Luke Jordan is today’s guest on the Niche Pursuits podcast. He shares his website story, which could also be labeled a website drama!
Luke first started dabbling with website building when he was a teenager, creating an AdSense site when he was just 15 years old. After leaving school, he started his first job in the SEO industry and moved fully into website building a few years later.
Today, he has a popular website that has just hit a million visitors in a month. The website also earned $42,000 in one month, just a few months ago. However, don’t be fooled into thinking that this was a smooth journey because nothing could be further from the truth.
His website has seen many ups and downs and almost complete failure. For example, less than 12 months ago, his website traffic dropped by 80% after a Google Algorithm update.
Luke has had to overcome many problems to get the success he has today. During the interview, he shares his thoughts and strategies for overcoming these hurdles and elaborates on how he took the site from rock bottom to the giddy heights of one million monthly visitors.
He talks about the risky decisions he made to save the site, the re-design decisions, and the new writing process he made to improve the quality of the content.
The podcast interview offers many pearls of wisdom for website builders, but the core message is about going all-in on a site when your website takes a hit and looks doomed for failure.
Most people give up after being hit by Google, but Luke fought back, never gave up, learned from his mistakes, and today, he shares the story of how he did it.
Some of the other topics discussed during the interview include:
Watch the full interview:
Read the full transcription:
Jared: Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman, and today we are joined by Luke Jordan, Luke. Welcome on.
Luke: Hi, thanks for having me.
Jared: Yeah. Yeah. Glad you’re here. So we’ve got it. We’ve got a good one here and we’re going to be talking about, well, obviously your backstory is a website builder, but I think, you know, where we’ll probably land for a significant portion of the conversation is this website that you’ve been all in on for the last, you know, year or so, but before we kind of tackle that, give us some background on your journey into website building.
Luke: Yeah, sure. I mean, before we get started, I’ve tweeted out like a month or two ago and said like, what’s the Joe Rogan podcast of SEO and people definitely replied saying niche pursuits. So it was good to get to be a, oh
Jared: well that’s wonderful, man. I never heard it referred to that way before, but that’s a shining compliment.
Yeah.
Luke: Doing well. So yeah, I’m one of those people. That probably aren’t like a lot of people that you have in the show, I’d imagine, because from what I’ve heard, there’s people that tend to like randomly fall into making sites and doing that sort of stuff. And I guess it’s kind of similar for me, but I’ve been making websites, not that I’m a web designer or a developer or anything, but just playing around with websites and stuff, as long as I can remember, even like when I was like 10 or 11, like as a real young kid, just churning out like really simple websites or like I learned to code HTML on Neopets playing with my cousin, which is some crappy kid’s game.
But then like, you know, I didn’t go to university. I just went straight into employment. And my first job was like, SEO. I didn’t have, I didn’t have a clue what it was at the time, but it was kind of like the full range of. Uploading products to a website merchandising and photography, writing blog posts, writing, press releases, doing the email marketing, answering the phone.
Like it was everything and link building as well, mainly. Wow. How long ago was that? So that was like 12 years ago. 11 years ago. Something like that. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe 11 years ago. It looked a little
Jared: bit different back then.
Luke: Yeah. Yeah. So I’m always like our resident, Google penguin expert. Definitely not an expert, but I remember we got hit by penguin on the site that I worked on and I started telling all the bosses that we’ve been here and they were just like, no, we haven’t.
It’s fine. I’m the only person that works on this site. We’ve definitely been hit by something. They’re like, no, it looks fine to me. And I’m like, I see these grafts every day. Well, yeah. What you’re talking about and
Jared: then updated. Definitely doesn’t look
Luke: fine. Yeah. I don’t know if it was like six months later or a year later or whatever, the main website of that company got hit.
And then they came to me and they were like, oh yeah, you know that thing that you said all those months ago, like, can you help us now? But yeah, I’ve been through a lot of changes in the industry and many failures, everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. That’s encouraging
Jared: though. Cause you’ve seen so much at this point.
Luke: Yeah. I’d like to think so. Certainly not as much as some people, but for the average like SEO person, like five years in the industry or whatever, I’ve probably seen a little bit more, but probably not quite as smart as well. So are you
Jared: still working for others or are you on your, or are you on your own right now?
That was a mouthful. Yeah.
Luke: I’ve been on my own for about five years. Okay. Yeah. So that first job was, in-house obviously like an in-house SEO role. And then I went and did agency and started up a small site while I was in the agency that ended up. Going really well. And like, some people still follow me for the random stuff that I used to share on there.
And I ended up selling that site like two weeks before a COVID lockdown, which is like the first time I ever feel like I’ve had real look in business, like, cause it was like, it was about sports or like related to sports. So like then all sport got canceled and stuff. So I feel obviously I felt a bit guilty for the buyers, but I mean, it was just pure chance I was
Jared: getting, I didn’t know that all sports were going to be canceled your plus or whatever.
Yeah, exactly. Well, hopefully there’s a start to rebound and congratulations on the exit. That’s great.
Luke: Well, thank you.
Jared: Yeah. Did you, I guess, w when did you get the idea to start building websites on your own? You know, I mean, you talked about how. I don’t know if you said like five years ago or something like you’ve been on your own for about five years, but when did site building become the thing?
And I guess the second question there would be you have this history of agency and of doing SEO for companies. Like, did you ever consider going down that
Luke: route instead? Just to go to the second one first, do you mean like, have I considered having clients to myself? Yeah. Like
Jared: client work or working for another agency or things like
Luke: that.
Bits of client work, but it’s certainly not for quite a long time as for like getting into star insights. I don’t really remember an exact time because it has genuinely been something I’ve always done. I’ve always just played around with stuff. I remember. The first, like real site, I remember was like an ad sense site.
When I found out what ad sense was when I was like 10 or midnight, maybe like 15 or something. And I just posted a bulletin on my space and said, can like, can you all just click on the adverts on this site? And they all clicked on it. And I got like 90 pounds and then got banned on the same day. And I was like, oh wow.
I was like, well, I tried complaining to them. Like I haven’t been getting everyone to click it. Well, obviously, yeah. The click through rate was like 500% or something because everyone was clicking modes. But when I got that job in-house it was like a technology company. I’ve just kind of always been someone that’s like all in, on effort than I do.
So I’m like, I’m working for a technology company. I was like, oh, I should start a technology blog. That would be fun. And like put a technology blog up. And I started a YouTube channel that was like around phones and stuff. And like, I remember putting blog posts up. That was like the best phone cases for this new phone that was coming out, like the next.
And it happened to rank number one in Google for like best. I think it was called the HTC one, I think was the phone. So it’s like best HTC, one case I ranked number one on release day and I made like $300 or something on Amazon. And then like two days later I didn’t rank for it. And I just gave up, I was like, oh, it’s never going to be $300 again.
And that was that. Yeah, that was that. And then there’s kind of a few years of repeat in that same thing of seeing initial signs of success and not following it through or not like putting my foot down on the accelerator. I always say there’s always distractions or always just, ah, maybe I flipped it, but yeah, never really a set time where like I was like, oh, niche sites, this is something I should get into.
I just remember hearing about people doing niche. And I was like, oh, that’s what I do. And I already do that. Yeah,
Jared: yeah, exactly. Someone finally named it. Yeah. Well, your success with the site you sold, I guess what let’s see, that would be early 2020 then, you know what kind of, we don’t need any exact numbers.
I mean, but like what kind of exit was it? Was it, was it a pretty small one or was it one that they gave you a lot of lifts for future
Luke: projects? It was low six figures. That’s like what I share, not mindblowing amounts of money, but at the same time, it was more than enough to keep me comfortable, like pay me a wage for however many years.
I don’t know. And I think the main thing it gave me was time to work out what I wanted to do. And I didn’t really realize it at the time. That’s what it was given me. But there was certainly a lot of trying out different things and seeing what was right for me. I spent time trying to grow a YouTube channel and I spent time by anger or the sites.
And I started. Quite a lot of success, short term on buying sites for the people, optimizing them and just seeing the money, like go up a lot the next month. But unfortunately that was like two or three months before the Google reviews update or the officially released because I stick to that belief that it didn’t release when they say it released, which was something like April of 2020.
And I believe it released April 20, 21, I believe, or at least December, 2020, because that’s when I saw all of my Amazon sites go down. And it’s when I saw a number of other Amazon sites.
Jared: It was quite the weird year of updates. I’m just going to jump in there because I know from my site, they had the summer updates, right?
Wasn’t it, June and July, they announced both updates at the same time. They said we’re releasing one den. We’re coming back with another one. I don’t remember the reasoning why they did two back to back and I saw minimal.
Luke: Yeah, it was the core of it wasn’t and they were like, oh, actually, we’re going to do half of it in June and half of it. And
Jared: just, we’ll just do half now and half I’m like, well, why? Okay. Well, neither did much to either me or any of my competitors. And then I think it was like a month later in August, all of a sudden under nine counts, all of our sites went up or went down and it was just so bizarre, such a bizarre year of a lot of updates, announced updates that didn’t do much unannounced updates that did a lot.
I announced updates that did a lot of,
Luke: yeah, it was crazy. And there was a, it was a good year for me, related to updates, which was. Real relief. After many years of just every update, just pounded me into oblivion. So
Jared: you’ve been doing SEO long enough. And I started getting into SEO when this was still the case, when it was, if you were building sites, we’ll call it white hat.
You know, like you, weren’t using dodgy link building or spam or, you know, or, you know, spin article spinning. If you weren’t doing these things like updates never really affected you. Right? Like that was how it used to be. And nowadays it doesn’t even matter. Like your site it’ll go up 20%, go down 40%.
It’s so much more intricate now in the last couple of years, these, these site updates. And even if you’re building everything right, you could still very likely to get knocked by an update or two during the sites lifetime.
Luke: Yes. Like back in the day. All I ever remember is if you did SEO, you went up. That was
Jared: it.
Yeah. Like, oh, you optimize the page now you’ll go. You’ll go
Luke: up. Yeah. There was no going down. I can’t remember the exact title.
Jared: Yeah. I know. I feel like it turned around the medic update in 2018, but that’s. I don’t know why I feel that way. There’s absolutely no signs or data behind that.
Luke: Yeah. Well, penguin was the one for me when that first rolled out what I was like, well, you can do this wrong.
Like the company I worked for, they had like a really shady link-building tactic. Not like as shady as super black hat, but they were just doing like product review links. So they would just email, I would email loads of bloggers and be like, you want to review this product? We’ll send it to you for free and then link to our category page.
But they would always say, like, ask them to link to the category page after the reviews already live. And then they’d be like, I’m not adding that in. Like, if, or if they ever said I’m not adding that in, which was rare to be fair, most of them just out at the end, but then they would say, oh, well tell them if they don’t add it, then we’ll invoice them for it.
Oh yeah. And I was just like, this is so shady. And then eventually they got here and no one works for that site. I used to work on anymore. So yeah.
Jared: Well maybe it’s it had, it was a long time coming, maybe. Well, let’s, let’s transition. Let’s talk about this website that you’re working on right now. I caught, I caught up on it with your YouTube video, that you did a little while back reviewing the progress of the site.
And, you know, the numbers are very attractive, you know, certainly eye catching would be a great way to put it. And this is a site that I don’t know how old it is. You have to tell me, I think, but it’s about a year old, maybe a little longer than a year old now. And you grew up to a million visitors in a month.
And I think the revenue was over 40 K in that month. And I mean, what a fantastic story. And I can’t wait to just dive in and hear all about it before we get into some of the specifics about how you’re doing it. And some of the tactics you’re using, maybe just give us some backstory on this site and you know, how you started or required it and just get it, kind of get the ball rolling on this project.
Luke: Yeah, sure. So, I mean, you’ve really hyped it. I’m kind of, I’m struggling to not smile and be like, wow, it really is all that really that’s how I feel about it. Yeah. I don’t actually know how old the site is. Certainly quite old, a few years minimum, but I acquired it in may of 2021. Sorry. My timelines 20, 20, 20 20 is may of 2020 roughly around that
Jared: after you sold the cold months after you sold the other site.
And COVID, I think that was right when it was, you know, really launching and ramping
Luke: up. So yeah. Can you give locked down? So I sold my site into February, had all this money, like started buying sites of other people and stuff. So this is one of the many sites that I bought at that time and carried on, working on all of them, started seeing some success.
And then in the December, everything just went to almost nothing. Like our income was basically nothing. Kind of
Jared: related like Google
Luke: update related. Yeah. W what I think was the initial reviews update rollout, and
Jared: that was a painful update, by the way. Yeah,
Luke: I know that one. So the project we’d actually started a few months before it was a comment.
So it’s July 7th was the first day a post went live on this particular site. As I say, I had many sites at this point, but on this particular site, I was like, I’ve got this idea. What I’m going to try and do is see if I can grow a site that I have almost no involvement in. I’m just going to train other people, not just to write articles and former articles and stuff, but to do the whole process of finding their own keywords and writing the posts and uploading them and publishing them and editing them, and literally everything without my involvement, other than a bit of strategy and a bit of guidance.
So that had started in the July and. By the December, just before the update here, which started to see like real signs of success, just doing info content. So when we bought the site, it was a hundred percent Amazon affiliate getting about a hundred visits a day. And in the December, it peaked at 7,000 visits.
So we’d launched our first post on July the seventh. And a few months later, it was over 7,000 visitors a day from organic. Then the update hit and we went down to like a thousand today. Awesome. Oh, that was,
Jared: yeah, that’s brutal. Okay. That was a good that’s. That is a, that’s not just a 20 or 30% drop.
Luke: Yeah.
And that was one of the nicer, like, that was one of the nicer drops. Some of the sites that I had with down to single visit single figure visits a day. Sorry. Oh, that is demoralizing. So I had like a few months of trying to work out where I go next. Like my businesses has gone up in flames really. And it just so happened at this site.
One of them. Was the one that I was like, I think this is something I could work on long-term, but it would need to change a lot. And my mental position at that point was, this is my last chance. I’ve got a bit of money in the bank left from the sale, but certainly I don’t have enough to go investing in loads of projects.
And it really was like a hail Mary play in my opinion of just, let’s just put this money in and see what we can do. And ultimately when it doesn’t work, it wasn’t really like if it doesn’t work, I was more like, when it doesn’t work, I’ll just go and get a job or start freelance and or whatever. And yeah, from that December, I think we actually started working again in like February or March.
I had to get rid of the writers that were working on it, or most of the writers that we’re working on and just kept a bit of content coming live. Eventually after a couple of months, I reached the decision that was like, right, we’re going to redesign the site. We’re going to rebrand it. We’re going to improve all the content we’re putting onto it.
Because whilst I think the strategy was all right, in terms of the keywords we were targeting and stuff, the quality of the content was properly a seven out of 10. And I was like, if I’m doing this, I’m doing the best we can do all. I think it’s the best content in the industry. I’m biased, but I’m like, we’re going to, but the best stuff we can possibly do, the website’s going to look really good.
It’s going to have a good brand name. We’re going to get links. And yeah, that was, that redesign went live in may of 20, 21 getting, I don’t even know how much traffic. I really can’t remember the numbers now, but not very much really. It hadn’t
Jared: been covering really that much yet at that point.
Luke: Yeah. Yeah. I hadn’t done anything.
It just continued trickle in downwards. And then we re launched the redesign. And in October of 20, 21, 3, 4 months later, we hit a million visitors. So it was just absolutely crazy. We’d gone from six months before thinking I’m going to have to pack this in and we’re going to go and get a job. I still have a job application saved in my drafts on my email.
So every time I open up my emails, it says drafts one. And it’s like a motivational thing for me. It’s like, there’s that job application like, wow, this is how close you work to
Jared: that. Storyline has so many interesting twists and turns to it that are unexpected. I mean, first off that you had a site that lost that much in traffic from an, you know, an update like, like the December one, which that was that was, that was a bad update, but I mean, you lost like 80, 90% of your traffic, this storyline, you know, that you chose to go kind of all in on this site.
Had just gotten pummeled by Google and then the absolutely dramatic turnaround that it had. I mean, last Christmas you are going to bin it off. And this Christmas, you know, you’re celebrating a million visitors to this site and this is all the same site and all within 12 months of each other. Yes,
Luke: this really interesting.
I mean, I was worried that I was just rambling on with so many figures and dates and stuff, but at least you picked it up. Hopefully people we’ll
Jared: listen to why take notes. That’s the benefit if I don’t take those, but no, I think it’s, I think that the storyline is unique. I’ll say that. And I think that it’s worth pointing out how unique that storyline is.
And obviously we’ll dive into it, but I guess I wanted to double down on it because a lot of people abandon projects after it gets hit by a Google update, I’ve been guilty of it before as well. It’s just so demoralizing to have your hard work, go into it and then have it get knocked and. I think there’s also a component that if you haven’t been doing this for a while, you can feel like, well, obviously I’m not good at it, or I’m failing at it.
Or this site is a failure. And hearing a story of recovery is just, it’s a really good reminder that with time and effort, and obviously it’s not like you just waited and it rebounded like this, like it’s sounds like you really put a lot of effort into it. You really upped the content game, the quality game, but this story of recovery I think is also great.
It’s one thing that you got 2 million visitors. It’s another thing that you did it on the back of a massive of getting swept up in a massive updates. So
Luke: yeah, it is definitely a unique situation. What I will say, I completely agree that a lot of people struggle after getting that site worked in Google, but for a lot of people, they don’t understand why their site has been.
Yeah. For good reason, a lot of good sites get penalized and it’s not penalized, but they get demoted in search whatever. And they’re like, what have I done wrong? I don’t really understand what I’ve done wrong. I had actually been speaking for two or three months in like public videos or probably on Twitter knowing me just saying, I don’t really like what I’m doing.
I’m seeing great results in terms of buying sites of other people and improving them from a financial perspective and from a traffic perspective. But I didn’t feel fulfilled. I knew the sites. Weren’t great. I even, I tweeted about this earlier actually, and said a good sort of measure of whether you’re going in the right direction with your site.
Is would you want to buy your own site
Jared: like that? I saw you say that. Yeah. Yeah. And I thought that was a really, really good point, you know? Like, are you building them for SEO? Are you actually building sites?
Luke: Yeah. So these sites I wouldn’t have, I wouldn’t buy them off myself. So. Google value them as a good site if no one would ever want this site.
So it was like when they hit it wasn’t as if I was scrambling around thinking, what do I do? I knew the whole time that if I was ever going to make a project for the longterm, it would have to be super clean, super white Hart done to the best of my ability. The only doubt I had was could I make it happen or could I make everything fall into place?
Yeah, I
Jared: think when you’re sitting there in, after the update happened in December and you’re evaluating where to put your time and your energy, and you’re evaluating why this site dropped, and then you’re evaluating the rest of your portfolio and you came to a decision to a pursue this site out of all of the rest of them and B go all in on this site versus maybe going.
You know, splitting your time or your finances across a couple of sites. Like how did you determine that? I think a lot of people have several sites. I think a lot of people are faced with a prioritization. And I think a lot of people struggle. Like you talked about with when maybe a site or two goes down, how do I know whether to double down or how do I know whether to, you know, just keep dipping my toe in the water on this site,
Luke: the decision eventually to do what I did came from the fact that that first post went live in July.
We’d hit a reasonable amount of traffic in December. And I can’t remember the exact numbers, but we didn’t put ads live. I never went with like ad sense or is so quick. I waited until we hit the media vine threshold at that point. And I really can’t remember, I’m going to say a thousand dollars or something for the November before the update here.
It was a thousand dollars or maybe it wasn’t that much. Maybe it’s like eight or 900, but it was positive for four months in, at that point. Okay. Yeah. So I was like right out of all the sites that I have now. Firstly main priority, what site would I want to work on? And it was in the most interesting niche.
I was just like, well, this is the most interesting site. It is the biggest niche as well. Like by far all the other sites they had were like really very specific, like as people would be recommended, like pick a super small niche and try and branch out over time, this one was specific, but it had the potential to be hundred thousand pages in the future.
So I was like, the niche is massive. I really enjoy being in the niche. And we’ve seen results before with average content. Could we see results again with good content? I had no idea, but it just made sense to try
Jared: one, could see a path to it. Yeah. I guess a point.
Luke: Yeah. With the other sites. I don’t know if I could make high quality content.
Boring stuff, but I’m really jealous of the people that can, because there’s a lot of money in a lot of bore and stuff. Right? Yup. Yup. And less competition people. Don’t like making boring websites for the most part.
Jared: Well, let’s talk about when you decided to go on this site and you teased it a bit. So I wanted to actually, I was going to ask you anyways, but you mentioned it.
So now I really want to talk about like, how do you evaluate what was going wrong? You’ve talked about how you mentioned earlier. Hey, I don’t think people necessarily know how to figure out what is wrong with our site. You’ve talked many times already about how the content was average was a 710. Wasn’t good enough about how you were going to invest in really good content.
Like how are you making these determinations? How do you determine what went wrong? And you needed better content?
Luke: Some. It’s hard when I’ve been in the industry so long that you just have a good feeling for this stuff. But one of the things I did was I tried to make a list of everything that big sites do.
I was like, what if I want to be a big site? What do big sites do? And therefore, what should I do? Like if I want to be a big site, I should act like a big site. So one of the things was like the brand name. We had like a generic name that a lot of similar sites, a lot of sites had similar names to us, or even the same name as us, because we would not know whether people had the same name as like.com and.co.uk.
And the name was just generic. So I was like, right, I want a memorable name. And I should say if people have dropped since. It’s a fairly good recommendation to try and wait it out and try and improve things. Don’t just go right. I need to change the domain and I’ll redirect everything. Definitely don’t rush into doing that.
But yeah, I’ve had a history of gambling problems in the past.
Jared: We also did a 3 0 1 redirect to a new domain in all of this. That’s the story gets the plot thickens.
Luke: Yeah. So I did buy a new domain that was fresh red. Like I’d never registered before managed to get the.com.co.uk. Every, every house that was worth getting redirected to that site was just basic generate press that a lot of affiliate sites had.
So I had a custom theme made on top of generate process to like fast, but certainly it doesn’t look like a typical generate press site. It looks, I think it looks really good, but I’m biased, but. I’ve been very open in the past about my other sites. Just say, this is crap. Like this looks terrible. It’s a type of thing.
Yeah. Yeah. So I think the site looks good and it’s fast. It’s got a good name cost for the quality of the content. The quality was all right. It wasn’t terrible. So it wasn’t as if I was looking at terrible content, I was like, oh, this can easily be improved. But there were always just little things. Like a couple of the writers that we had before are on the cheaper end of the scale.
They weren’t amazing. But I was just like, well, they show up and they do the work and I’m not involved. So I’m happy enough with that. We see in results. Why change it? Right. Unfortunately you have to let some people go when they’re only freelancers, obviously. But I had to just say like, no, I can’t give you any more articles for the time being.
But when I came back to hiring new people, I was like, I should really get that. Our writers rarely invest in training, the quality of content side of things, like format in SEO and just trying to put as much stuff together. So that it now means I actually really don’t like bring in new writers on just because I have to do a lot of work.
I’m like for every new writer, rubbering again, I’m going to train them up and be like, whenever you leave working with me, you’re going to go and get a better job. You’re going to have a lot more knowledge than you have now, or you’re gonna be better at what you do. Just blow my own trumpet, a good starting place for someone’s writing career
Jared: because it isn’t a train that goes into
Luke: it.
Yeah. And I should also say I’ve been getting a lot of people messaged me recently about wanting to write for me, please. Don’t message. And ask, because it’s such a specific niche and we’re only like hiring experts at the minute. So they’re experts in the content matter. I just teach them how to format and how to write for the web and how to do SEO.
And it’s like 99.99, 9% that you won’t have the required expertise. I hate saying no to people. I keep getting bombarded and I feel really bad and some people take it really badly and I just feel terrible. I’m like, I’m trying to help. Oh, geez.
Jared: Yeah. Well, if you’re hiring experts, they gotta be an expert in the space.
And that’s a pretty good reason, I suppose. Yeah. I mean, I’m just, I’m really curious about the idea of evaluating content and the differences between it being up, say an average to above average, to really good, to great. It’s such a difficult thing to, to evaluate, I guess I keep using that word. I mean, we had car roof on a couple, I guess, many months back now.
And he was talking about, you know, the way that Google looks at content and the way that it evaluates quality. And then, you know, the way that we look at content and the way that we evaluate quality. And it’s just, it’s a really interesting topic to try to determine, Hey, is my site, does it have a good enough quality to rank?
Number one for the keywords I want. Versus do I need to, you know, publish 10 out of 10 content to rank number one for this, it’s just, it’s such a deep dive, you know? Yeah.
Luke: So now you’ve said that it’s kind of, what’s the word I’m looking for? It’s reminded me of the main thing we did, which actually in terms of content quality, it was relevancy.
So we had like four or 500 posts on the site and we had about 40 or 50 categories. So loads of content in some had one or two posts. And once they started doing well, initially when the Google up they hit, I was like, actually, maybe it’s not good to just have such a scatter gun approach. It wasn’t multinational or anything.
It was all heavily relevant to my niche, but I was like going forward, if we want to launch a new category, we have to have 20 pieces of content minimum. Otherwise there’s not enough for a new category on our site because we want to show topical expertise. We want to show Google. We know what we’re talking about on this matter, because we have 20 articles on there or probably more like 40 or 50.
So that was the big thing for my site. I ended up calling a load of content.
Jared: You doing okay? You deleted some of the content. You mentioned that your video actually. Yeah. What’d you delete like a hundred or 200 posts like that, right? Yes.
Luke: Somewhere between 102 hundred. And I just went through and it was a decision based on the criteria for what I wanted us to cover.
So I was like first to really be able to focus on what we want to do. I was like, this is the topics or the type of topics that we cover first and foremost. And then I was like, I’ll just check how’s it, hot hundred visitors or more in the last few months. So I was like, if it was not quite the right topic for us, but it was getting a load of traffic.
I didn’t want to delete that. But if it was. Topically relevant to where we are and wasn’t getting traffic then. Yeah. I ended up removing and we got,
Jared: we had this conversation recently with someone and I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer, but I’m going to throw it out at you anyways, because we talked about it.
I don’t remember which episode recently, where, you know, a lot of people when they start building their websites and I’m guilty of this too, by the way, you kind of. All the different topics that would work in your niche. And then you go after just the lowest competition stuff. Right. And so sometimes it can be a little bit scattered.
Like it’s not as focused as maybe getting the topics in your niche and breaking them apart into the categories that they belong and then saying, okay, well, category a only a couple of these articles are super low competition, but I’m going to write all of them in this category before I move on to my next category.
And it’s kind of this dichotomy that gets created when you’re starting a site, because do you go after just all low competition keywords that are in your niche, but a little bit more wide, right? And then more broad, or do you really double down on a certain cluster? You might call it or a silo and just write everything in there.
Even if it’s some of them are so competitive, you’ll never rank for a couple of years anyways.
Luke: Yeah. I prefer like the dominate approach of go after every key word, even if you’re not going to rank for it. Again, from a relevancy perspective, I’m trying to think of a random example there. I’m not very good at this, but like, let’s say you want to write an affiliate post.
I’m really not a big believer in affiliate content that much at the minute, especially like Amazon supper, let’s say you wanted to write an affiliate post about like specific window cleaning products, but you don’t have a post that or a guide. That’s how to clean a window. And this is a really terrible example.
Right?
Jared: I bet it would be almost impossible for a small site to rank for how to clean a window. So
Luke: yeah, you’re not going to clean a window, but it doesn’t make sense if you, if your site doesn’t have that, but to have a really specific post. Very niche window, cleaning products, you know, again, bad example, but hopefully,
Jared: no, I, I think you’re right, like in the example, if you’re a home website and you write about cleaning windows and cleaning, you know, you’re talking about windows and shower doors and sliding glass doors and car windows, and you know, and then you start bouncing all over the place and you write an article, but you know how to clean Oak trim windows in winter.
Then the next article is how to clean the windshield wipers on an F-150. And pretty soon you’re writing about a lot of low competition keywords, but the relevancy is super diluted. I think I, I totally get your point where you’re kind of saying is, Hey, you got to write that article on how to clean windows or how to clean interior windows or how to clean windshield wipers, you know?
And then yeah. Then you can also build out the silo with the low competition keywords.
Luke: So I think there’s definitely value in content that you don’t think you can rank for. And don’t think you will get traffic. My line of thinking is, well, if five years will rank for it, maybe you probably won’t, but maybe
Jared: well, with your website, I don’t know.
You should never say never with the site you have going right
Luke: now. There’s a lot of big players in, in my, in my
Jared: well, so you, you know, bringing us back on track here, you, you had this site and you made the decision in February, March, 2021 to go all in on this one, started that process by committing to upping the writing game, the content game, the quality game, you got rid of a bunch of articles, a hundred to 200 articles.
How many articles, one of the site at that point, you know, how much of the site did you end up bleeding to kind of reboot? It
Luke: I’m really bad at remembering exact numbers, but I did, like, I did tweet and video again about the, like, there was a breakdown of all the numbers, but if I remember rightly for the year, we had like close to a thousand posts, but I did remove about a hundred to more like 150, I think was like the number we’ve removed.
It wasn’t like 15% of the content because we removed all at the start of the year and it took us the year to write that much. So there’s like 25% of the site, maybe a bit risky, but we weren’t getting traffic anyway. So I was just like, let’s just get rid of it. Let’s
Jared: just get rid of it. Like you said, the criteria basically ended up being, Hey, is it getting traffic?
And is it relevant? And if the answer is that it wasn’t either wasn’t relevant and it wasn’t getting traffic, you were comfortable taking it down in that moment. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. And then you did the redesign, you did the redesign and that come out around the same time or soon thereafter.
Luke: So the relaunch of the website all happened very quickly.
There’s like a lot of things that are done behind the scenes to get everything going live at the same time. So we put the redesign live redirected, I think the same day. I’m pretty sure it was the same day. So new design, new name, new brand. Social profiles go in life. Didn’t like outreach or try and make a big deal out as launching, because I think that’s a mistake.
A lot of beginners make is they think people will care about their website and they don’t care about your website. They only care about the guides that you have when you show up in Google. Yeah. For the most part again, not fairly
Jared: transactional relationship in
Luke: that regard. Yeah. Yeah. So you don’t need to try and have a big reveal for your new redesign or anything like that.
I’ve noticed that’s a trend like websites will email you and be like, we have a new design. It’s like, I don’t care. You’ve just emailed me and wasted my time. Anyway, that’s a tangent and we had like a link building campaign set up. To launch straight away like a digital PR style to try and get attention and stuff that would actually just was a massive fail.
It didn’t go anywhere at all, but yeah, we have the redesign and the rebrand go live and then launched another campaign a few weeks after and ended up getting a load of links. So in Google’s eyes, all of a sudden we’ve got this new website that looks better. The engagement was way up. It was faster. And we had a load of other big websites talking about us or within the space of a month.
And we had like a good post on Reddit as well. That ended up getting like 20,000 visitors or something. So they could see all these signals from different places. That we’re all looking good. What was it? Right,
Jared: right. Okay. Well it clearly it worked really well. And clearly it sounds like though, you were getting, it sounds like you were getting some initial signals that, Hey, this project might work out, you know, because at this point again, I don’t want to drag you back into the mire of it, but I mean, at this point you’re still in this situation where your sites have gotten creamed by the algorithm update nothing’s really recovered yet.
And like you were saying, you kind of had enough funds to go all in on really only one project. So it was probably really good to see it starting to have some life again, after you went to all this effort at that point.
Luke: Absolutely. Like I said earlier, my one of my biggest mistakes that I’ve made multiple times is giving up on things too early or more importantly, not putting my foot down on the gas when there’s a good sign.
So we’d relaunched the site. The next day I could see traffic was up like three days later, traffic was way up like double what it was a few days before, still not what it was in December, November of the year before. But compared to where we’d been for the last three or four months, it was like, well, this is going all right.
So I was like, right, we should get another writer back. If we can money fast running out at this point, I should point that out. Jeez. And I was like, well, let’s just try, we’ll put some more content live, but it started to head in the same director. And that was going before, where it was just growing really quickly.
So I ended up selling the other sites that I had, or some of them were so bad. I couldn’t even get rid of them, but some of the sites weren’t too bad. So I was just like, I’m just going to try and get what I can. I saw one site that was like $20,000. I actually put about $20,000 into it. So I didn’t really make any profit on it.
But that
Jared: 20,000 at the time. Yeah.
Luke: Yeah. So I remember being like, right. That’s 20,000, that’s all going into the project kind of committed to. So at that point, yeah, we’re running out of money. I’m selling everything. We’ve got to try and put the more money in. Cause I’m like, I’m not making that mistake again.
Not even
Jared: the cat feels safe in the house.
Luke: I was like, if it doesn’t work, then I definitely can’t say I didn’t put my foot down.
Jared: You are redefining the phrase all in.
Luke: Yeah, it was, I was taken out. I didn’t take out a loan, but you know, I was like, I was all, I put all my chips in and then I was grabbing money off other people’s tables and putting them in as though,
Jared: like, you have to take it out of your pockets from last night.
Yeah. Like
Luke: I’m obviously in a fortunate position in terms of, I don’t have kids and stuff, so I don’t need to worry about those responsibilities, but I don’t have a pension. Like I don’t have a single saving for future life. So there are definitely risks just right. I didn’t have to worry. Ruben in the family, if everything went wrong and I worked quite hard over the last few years to put myself in a position where if everything did go wrong, someone out there might hire me or someone out there might pay me some money to help them.
And that was a very conscious effort. Like people were always like, why are you making videos and why you’re trying to help people because I don’t sell anything. And I was like, well, I like doing it, but it’s kind of an insurance scheme as well, or an insurance policy. If everything goes wrong and if it does go wrong, it’d be funny.
I was like, I’ve got a funny story. I’ve got a funny story to tell, look how stupid I look, but put everything into this. And it didn’t work well. And that could still happen. That could stop me because I’m still trying to just like the revenues are good, but I’m still trying to spend more than our revenue still.
Yes. Yes. Still. I mean, After the really good month we have, but
Jared: you gotta work at it. Well, talk about, I mean, I don’t want to fast forward through it all, but let’s just talk a little bit tactically about what you did to get the site to where it was in October, which is a $40,000 a month or higher, whatever it ends up being.
I should let you actually tell us, but I know over a million page views in a month, which is crazy, you know, it sounds like a big content push. You mentioned a thousand articles or so you mentioned link building. I don’t know how much link-building you done on this site? You mentioned the new redesign. I don’t know how much other on page types of things you were doing, but maybe just from a technical standpoint, kind of walk us through the next six months or so it looked like from February, March to this culmination, this milestone moment that October had.
Luke: Yeah. So as for designer stuff, I was pretty confident that every post we publish now with the new design was going to look good enough that our writers get their own images and stuff. So the posts. Decent. They’re not the best, like SEO people and marketing people. They make amazing looking websites. This isn’t a marketing level website, but it’s certainly a nice look inside.
That is, I would say better than some of the top publications in my industry, which has some really massive players in it. So sorry, my cat’s pulling up the carpet at the door. Just bang. I’ll just stop.
Jared: My dog has started staring here in a minute.
Luke: Sam distracted me. I was, I
Jared: designed it. Look, every post looks good.
Good enough. You know,
Luke: look good. Yeah. And we were in a position where the writers were being trained well enough so that they knew what they were doing. They knew how to find key words. They knew what we were covering. I had a very strict list of criteria. It was like, these are the topics we cover. So you can write whatever you want.
Like these, this is how to find the right keywords to go after. This is our criteria. This is how we format and upload and all that stuff. And I do work with people long-term so that’s one of the unique parts of my model is I don’t use the content mill that most people use of write a brief for a writer, pass it, upload it to a site and pay whatever rate to get and then get it back and then give it to an uploader who formats it and get it.
So I don’t do that. I train people up so that they own the process of creating content and they get that pride of actually publishing themselves on the site,
Jared: basically finds the topic, writes the article, figures out, what goes in the article, formats it on your site, finds the images, does the internal linking presses published and off to the races for another.
Luke: Yeah. And you know, they get analytics access as well sometimes. So they can even see the traffic that they get in to that stuff. Yeah, definitely
Jared: is all, you know, they get a lot more access than perhaps the average writer would.
Luke: Yeah. Yeah, definitely on a try. For like our content creation process, we’re in a pretty good place.
It was really just a simple case of get more writers to do more of what we’re doing. And I look to do that as much as we could, but we certainly didn’t have an unlimited budget. I already said money was running now. And $20,000 is good, but I do take away each. I have one employee or a hard one employee in the UK here at the time and freelancers and we’d invest in design and content and stuff.
And I didn’t want to spend every penny in one month, but I was trying to bring in more writers and just get more content live. As for link building. We did go for the digital PR route of trying to create something worthy of Sharon. I’m always aiming for like viral content pieces. So things that will interest people or will intrigue them or even make them angry.
So the first content piece that we had to go like. That’s straight after the redesign, it failed massively. And then one day in the shower or in bed, whenever, wherever I was, what I have my best ideas, usually when I’m trying to get to sleep at night and I’m like, oh, that’s something I should work on right now.
I had this idea and I was like, that is going to work. I was like, that is going to get so much attention. And I was like, it’s a good idea. It’s it was like a progressive idea, I would say. So I knew it would get a good reception, but also that would be people angry about it at the same time, perhaps if like a progressive mentality, I just knew it would press buttons in the right kind of ways.
I certainly don’t think I wasn’t like out to annoy people because as I say, I think it was for the greater good, but yeah, we do invest into trying to create content that people will share and hopefully not be angered by, but some people, when some people are angry with. They’re going to share it. Some guy with like hundreds of thousands of subscribers on YouTube made a video about it, like, oh, right.
And so it really got out there and we were London links from our competitors. Really? Our competitors, big newspapers had they’re the perfect links to begin. Yeah. So we just did that a few more times. And fortunately out of, I think we did five campaigns. I think two of them did extremely well. The three at three of them did extremely well.
One of them just did all right. And one of them totally failed, which is an extremely good success rate. I
Jared: think any website builder would take those that’s that overall success rate any day.
Luke: Yeah. I don’t want to sit here and say. I’m amazingly good at this. There’s a lot of luck involved and I’ve done this for clients when I was in agency and stuff.
And I’ve seen more failures than you can imagine. So I know there’s a lot of luck involved in such a good success rate, but it’s a small sample size, like five pieces of content. If I did 50, maybe we’d only have five that were any good, but fortunately we’ve had three that were good already. So we already picked up a lot of links from,
Jared: so both the content push and the links were a major factor in this site, kind of taking off, you know, it sounds like you got a lot of great links, a lot of links, more on the earned side of things, right?
And they were really high quality links. And then obviously, you know, you pushed pretty heavily to get to a thousand articles, especially with how much you had deleted. And I mean, you made a really healthy content push focusing on this high quality plus some healthy link building campaigns.
Luke: Yeah. So our target was to hit a thousand into the air.
We actually didn’t hit it. We were like 980 or something like that, but no clothes. Yeah. So we had like October and maybe it was September or November one month, either side of October where we’d publish often 30 ish posts from memory. So that’s like 25% of the posts on the site in two months. So we definitely had a big push at the end of the year and then a little bit of a lull in December, but it was a lot lower, although I did give everyone a break over Christmas and stuff.
And now we’re at the stage where I’m like, I didn’t realize it could get this big or like, well, that’s not even true. Right. I didn’t realize the traffic and the revenue could be so good when we done so little. I was like, there’s still so much for us to cover. Like we’re just such a small site. Wow. That we really are a small site and I don’t want.
Make out that I’m bragging about revenue. I always try and point that out that we are, or we’re. So $42,000 was record month in October. That was obviously a very profitable month, but we had many months leading up to that where we weren’t profitable. I think September maybe was the first profitable month.
So we had like a month of good profit a month of amazing profit. And then November, December, we’re both good, but not October’s level. Good. And now with the RPM drops that coming Q1, we’re already back to break even, or maybe even less than breakeven. In fact, definitely less than break even because I’m hiring.
I think I’ve got eight writers on trial at a minute. So I think it’s
Jared: important point out because you can see these flashy numbers, you see these revenue numbers, these paging numbers, and it’s like, man, I mean, Outwardly show the investment level, you know, and, and the investment you’ve invested incredibly heavily.
I mean, if you’re talking about even September’s earnings being close to October’s, we’re barely above breakeven, you know, you’re obviously investing tens of thousands of dollars a month into the, into this site. It sounds like. And you’re continuing to do that even after you’ve hit that first milestone.
Yes.
Luke: I think the right that we go to before me hiring now, I never have exact figures. I’m not a business, man. I just make websites and try and have fun. And I hope everyone else has fun while they’re doing it as well. But I like rough calculations. I think we’re like $15,000 a month of expenses. So 42,000, obviously that’s a great month, but when you’ve had eight months of spending that much without any.
Jared: a big hole. You got a little profit to catch up on for all the expenditures.
Luke: I should point out it wasn’t 15,000 spent fragments because we already started ramping up to that amount. Right. It started going better. But yeah, from what I can tell for like financial forecasts, which were pretty much done in like five minutes of just, well, this is how much we are and how much I think we’ll make, I think we’ll break even for the year.
So it’s certainly not making $40,000 a month. And I don’t want to sit here and pretend that it is because it’s definitely not that, but yeah, I ended up hiring. Oh, it may fact I’ll say I’ll save that we can move on to late. What’s next, if you want, I want
Jared: to know what’s next. I want to ask you one more thing because I haven’t asked it and people will ask them to comments if I don’t ask it.
Cause they’re gonna be curious. What, what’s the breakdown? You mentioned that you are more of an info monetized by ads type of model here. Not as much affiliate, but let’s maybe take the month. We’ve been talking about the $40,000 plus month. Like what’s the breakdown of ad revenue versus affiliate revenue.
Luke: So I should say as well, I come from Amazon affiliate or for the last year and a half before this, I was like a hundred percent Amazon affiliate. This wasn’t a hundred percent Amazon affiliate site when I bought it. Revenue breakdown for October was like 41.6 K ads and like $600.
Jared: So basically mostly basically all ads for
Luke: yeah, yeah, pretty much.
Okay.
Jared: So yeah, this is an entire, I mean, I’m just doing the math. If you had roughly a million visitors and you had 40, 48,000, I mean, that’s an RPM of like $40. That’s a really good,
Luke: yeah. So that’s, I said that November and December weren’t as good. And it’s basically because we had one category on the site that just, I don’t know why I don’t, I still don’t understand it, but the RPM was just crazy.
It was like 70, $80 on a lot of hosts, which for some niches is not that good, but for my needs yeah.
Jared: Maybe finance or things like that right there. Those have hierarchy. But for the average niche, that’s an insane RPM. Yeah. And
Luke: then once November came round, we weren’t getting as much traffic for that. And the RPMs dropped as well.
I still have no idea what was going on, but is there a
Jared: seasonality component to this site? I’m just curious, like, is that also is October meal maybe also a high season or do you expect kind of a flattened seasonality to the site?
Luke: So December actually be October. Okay. But not for revenue, nowhere near on revenue.
In fact, it was less than November for revenue, even though November had the lowest traffic, the three. So there’s definitely seasonality, but the seasonal in most niches is Christmas is more busy. So that is the seasonality. Christmas is busy, but yeah, not anything unusual or out of the ordinary in terms of seasonal, I would say.
Yeah.
Jared: Well, let’s talk about where you’re going now with this site. I mean, first off, or I’ve heard it said at once, but congratulations, what an accomplishment and again, the backstory that you feel like we could make a movie about this, probably nobody outside of our industry and watch it, but I bet everybody in our industry would watch this movie because it’s just layered with drama and intrigue throughout the whole course of it.
So congratulations, especially considering. All that went into it. This is a site that yes is getting a million pages a month now, but it’s also a site that was done in Dustin a year ago. Got nailed by an algorithm update to 3 0 1, redirect to the whole. I mean, this site is really an interesting and fascinating story and clearly a measure and perseverance.
So congratulations. What is next now for where you’re going?
Luke: Thanks. I wasn’t gonna plug in at them, but if I can plug, I basically did make the movie on my YouTube channel. So if you want to, if you want to watch the most boring movie you’ve ever seen
Jared: got the 30 minute one about the site. It’s good. I will include in the show notes.
It’s good. It’s it’s it’s it definitely goes into a lot more depth on some of these topics than we had time to go into today’s.
Luke: Yeah. So I’ll get that plugged in. As I say, I wasn’t going to bloke, I don’t, I don’t really plug anything, but that’s okay if you couldn’t
Jared: dramatic music in there too, by the way, I liked that there was some dramatic pauses.
I mean, I, I agree actually, that, that does capture the drama pretty well.
Luke: Yeah. That’d be way enough about me plugging stuff. Cause it’s embarrassing. What’s next? I, funnily enough, I still want to make an affiliate play even though the ad revenue is crazy. I don’t know if this is just my history of being an affiliate or I’ll be, I really think I can’t avoid the feeling of, well, if we did rank really highly for these affiliate terms, we would make loads of money and I do want to diversify as much as I can, but in terms of what other people, pluses diversification and what I now, classes diverse.
They’re not the same thing. So my diversification is while I’m still just going to carry on, invest in everything in this brand, but now we’re going to have a YouTube channel as well, where we each have two YouTube channels. So I hired two full-time people to just make videos. One is like a hundred percent affiliate.
And I think this is an interesting topic because I actually hired him kind of with the impression that it wouldn’t make any money directly or maybe it would make money. I’m not really sure. I don’t know how many people go to like the YouTube description and click affiliate links and stuff. But the main reason that we’re making the videos and really annoyingly by the way about the Google review update stuff, I had all this stuff, these ideas that I wanted to do to make a good review site, I was like, right.
So we’re going to have a full-time person making review content. And his only job is. Review products really honestly make them entertaining. And we put those videos into our articles to show that we’ve actually tested the products and stuff. And maybe who knows long-term we can actually rank those articles because of how trustworthy they are.
So the articles might rank and make money, but the YouTube videos might not make money themselves, but
Jared: they’re there to help the articles rank in this theory
Luke: yet that’s my, I came up with this list of stuff that I was like, this is what a good affiliate should do. And about a month later, Google revealed it themselves.
They were like, oh yeah, here’s what everyone should do. And I was like, well, yeah, that’s good. I mean, I’m, I’m thankful to know I was on the right track, but now you’ve let everyone else know the
Jared: entire world now.
Luke: Yeah. But so that’s kind of our next play. Trying to make YouTube work. When I started the website or when I started the project, I didn’t start the site in the first place.
Boy of someone else, I didn’t know what would happen. I was just like, well, let’s just try it and see what happens and maybe it’ll work. And that’s where I’m at with YouTube. Now, one is affiliate. One is even folks at the info content and one that is hopefully a revenue play eventually to get a load of views and a load of subscribers and make money from ads or brand deals or whatever the affiliate one is.
As I say, maybe a loss leader to rank our reviews and not make money directly, but indirectly help the brand. And there’s a brand in play as well, even if they both don’t make any money, but they make, they get loads of views and people talk about us that might belong to. Are you all right? I really don’t know.
Well, mostly just a bit of fun.
Jared: I mean, it’s a good lead in for what was going to be kind of my last question on my list here, but I mean, the potential for sale down the road, would you consider selling this site? And I mean, I haven’t sold a site ever with a YouTube channel, but I know from the various people that we’ve talked to on the podcast here, that having additional streams of viewers or revenue, whether it’s an email list, whether it’s YouTube channel, whether you know, these other things that they add value to that site.
And so they, they increased the effective purchase price at the end. So even if you know, it just ends up being a great brand play for the brand you’re creating a and nothing more monetarily, it probably would help you for a future sale if you’re interested in. Would you ever sell this site?
Luke: I mean, I certainly started it with the intention of one day selling it.
Yeah. Also I don’t see me selling it any time soon. Running sites. And I like running this I, and I like the industry. And as much as I’d love to take a bit of money and run, I would also love to make stupid amounts of money. And the only way I will make stupid amounts of money is by taking risks and trying to take it as far as it can go.
I don’t know. But there will always be those things where I’m like, well, we could also do like an
Jared: email list and even some stuff
Luke: on the table. Yeah. So I would never, well, I shouldn’t say never, but I wouldn’t want to sell it until I knew, or I felt that I’d done everything I could. And I wouldn’t like a strategic acquisition.
Is that what they’re called? Where like a competitor buys you and you get like some obscene multiple, because they have other benefits of buying it on top of just the revenue. That’s what I want to aim for if I ever sell it. And it is part of the plant to sell it, but not
Jared: anytime new. On the near
Luke: horizon.
Yes. Not something that I’m looking to press on with us, for sure. For
Jared: someone who continually says that, you know, they don’t plan and they’re not paying attention to the numbers. You have a pretty good plan in mind. In my opinion, you have a lot of it worked out pretty well. I think it’s, I think it’s pretty smart.
Luke: Yeah. I’m just like, well, let’s just throw money at this and see how far it goes. And that’s basically the plan. Well,
Jared: I mean, I’m thinking about my own site and I can’t help it that, you know, like my site that I have, I mean, I run an agency for my day job, so, but I have a site on the side that, that does all right.
And it got hit by the December, 2020 updates. And I’m just watching myself throughout this entire interview. Just keep going back to, because I definitely spent time looking at it, trying to figure out what went wrong. I definitely invested in it. It’s doing a lot better now. It’s gone. It’s doing now a year later or more than a year later, it’s doing much better than it was before the update hit.
And it’s all great. I didn’t go all in and I didn’t take anywhere near your approach. And I’m just wondering how much I’ve left on the table as a result of it. You know, like I think your approach is perhaps some, perhaps the thing that’s holding many of us back from the really big successes that we dream of
Luke: maybe, but the so many factors that come into play here, people’s tolerance for risk.
Like I said earlier, I’ve had gambling products and problems in the past, like
Jared: tolerance for risk. I will give you that.
Luke: Well, I’ve just had, like, I don’t know how many times where I’ve had literally every penny I own on a casino table and lost. So yeah, to lose this, like it’s a plus Evie play. I would call it like the expected value.
Even if it doesn’t work, the expected value is positive. And if it did all go wrong, I have fallback options. That isn’t for everyone though. I do. I do agree that yeah, maybe most people that do this aren’t ever going to get a seven figure exit or an eight figure exit. Like I haven’t had those either. I would like to.
But my approach is obviously more likely to achieve a seven figure exit. It’s also more likely to lose me everything that I’ve got as well. So, well,
Jared: perhaps oral then is you don’t necessarily, each of us could probably push a little further right now. I think perhaps the moral of, or at least a lesson I’ll take from this is I don’t need to go as all in as Luke, but maybe I should be pushing myself a little bit further out of my comfort zone than I am right now, because maybe success lies or some success lies.
Yeah.
Luke: Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend going crazy, but something I really like that my friend did recently, he spent on his site, that’s going really well. He ended up spending $30,000 on new content. At that point, he was like, I’m really nervous. I’m spending $30,000. It’s everything that the site has. Like, it’s everything we’ve got in the bank for the business.
And I’m spending on content. It’s going to take us three months to make. And I was like, well, how much revenue do you get? And he was like, well, $10,000 a month. And I was like, so it’s going to take you three months. It’s going to cost you $30,000. And after three months, you’re still going to have $30,000 because of the, you weren’t 10 grand a month, right?
You’re not, you’re still going to have the same amount, the bank, as long as everything doesn’t go wrong, which it can. But the interesting thing now, After all this time, he’s he can see the traffic increases heart from that exact expense. And the revenue increases. How does, well, I don’t know the exact numbers, but it’s something like he spent $30,000 and now he makes $5,000 a month more.
So that’s an insane ROI. Like I always think of real estate or property, but we, I don’t know what it is with multiples in this space. But if you make three grand a month, you could sell your site for like a hundred grand somewhere. Ballpark figure. If you bought a house for a hundred grand, you’re not getting three grand a month in rent or not even anywhere close.
I know the risks are different than stuff, but it’s crazy. You see that ROI so fast as well,
Jared: multiple desserts only seemingly going up, you know, certainly the last couple of years they’ve been going up and up.
Luke: Yeah. Hopefully that continues. But,
Jared: well, Luke, I mean, we could chat about this stuff forever. I feel like where can people, this has been such a, both educational and inspiring interview.
So thank you for coming on board. Where can people follow along with you? I know Twitter and YouTube is where I keep up with you and maybe share your contact info on those platforms in a, any other places that people can
Luke: follow along. Yeah. I really appreciate it on an yeah. I could talk about this stuff like weeks.
So I do apologize for rambling at points. I didn’t really have anywhere. I just tweet a lot. So LR underscore Jordan on Twitter. I do have a YouTube channel, but I’m not making any videos for the time being. I’m not doing anything that isn’t my project for the time being. I just want no distractions.
That’s my. One of my new year’s goals was to not buy any domains, the sheer, oh boy. But no domains, no new projects, no client work, no videos. Maybe I might make a video here and there, but
Jared: I hope you keep us up to up-to-date a little bit on this project. You know, a video here or there, maybe, you know, maybe a summertime video, you could squeeze out for it.
Luke: Yeah. I’ll definitely try to, I do try and just tweet like BRAF porn or whatever, just people look at the graphs and they’re just like, wow, that’s a crazy graph. And I lie. I know, I can’t believe it’s my graph. It’s gone up into the right
Jared: up
Luke: into the right. Yeah. I do share the ones that go the wrong way as well.
I’d also say that all the ones that are coming down and everything going wrong, I do try and always say it as it is right now. Things are going well. It might appear that I’m boasting. But when it’s going bad, I say that it’s going bad. I tell it as it is. And that’s just what I try and do on. Well,
Jared: congratulations on going so well right now.
And clearly, you know, it’s preserved given the amount of hard work you’ve put in and the amount of effort you put in here and the investment you’ve made. So yeah, it’s good to see that happen when you go all in, you know, so congratulations again, and yeah. Thanks again so much for coming on board. We look hope.
We’ll hope to catch up with you again soon. And here, this project is going
Luke: no Jasmine. Well, thanks again for having me and yeah. Hope people enjoyed listening to the story.
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