aren't visible to the user". Google also let us know we needed to fix this site-wide.
I feverishly started researching this error and found very little online about how to solve it. While we have structured schema on our site, it wasn't clear which elements that Google was manually penalizing us for not adequately displaying them to the user.
After a bit of digging, I concluded that our review star schema must be the culprit. I worked as fast as possible to remove this schema from our site, and then penned a formal apologies to Google, letting them know our invisible schema was published in error, and that in fact we weren't trying to game search results with blackhat tactics.
Submitting our "reconsideration request" via Search Console felt like progress, but MONTHS passed without any word from our overlords. Organic search rankings didn't fall off a cliff, thank goodness, but it was clear we had been neutered in more subtle ways. For instance, our pages no longer displayed star ratings nor breadcrumbs in search results. And no matter how much content we posted, it felt like there was an arbitrary traffic ceiling placed our site. New articles could rank, but we just couldn't get traffic to grow despite investing more resources than ever.
Then, amidst the darkness, a brief beam of light. On April 21st, three full months since being sent to purgatory, Google shared an unexpected message. Our reconsideration request had been accepted, and in a matter of days, the scary red alerts in Search Console were no more. The manual penalty had finally been lifted!
Although it's too early to gauge how this will impact our business, we're hoping to see a positive impact on rankings, CTR, and ultimately revenue. Let my story be a cautionary one. For anyone experiencing a manual penalty, I hope it also offers a glimmer of hope. A manual penalty from Google is one of the scariest rollercoasters for any online business, but it doesn't necessarily spell disaster.
The Fin vs Fin portfolio / empire is growing! I found a marketplace for profitable affiliate sites called motioninvest.com and scoured deals for a few weeks before pulling the trigger to acquire two -- pupfection.com and fitnessmasterly.com. Both have been generating a trickle of revenue from amazon associates, and our plan is to:
- Polish (i.e. improve the UX with new WP themes and plugins)
- Add content (i.e. drive more high-intent organic traffic)
- Improve monetization (i.e. replace the amazon network approach with more lucrative direct partnerships)
Our biggest challenge is (and will always be) time management. Growing one site is hard enough, is it crazy to expect to make any progress with three at same time? It's not like we've somehow clones ourselves or increase the number of hours in a day. How should we split focus and investment among three distinct niches (D2C wellness, dog care, and fitness equipment) to maximize profit?
Well, if the journey this far has taught us anything, it's to embrace complexity and dive head first into the uncertainty. It may be challenging at first, but through necessity we'll eventually figure out how to be efficient.
Another way of looking at it is: we had no choice. To scale our business further, we eventually HAVE to figure out a multi-site strategy, and if the timing is never perfect anyway, why wait?
We'll see how these investments pan out, of course, but it's exciting to be expand our footprint and taking on new growth challenge nonetheless. Onward and upward!
Santa didn't forget about us this year; he merely came a day late.
Today our site was featured on Side Hustle Nation -- one of my favorite podcasts of all-time! 🙌Listen to our episode to learn how my partner and I built a modern review site from $0 to $20k/month in revenue in less than a year:
https://www.sidehustlenation.com/affiliate-marketing-case-study/
In the interview, we discuss:
- Why we initially decided to start an affiliate site in the first place
- How we come up with unique, low-competition content ideas
- How we structure content, both for robots and humans
- Ways to form lucrative, enduring relationships with brands
- Effective on-page SEO tactics to win featured snippets
- How we split our time and responsibilities as business partners
- Our #1 tip for success growing a side hustle
I hope that our story is helpful to others, and for those currently employed full-time, that 2020 be the year your side hustle blossoms into something bigger than you could've possibly imagined.
Happy new year! 🎉
As I've ranted in previous IH posts, driving organic traffic via search can be a fickle game. It's brilliantly cheap (read: free), and feels like an unexpected shot of heroin when it comes flowing in. But buckle up for the choppy seas ahead. Undoubtedly your traffic will spike and drop just as quickly, forcing you to face the reality that whatever fledgling momentum you've managed to build could come to grinding halt without notice.
So how do you steady traffic, and more importantly, grow affiliate revenue despite being at the cold, algorithmic whim of Google? Here are a couple key learnings I've picked up growing finvsfin's affiliate revenue from $0 to a (fingers-crossed) consistent $2k+/month:
- Own your niche and build a content moat
Once you notice an article starting to generate organic traffic, it's time to double down. If this is a niche you think can be profitable, start to write more about that particular topic. This signals to Google that you're passionate, and more importantly, authoritative, on the topic. My only word of caution: be careful not to publish anything that's too similar to what you've already written. It's easy to confuse Google's algos if you have two articles targeting the same keywords, or God forbid, incur a manual penalty for posting duplicate content. But so long as you're taking a new angle and trying to capture new search queries within the same niche, Google will grow more and more comfortable with ranking your pages for searches around your niche.
- Update your content regularly
Google likes fresh (i.e. relevant in real-time) content, so it rewards publishers who consistently update their articles. The edits don't have to be big, but make sure you're adding a new paragraph, updating numbers in a chart, dates in headlines/titles, or otherwise letting Googlebot know your sh*t ain't stale.
- Develop your relationships with advertisers
Once you've stabilized organic traffic within your niche by bolstering your content and committing to updating it regularly, it's time to monetize. If your strategy is to become an affiliate, then the obvious first step is to apply to your advertisers' programs and accept whatever terms they initially offer new publishers. When it comes to maximizing your affiliate commissions, you really only have two levers to pull:
- increase conversions
- or increase commissions
While I've had many small and medium-sized wins from optimizing conversions (i.e. adding popups, deeplinks, and otherwise making it easy for visitors to convert), by far the biggest wins from a revenue-growth perspective have come by developing closer relationships with affiliate program managers themselves. Rather than increasing traffic or conversions, the lowest hanging fruit is often to increase the amount you make per conversion. We've consistently been able to negotiate 2-3x CPAs with all of our top advertiser partners simply by reaching out and asking. If you already have traffic, and that traffic is translating into consistent conversions for a brand, don't be scared to renegotiate your terms (and increase revenue overnight). Seriously, don't be afraid to ask for higher CPAs! Most brands have a lot more leeway on payouts than you think, especially if you've already proven you can drive valuable traffic.
Have any questions about affiliate marketing? Want to talk shop on finding a niche, growing organic traffic, increasing conversion rate, or developing better relationships with advertisers that translate into higher CPAs?
Drop me a line! 💚
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Awesome post, thanks Alex! Super interesting to hear about your journey with organic search traffic. That was the initial approach I took with an info site I built (willthishappen.com), before also developing a Twitter bot as I found without links inwards, there was little chance I'd ever be ranked high enough.
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Inbound links are also super important! Finding a repeatable way to acquire them (not just cold outreach) is essential for SEO success.
Checked out your site and it looks awesome! Sleek design and a great concept. Keep up the great work
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Finding a repeatable way to acquire them (not just cold outreach) is essential for SEO success.
What strategies for acquiring inbound links work best for you?-
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You can grow your own backlinks by posting on medium, pinterest, reddit, quora, etc.
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Getting the brands we write about to share across their channels. This works well with customer case studies too (in a b2b context) or interviewees (for podcasts) -- basically involved your subjects and get them to share your content.
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Create a widget/tool that customers/visitors want to put on their website because doing so adds value. These can come in a lot of shapes and sizes (data feeds, infographic, badges, etc.) And of course they should like back to your site.
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Brilliant idea & execution dude. Great job👍
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This is good stuff. Analysis of your domain says 49 keywords rank in position 1 to 3. That too in 4 months. 👏
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Cheers! Hope we can keep the momentum going :)
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Thanks for the interesting post!
For # 2 you can leverage user-generated content to keep your page updated. For example, I develop a comment system which is normally indexed well by google so when your users leave a comment it becomes visible to Google. Check it out here https://www.indiehackers.com/product/justcomments
As an example, this query finds a page on my site by the content in the comments https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A60devs.com+"Don't+modify+this.state.items+directly"&oq=site%3A60devs.com+"Don't+modify+this.state.items+directly"&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.2939j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
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Thanks for the rec! Looks like an awesome tool. Have always wanted to index comments.
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Solid thoughts. Healthcare & wellness is a very difficult niche to find SEO success in: congrats! It's also one of the most lucrative, so it sounds like things are going well.
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Wow, congrats on your success so far. Looks like you've cracked the code for affiliate marketing!
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How did you start building your initial organic traffic, from when you initially had 0 visitors a month and no domain authority?
Was it as simple as writing topics that targeting low competition long tail keywords? Can you share your strategy that helped you take off in the beginning?
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Love the design. What theme are you using?
Also, are you writing all the content yourself or have you found some success outsourcing?
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For design, I build on wordpress pages using elementor. Super easy to create attractive layouts :)
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Re: content creation, I initially wrote everything myself. Then I found a team of interns. Now I reinvest a percentage of earnings into a team of professional writers.
Still figuring out the right way to ramp our content engine efficiently, but also writing on the side. What I've found is that in order to rank in the top 5, you need to produce the BEST piece of content on the internet for a given keyword, which is hard to fid someone to do for <$300/article.
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Thank you for sharing your experiences!
Can you tell more about the template used for your articles, e.g. content length, keyword density, ... Anything we can learn from you? How do you find interesting topics? I have so many questions.-
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Honestly, the biggest thing when writing content is to put yourself in the shoes of your readers. What questions do they have about your topic? What do they absolutely NEED to know in order to make a decision by the end of your post? How can you help them digest the information faster?
As for length, Google definitely rewards long-form, dense content. But if it's too dry or visually un-stimulating, then readers will bounce quickly and that's a very negative signal. Keep in mind 60%+ of search traffic is mobile, so make the experience great there FIRST.
When it comes to finding interesting topics, it's all about keyword research. The three dimensions I look at are:
- monthly volume (i.e. are there enough people searching to make it worth writing?)
- competition (i.e. is it even possible to rank for this term given existing content online?)
- relevancy (i.e. Is there intent behind the search that strongly suggests the searcher is a good prospect for your business -- or the advertiser's you're trying to promote?)
Hope that helps!
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What kind of tools do you use for searching for new keywords and evaluating them?
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Everyone asks about tools :)
Currently I don't use anything fancy. I've tried tools like ahrefs, moz, and SEMrush at corporate jobs, and while they are helpful, I don't find them worth paying for.
For relative search volumes, I use Google's keyword planner. For finding keywords related to what I've already written about / rank for, keywordshitter.com has been sufficient, but a tool like clearscope.io is ideal.
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Maybe I should have asked more about your process.
For me, finding ideas for content is for really tough. I already wrote a few pieces which got zero organic traction.I would love to get better at evaluating topics before writing the content for it.
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Ask your customers / prospects what they search for (or what questions they ask) just before they are going to buy, or as they start to investigate solutions like yours. Find a keyword that encompasses that and has 100 or more searches per month.
Then type that keyword into Google and see what ranks. Are there really strong articles from authoritative websites? If you don't see a single SERP in the top 10 that you can realistically overtake, skip it and evaluate the next keyword opportunity. By "overtake", I mean, get a higher CTR than the link in a given position. (Assume you'll never beat a .gov, .edu, or an established business' homepage.
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When you focus on growth and achieve a consistent level of revenue, it's hard to imagine your business ever slowing down. After slaving away to build a predictable foundation for your fledgling hustle, how could the floor ever fall out so long as you continue to toil?
Well, I'm here to tell you: it can. Imagine my shock upon logging in to google analytics one morning to discover my site's average traffic mysteriously dropped from 200 organic visitors per day to 0.
Initially I brushed it off as a reporting error. When the disturbing trend continued, I reasoned that it must be a momentary blip that would sort itself out soon. By the third day, I was in a full-fledged panic. My business appeared murdered in the crib, long before it ever got a chance to walk or run.
In hindsight that was the moment it all clicked for me: relying purely on traffic/revenue from organic search is an inherently precarious position. Google's algorithms change all the time. Competing sites produce new content that might outrank yours. Search volumes for your best keywords can always decline.
As I dove deeper into analytics to diagnose my woes, I noticed a massive uptick in direct traffic at the exact same moment as the drop in organic visitors. Exactly 500 visits to one article per day for three days straight. All exhibiting 0 minutes spent on page and a 100% bounce rate. These visits were distributed evenly throughout the day and evenly across 5 cities. The consistency was too uniform to be real-human visitors, so I concluded it had to be from a bot. And given the timing, the bloody thing must also be to blame for tanking my rankings!
I racked my brain, contacted everyone in my network with SEO chops, and scoured the web for answers. Could a stupid bot really have depleted my domain authority over night? How could I take the bot down? Did Google manually penalize my site for a third party's unkosher (i.e. spammy / automated) tactics? Would my site ever recover?
6 days passed with still no solution in sight. I was beginning to come to terms with the fact that we'd probably never regain organic traffic. We'd had a good run, but the party was over. I started to write my site's obit on failory.com when suddenly...
... organic traffic was back. Without explanation and strong as ever! OMFG HALLELUJAH!!
In Search Console, Google displayed a note about a server outage that created a known reporting error, which impacted rankings across thousands of sites -- finvsfin.com included. It felt like we had been brought back to life, Jon Snow from Game of Thrones style.
I'm happy to report that our organic traffic has steadily increased ever since. The site fully regained its footing on Google, but with the decline still so fresh, I can't help but think about diversifying traffic sources. I've started investing more in referrals and started to test paid ads. While SEO is cheap, it's highly unpredictable. "Easy come, easy go", as they say.
I hope my experience helps you question your own sources of traffic and the risk you run with over-relying on a single channel. And if you ever need help diagnosing a sharp drop in traffic, don't hesitate to reach out.
#fyi
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interesting post and good advice re: diversifying, thanks 🙂
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Thanks, man! Cheers
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Thanks for sharing buddy. We shouldn't put all our eggs into one basket is what I took away from this.
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NP! That's the message I was trying to share :) Thanks for reading
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Valuable lesson. I was on the edge of my seat!
Six months after we both left the startup where we met, my former boss suggested we take up a side project together. No, he didn't want to raise money from top VCs and change the world with another hyper-growth unicorn. He wasn't even looking for a way out of his new day job. It might just be cool, he thought, to leverage our digital marketing skills and collaborate on something that might eventually generate a bit of passive income.
I agreed it sounded like a fun way to keep in touch, so we began to brainstorm.
With backgrounds in early-stage fintech startups, we knew there were SEO opportunities in the SMB 401(k) space. So rather uncreatively, we decided to spin up a content site for B2B fintech product reviews. I purchased the domain name finvsfin.com -- short for "fintech vs fintech" -- for $9.99 per year and launched a simple wordpress site. I hired a designer on fiverr for $30 to create a logo, and asked my ex-boss / current-partner to get busy writing reviews. We went live in just a few weeks.
After publishing four or five articles, we realized that B2B fintech companies don't generally offer affiliate programs. We could try to monetize by manually brokering cost-per-lead deals with local financial advisors, but that sounded like more effort than it was worth given such minimal traffic. Expanding into B2C fintech products was a natural next step, but we noticed SEO for the most popular investment and payment apps was prohibitively competitive.
We toyed with starting from scratch and picking a new niche, or just scrapping the project altogether. Ultimately we chose to rebrand. From a content perspective, our focus had been on helping consumers find products that improve financial health. Now we would cover wellness in general, not merely of the financial variety. Removing this arbitrary restriction freed us to review a much more diverse set of products and unlock a lot more traffic.
As it turned out, the decision to cover more than just fintech (despite our domain name, logo, and initial vision) is what kept the project alive. Lack of traction kills motivation, so I believe it was only a matter of time before we would have ditched the project had we not found a way to grow traffic in a repeatable way.
As we had hoped, the flood of direct-to-consumer wellness products on the market continues to present a large opportunity. Consumers are curious how new products stack up -- both to other new offerings and the traditional brands they grew up with. So we began to write articles on an extremely diverse set of products including subscriptions to hair loss treatments, personalized vitamins, organic tampons, fresh dog food, and a whole lot more.
It's been fun to see our articles rank and attract visitors. But I'll tell you one thing: nothing compares to seeing our first $10 in commission. I immediately texted my partner in ALL CAPS to let him know. Ultimately it provided the fuel we needed to keep going. If you break down our total earnings at that moment into an hourly wage, it surely would be fractions of a penny. But man was I proud! We had validated a model, and it felt like we were on to something.
Over the next couple of months with a lot of dedicated effort, we watched our traffic build further, and the affiliate commissions followed almost linearly.
We've continued to publish quality comparison content at an aggressive pace and have since grown affiliate commissions to around $600/month. Our next major milestone is $1k, although I don't think it will be nearly as exciting as our first $10 :)
If you're looking to start an affiliate site of your own from 0 to your first $10 in commission and beyond, don't hesitate to reach out,
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That's awesome! Cheers! I plan on doing something similar, but even more niche specific.
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Nice!
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Amazing, sounds like you have a lot of passion for the project!
Nothing can beat going from absolutely nothing to something. Keep it up.
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Thanks! It's been a blast despite being so small potatoes :)
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