Ep 167: What It Costs To Build A $1.6M Content Website In 12 Months with Adam Smith (Part 2)

Jaryd Krause

What does it actually take to make $40K per month online? Hi! I am Jaryd Krause host of the Buying Online Businesses Podcast and in this episode I am speaking to Adam Smith who is from Niche Website Builders and he has bought, sold and flipped many websites, content websites with excellent profits, we have talked about this on our podcast before on other episodes. He is also the cofounder of Niche Website Builders where they help people scale their content websites through content and link building.

Now in this podcast episode, is part 2 of a podcast that I did with Mark Maz, but I am getting the other half of Niche Website Builders , Adam Smith to finish off in part 2. What we do is we talk about how they have one client who built a 1.6 million dollar business in twelve months and how that business makes them $40K per month and we talk about what it actually costs them in terms of time, money and resources. So, we talk about the domain that they bought to build this site and how much it cost them to buy that domain? What type of domain it was and what was involved in purchasing that and the story behind it? We also talk about how much content that they produce for this actual website, how much it costs them, how many words, how many articles?

We also talk about them purchasing additional domains as redirects into the main website that came with a lot of backlinks which was a part of their backlink building strategy and a cheaper method for doing so when building backlinks and how they structured the website and their articles around buying multiple age domains to build a site out with great SEO and great content that produces a great amount of traffic come to the site with a great income. We also talk about some of the things they did with the home page, SEO wise and having the least amount of clicks to get to the content. We also talk about the link building they did towards the end of the podcast episode. This is such a valuable episode on what it takes to build a content site on age domain, how much it can cost and what the results can be?

Ofcourse, a disclaimer that these results are not typical and we talk about what the average time frame may be to start seeing results and how much it actually may cost you if you decide to go down this route. Such a valuable episode and I know you guys are going to love it!

Do you want to build and grow your content website, Niche Website Builders have helped hundreds of people to take their content websites from a few hundred dollars per month to tens of thousands of dollars per month with crafted content creation, buying age domains and link building strategies. These strategies have helped people increase their traffic, authority, monthly earnings and their website valuations too. Head to: www.nichewebsite.builders/bob/, to get 10% off any link building or more from their content creation services.

Adam, how lucky are we get to chat on the regular about online business.

Adam Smith:

It’s like we are best friends now.

Jaryd Krause:

I love it, we are sharing travel stories now and it’s good. So this episode we are going to dive in to the case study that we started talking about with Mark, your co-pilot and founder in Niche Website Builders and we started talking about how one of your clients, you built this asset, $1.6 million dollar asset which is a business. We talked a lot about tune righting SEO style, backlinks, and how many backlinks should you use and all that stuff. So, in this episode we want to specifically get to what happened with this deal and this business and how did you manage to get these results?

Let’s start off with, I think the person; your client bought an age domain, let’s talk about that first. How much did they spend? We don’t need the actual figures, roughly how much? What type of domain? What goes into that?

Adam Smith:

Sure, you are right. Me and Mark were actually watching the domain ourselves at the GoDaddy auction, you know the day it was actually about to expire, all the day that the auction ended essentially. It was on our shortlist of domains that we were typically looking at purchasing anyway and then we have a set criterion of how much we are going to pay. This went over that set criteria by quite a bit and at the time we were like, wow why is this domain going for so much? So, it went for kind of high teens, between 15 and 20 thousand dollars.

And it turns out, the reason being, I think, is that it has an affiliation to someone quite famous and well known. That night we watched the auction and we forgot that okay somebody paid for this domain and that’s it. And literally the next day, the guy emails us that hey, I won this domain last night, can you help me build that into a site? We were like, that was you, and we were watching it. So yeah, the domain had an affiliation with someone quite famous at some point during the time. It was one of a philanthropy projects and I believe it was around a DR 44 I think, but it was a strong DR 44, the backlinks were super niche relevant and it was a very strong domain to start with and well rounded domain.

Jaryd Krause:

Cool! Cool! So, DR 44 had some famous person in philanthropy, are we talking a one word .com? Are we talking 4 figures? 5 figures? 6 figures? 7 figures? How much are we looking at?

Adam Smith:

It was between 15-20 thousand dollars for the domain, and it wasn’t even .com, it was .org. That’s why we were a little shocked when we saw the auction going so high to start with.

Jaryd Krause:

Yea, without a .com and sort of three words, it sounds like. So, between 15 and 20 and DR-44, and then so this person just out of the blue, you are one day looking at it and somebody sold it and then they say, hey give us a hand. That’s pretty cool. So what happened from there? When somebody goes and bought a domain, what did you chat about? What were the things you decided or thought that would work were put in place? Let’s start with that.

Adam Smith:

Sure. So initially it was like an onboarding call, discovery call. We talked about some of our ideas, and they presented some of their ideas about direction that we can take the site in and this site in a niche that is super expansive and you can pretty much keep on adding content forever. So, in those cases, it’s where do you start is the hardest part I think. Like how do you know which sub topic of the overall niche to start with? And this is great as this is where our tomb raiding keyword research comes in, you don’t have to pick, you can look at the competitors in the space, you watch what’s working well for those guys and base the research on that. So I won’t dive into the tomb raiding, I think you can and Mark covered that quite a bit in last call. But essentially, we talked about tomb raiding and how that would guide us in a direction for the initial contact.

Jaryd Krause:

Excellent! Excellent! Yea, so I am just going to pull up the podcast episode that mark and I did so people know what number it actually is, so they can go back and check that. Because we did cover, like you said, the tomb raiding, SEO and we covered a bunch of other things, it’s Episode 155 on “How to build $1.6 million content website in 12 months with Mark Maz”. So check that out guys, it is part 1 for this and this is part 2.

So we are going to dive in, so how much content and let’s talk about what type of content info, affiliate and then I would love to talk about structure. So what was the starting point? You have got this domain and where did you go with content? Did you decide what type of content to create and how much? And what was the answer for that?

Adam Smith:

Given the fact that client had sent quite a bit of money on the initial domain, he wanted to launch the site with large load of content to start with, so we launched the site in December 2020 with 150,000 word content, it was all information based content or I can say 95-97% of it was information based content, it is a specific type of content typically the listicle type. For example we looked at an age domain on our live stream this week which was about birds and one of the listicle we came up with was “50 Black birds”, “backyard black birds in New York” or “25 birds that have a red beak”, that kind of informational content.

So, we built the site, we launched it initially with 150,000 words, on average each piece of content was around 1500-2000 words long and very quickly we saw some nice early traction, even for age domain we saw very nice early traction for the site and within first couple of days there was traffic. And in a couple of weeks it was getting a couple of 100 visitors a day which then gave the client confidence that I want to keep going. I have spent a lot on the domain and I have put a lot of content and I can see that this is taking off and we were some advice that this is really fast for an age domain to gain this sort of traction, if you got the results this is when to push. So in January, we agreed to put more content and that was pushed live in February another 150,000 words and while that was being published, we were still adding and creating more content. And I guess we can go into the full schedule of content but essentially it was 2 million words of content over 13 months this site has.

Jaryd Krause:

So 150,000 words in a 1500-2000 words per article, looking at about 100-ish articles I guess on average, so that means 150,000 served times by 10, so 1.5 million, so we are looking at about a 1000 article over the time frame of this, is that right?

Adam Smith:

Yes, it’s slightly less; it’s about 900 pieces of content on there.

Jaryd Krause:

You started seeing traffic, what did you say, within a week?

Adam Smith:

Yea, it was very very quickly, incredibly quickly. Within the first week, there was traffic and then first 5-6 weeks the site was getting acouple of hndred visitors per day.

Jaryd Krause:

Okay, so when were the milestones? And this can be rough, milestones of like say a 100,000 page views to more? And what sort of page views are you getting now? Do you know the milestones of that?

Adam Smith:

Kind of. Not exactly. I know that I pulled up the analytics in January and got 3.3 million people, so that was month 13, but it was on an exponential growth part. It got to 2 million in November so it went from 2 million to 3.3 million in two months essentially and it was about in July when it got to 1 million, so from December to July-August, that’s how long it took to get o 1 million views per month which I think it was just incredibly fast.

Jaryd Krause:

Wow! That’s wild, it really is. So, for people listening who are like, "Alright, I am going to buy an age domain and add a bunch of content to it, in theory it’s pretty simple, but there is more that goes on behind the scenes of what type of content that you should be creating. Of course tomb raiding SEO, key word research is something you guys are really good at which we cover in Episode 155 with Mark, so listen to that guys.

So, once you have a bunch of content, how do you structure putting the content out? Do you just say, "Cool, let’s just drop a 100 posts a month," or do you put them up daily? Tell me a bit more about the structure of how you release and publish them, and how you may also put them in different categories or in different places on the side, and how does that look and work for you guys? And was that a big help for you guys or not?

Adam Smith:

Yes, sure, and that’s a great question. In this case, we kind of had a conversation with the client about the fact that if the site continued on this kind of trajectory, he was willing to keep adding content, and like I say, the niche is never ending. You could add literally 10 million words in this space and you still will have stuff to talk about. So, we talked early on about if site continues to see this trajectory, he is going to keep adding content and adding fuel to the fire, so we didn’t worry about any kind of publishing schedule and we kept adding content and pushed it live as quickly as we could, as soon as it was ready it was pushed live typically on a four week schedule ideally.

So we created 150,000 words in four weeks, which we would uploaded to the site, we would check it and if it was all ready to go, we would publish it all live within a couple of days essentially and then we would move on to the next batch which would be 150,000 words for the next four weeks. And once it’s ready we push it. In terms of structure and categories, the categories structure of this website evolved quite a bit overtime. And I will talk about a reason why that changed, but before that I want to talk about the way we set up this site. Whenever we build a site, we never hard called the categories into the url, we never use that as the primal link and it’s never; /cat/post. Just because we understand as a site grows, we would probably need to amend the categories structures and we started off pretty basic and in this case, we had like two very broad categories to start with and as we started adding more content and it made sense not to have a 150 pieces of content under two broad categories, we could break it down into sub categories and then that led us into, we started acquiring other age domains to redirect into this site and that also influenced the category structures quite a bit too because we would make a new category around whatever the sub topic of the domain we would redirect in.

So if we think, for example if this might have been a site about sports, if we found another age domain about tennis we would go and create another 150,000 words of content about tennis specifically, we would create a new sub category called tennis, we would redirect the tennis domain into that category of content. The next month, we might find an expired domain about rugby, we would create another 150,000 words about rugby, a new category and then we would redirect the domain into that category of content all about rugby. The category structure is influencing two ways; one is just spreading it out and other one is through the age domains acquisition that we went over.

Jaryd Krause:

Okay so buying more age domains and creating categories around that and not creating a separate site for that but creating a category on that on pay your domain that you bought first on this website. So how many domains did you and owner purchase?

Adam Smith:

It was six domains in total and they went from December till June, basically it was one a month apart from April because we couldn’t find a domain that was worthy of redirecting in. So, in December we redirected into a DR39, in January we redirected into a DR48, in February we redirected into another DR48, in March a DR25, then we didn’t do one for April, May a DR39 and June a DR31. So, six fairly powerful domains were redirected in, over the course of first seven months basically.

Jaryd Krause:

So, thinking about those domains, it sounds like they have been purchased between $5000-20,000 range, am I right or not?

Adam Smith:

No, those domains were cheaper; they would be considered the typical domains for those kinds of costs. They were around $3000-4000 each.

Jaryd Krause:

So in between $3-4K for each of those so we got 6 domains, right?

Adam Smith:

Yeah, so that was $18,000 in additional domain costs.

Jaryd Krause:

And then each domain you are doing 150,000 words, you roughly have about 90 posts per category, per domain, something like that?

Adam Smith:

Pretty much. I would like to add this at this point, because this is the question that people always ask like as awesome as it is after getting redirected to 6 domains , how did that affect site’s DR? As it started as DR44, what is it now? And it is a DR64 now which is pretty good I think, it’s exponentially harder to go up a DR, the higher you go. So, from 10-20 is relatively easier than to go from a 50-60. Just thought I should throw that in there because people would probably want to know in the comments.

Jaryd Krause:

Yes so I think from 44-65, is real good. And so why did this work? Why did buying another domain work and adding that as a category and a bunch of content on the main site? Why does it work? How does it work? Obviously, this is a disclaimer that we need to make that the domains that are being purchased need to be niche, I guess and how similar they need to be? There are a lot of questions in there but I just want to unpack this.

Adam Smith:

Yeah. These are really great questions. The thing that I really suggest to people who are thinking to buy a domain to redirect into the main site is it needs to be of the same kind of quality as that you would build a money or main site on, you cant cut corners. Somebody asked us the other day, what you would expect to pay for a money site domain vs. a redirect domain and the answer is the same like the quality would be the same. So, firstly you should put it through same vetting process, it should be same quality, if it has any red flags or anything like that then you just walk away from it.

Relevancy is really important to the overall topic, the closer you can match it, the better. It’s the same however you work with an age domain, relevancy is always the key, the one thing that you should always look for when you are trying to look for a domain to redirect to your main site it, look up where the majority of the links point on the site you are going to redirect in, do they point to the homepage? Do they point to individual pieces of content? If majority of them point to home page, that’s great because you have got free reign over what type of content to create when you are redirecting it to your acquisition page and we would probably come on to strategy in a second. But if there are lots of individual pages and has a lots of great links, then you probably need to factor that in your 90 pieces of content you are going to create, you need to factor in some of those, you are going to have to be created so you can redirect individual pages into those as well.

Why it works is because redirecting age domains into sites as long as it is done right and the domains are good, and you have vetted, it is a super cost effective way of link building, like for example, this site went from about 500-400 referring domains to almost 9000 referring domains over the course of 12 months and the majority or big chunk of that was taken up through redirecting. If you try and buy or you know try and build 8000 links it would cost you way more than 18000 dollars, what it cost for these redirected domains. It’s really cost effective if done right.

Jaryd Krause:

Wow. What an awesome strategy. You are buying not just one backlink, you are buying a hub of backlinks really that you can plug into your site. And he bought his first domain and you built with content on that, you bought second one and you just redirect that second domain straight to the category page with all the blog posts, is that what you do? Or where do you redirect?

Adam Smith:

Almost. So we create a specific page that we call an acquisition page, and the first paragraph of that acquisition page will talk about how your main site has acquired this other site and how are going to welcome all the readers and basically just talk about you have been acquired. And underneath that then you are going to have almost like a sky scrapper piece of content. So going back to my example, if this had been tennis domain we were redirecting, we would say “This site has been acquired, we welcome all the readers and if you don’t know who we are, this is who we are and so this is the history of tennis and how it was started”, it would be a couple of thousand words piece of content but in there, their would be internal links of all those 90 pieces of content that we have created about tennis.

It is very similar to a katewe page but we call it an acquisition page to stand alone and it stands alone as well as a katewe page and then we redirect the domain, all of the posts if there is nothing to match up one-to-one, straight to that acquisition page to power up that page and then through those internal links it passes all that power down to the individual posts we have created about tennis and distributes the power through that category quite evenly and nicely. Then typically we would also put out a press release to say that this site has acquired the other site just to try to make it look as natural as possible.

If one business acquires another, typically this is what they would do; they would make an acquisition page, talk about it, they will want some press and they will put out a PR statement and we just want to show to google that we are imitating what a real business would do if they acquired another one.

Jaryd Krause:

And so you don’t that on socials and things like that? Adam Smith:

It’s just a PR, press release service, like you can use web21 or 38 digital media.

Jaryd Krause:

So, say you have got 90 posts for each category, you have 90 internal links on the acquisition page, is that throughout the content or like a listicle because it’s quite a lot?

Adam Smith:

No, throughout and contextual, so we have got a couple of members on our team now that have gotten quite good at creating these acquisition pages. In the start it was really hard because you had to write a two or three thousand word piece of content that contextually and as naturally as possible internally links to 90 pieces of content, is hard. But they do it really great and we are like how did you do that?

Jaryd Krause:

And it had to read well, that’s a tough task. That’s excellent. Obviously for people listening, it’s not just about hey lets buy a domain and put bunch of content up on it and we are good to go. You have to structure the content in different ways, you put different types of content, sub headings and video and I am sure you use images. I wanted to speak about the whole sort of site structure; we understand now about what it looks like buying age domain, and building content around that and plugging that into the main site.

But let’s talk about the main site and homepage structure and how do you get to the all of the other content so you know 6 domain with 90 piece of content each and how do you get to that? The reason I ask this is because I do business breakdowns in the inner circle mastermind that we have with bunch of our clients with content sites and also e-com businesses and structure out what they need on the homepage and why? The most important question is why it needs to be there and how important it is? So I am curious to lots of categories, like the most popular pieces of content, any authority sort of things, what does it look like?

Adam Smith:

The homepage is fairly basic, it has a little bit of content on there and it has basically three main categories broken down and it’s got a link to each of the category pages so you can go straight to the category page from home page. It’s got a small amount of text about what this category covers and then it’s got a link to the automatically polls of the three latest posts in each category. It’s a basic homepage to be honest; there is not a ton of stuff on there and visually there is like three posts to each category, the polling automatically based on date and link to all the categories on the homepage.

The one thing which we do make sure of though in terms of site structure; one is the categories structure and the menu structure is typically very flat, we don’t have like sports, underneath that ball sports, and underneath that tennis and underneath that table tennis like lays deep. It’s a very flat structure and that allows us on the homepage and menu structure then to have all of the categories laid out on the homepage. That’s the one thing.

And the other thing is that we are a big fan of custom category pages, so we don’t typically tend to use standard word press category page, the main reason being that if you got a category with 90 posts in and you use standard wordpress category structure, typically it would be paginated and you will have page1, page 2 till you get to the end of those 90 posts and what that does is increases site clicks depth which basically means how far away is a content from homepage. And if you use that type of category pages, typically have to click on the category and then you might of click next, next, next five times and imagine the google bob doing that and its tedious and when we make custom category page we don’t have to do pagination and all the posts are on one page. All the sites that we built all of the categories and menu are in all the category and menu structures and in any of those categories you can view any post within two clicks.

Jaryd Krause:

Good rule of thumb, two clicks from the home page to get to content. When you make it harder for google, you make it harder for users anyway. It’s basically the same, same with user experience. When user experience isn’t great, the google is going to find out. So, I like that.

I want to touch on, before we talk about how much they spent on content and all the different things that will break it down, I want to talk about link building and basically it looks like link building was done through the acquisition of these other age domains but were there some other link building done? Or were there some other things that we may be missing other than buying age domains, creating categories, creating contents for those categories, creating content for main age domain and structuring the site, were there some other things that we may be missing?

Adam Smith:

Yes, we did a shot gun skyscraper campaign, link building towards the later end of the site build as well and that lasted for set of months and about three months about reach and then we switched to new series, the Haro link building and we did that for two reasons, one is that haro link building is great for building high quality, typically editorial type links and they are really good high quality links but the other thing it is really good at is building a digital footprint for the persona or the person on the about us page of the website.

Typically, most websites have a fake persona on the about us page, it’s an image from this person does not exist and whole invented back story and that means they don’t have any digital foot print and in certain niches, EAT or expertise authority trust is not that important than in other niches it is important. But I think overtime it is going to become important for all, as google figures out how to understand is someone a genuine expert or not.

When you link those using Haro, you will reach out as the person on about us page to these journalists and it could be Adam who is a specialist on tennis for example and is been a tennis coach for ten years and when they link back to your website or when they link back and use your quote in an article, typically they will mention you by name and say that this a quote from Adam Smith at tennis.com and what that does is it starts to build a digital footprint around someone that’s not real and you start to build real expertise or authority or trust for someone who is not real but typically doesn’t deserve it but it’s a great way of adding a level of eat to your site and go above and beyond, what the competitors are typically doing. So yes, we also started some Haro and that campaign long ago.

Jaryd Krause:

Okay, great. What a lesson on building EAT, so if you are linking to say Adam who is an expert at tennis, where you linking it to? Are you linking it to a social account or are you linking it to somewhere else to have a digital footprint built up somewhere else? So what does this link look like?

Adam Smith:

No, it usually comes back to the homepage of the website, the thing with Haro is you can’t control where the link is built to, they might link to the about us page of website but typically they link to the homepage of the website. The anchor text that they use to link more often than not will say “this is a quote from Adam Smith of tennis.com”, the anchor text would be Adam Smith and tennis.com for example and it mentions the person by name and that’s where the link is between that person then, the name, the higher authority site and the anchor text linking back to you. That’s where you start to build the EAT for the site then or the person.

Jaryd Krause:

EAT is an interesting one, something that I am working with all of my clients on how to build it, you know a win-win for multiple people. You explained it the exact way that I explain it is that what is EAT? It is basically, you need to have a digital footprint that google can see, most site don’t have that but can built if you understand some ways that you can do it. For example; one of our clients on Tuesday, we had a call and he said I have all these people reaching out to me wanting to do this sort of work with my site, ia m like great, you don’t have to do outreach to get EAT, its coming to you which is one of our strategies that I kind of keep with my mastermind clients before it gets too widespread.

So, let’s talk about the investment, what’s up with the investment they have made in this. We have got the domain in between the $15000-18000, then the six additional domains another $18000 mark range, then you got the content, how much did they spend on content? So we have got 18+18 that gives $36000 so how much it cost them for content?

Adam Smith:

It was around $150,000 which sounds an awful lot, it is an awful lot. It is probably out of the reach of most people, who are starting a website, they don’t have that kind of money to drop on content within a 12 month period.so we should probably caveat this whole podcast saying that this was a high return website, but there was also a lot of money that went into this website in a short space of time too. So it’s not really a typical kind of results that you would expect like you said if you buy a domain and put some content on there, you wouldn’t get this kind of results just by doing that. Let’s caveat the whole interview with that.

Jaryd Krause:

Nothing is more important to say so, we are looking at around $190K has been out into this and obviously it wasn’t completely from scratch, we bought basically 7 age domains, good age domain to build this out. I want to talk about scale-ability, because people may be thing that okay what if I start this with 50,000 dollars today, and say I bought a domain with $10K and then I will put $10K into content and then $10K into another five domains and you know they spent $50K, would they start seeing, because this is not a typical result as you started seeing results in a few days and weeks and then you can see scalability and I am sure the business started making money I am sure through ad revenue pretty quickly, was he able to draw much out of the business to reinvest or was it mostly out of pocket?

Adam Smith:

Great question. The business became pretty self-sufficient after first like 6-8 months, I think in January, the site was doing 40,000 dollars a month in ad revenue, it’s was more than kind of self-sufficient, it pays for the ongoing content and ongoing links and anything else the site needs and a ton more. And the idea would be to get the site to the point where it’s paying for new content to start with, once its paying for new content, anything above that is profit then and money back in your pocket to start paying off your initial investment.

Each site gets there slightly differently, slightly different time zones and stuff and what I would say is each project is different, some projects we might say you need a higher investment in content and we will look for less expired domains for you or some might say that we have an awesome domain to start with and we don’t need any expired domain for the first six months and let’s put most of that budget into content and see what happens.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, I think that’s great because when you think about this $190K has gone to this as an investment, and may be at the start it was $80K you know half of that and people start thinking that I don’t have $200K to spend on this but you can start with 30 or 40K and as then it starts to make the money, obviously 6 months was pretty fast but you might looking at 12 months for it to be able to start paying for content itself but that’s the big disclaimer we need to make here as well.

Adam Smith:

Yes, definitely. This is not a garage quick kind of thing; you should be ideally looking at 12-18 months really to see kind of decent returns this site is something different, something special I think.

Jaryd Krause:

Yeah, totally. Well, congratulations on this, congratulations to you guys and the owner. I am so stoked for all parties involved and where can we send people to find out more about what you guys are doing and how you been able to help other people?

Adam Smith:

Sure, I am assuming you are going to put your link in the shore notes, so come to our website, use Jaryd’s link and we have a special offer on for bob customers. We get some free additional content and some money off link building, if you want to work with us. If you are not sure if you want to work with us, you can go to our website and set up a free 30 minute call, like a strategy call, we will talk you through some options, almost pick our brains for 30 minutes essentially and then if you decide you want to move forward, then go back through Jaryd’s link and claim the discount and claim the free content essentially.

Over at www.nichewebsite.builders is probably the easiest place to get to us, there is a little chat icon on there if you want to send us a message or we have got a book a call button on pretty much every page.

Jaryd Krause:

Thank you for coming on Adam. Guys, there will be a link in shore notes. Check them out and if you did like the episode, pleased make sure that you hit the subscribe button so you can listen to more. And if you think this was valuable or other people would have thought this would be valuable to, please make sure you share this podcast episode with them. Speak to you soon guys. Bye!