Ep 148: 3 Ways To Grow A Content Website From 4 to 5 Figures Per month

How would you like to grow your content site from four figures to five figures per month and beyond? Hey, this is Jaryd Krause, host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast. And in this episode, I'm doing a solo podcast with myself on how to scale content websites. Now I've helped many people scale their content sites from $1,000 to $2,000 per month, from $2,000 per month, all the way up to $24,000 per month, and everywhere in between.

Structure your content so you can grow your website, and the traffic actually compounds as you add more content to your website. A lot of people don't actually see this unless you're doing it the right way. I'm also going to be talking about why most people struggle to start a content website and also struggle to scale the content website that they built or bought, and there's one critical thing that most people do wrong. I'm also going to talk about how to harvest an actual community.

Why you should build a community around your content website. I'm going to talk about what that actually means. What does that look like, and how can you do it as well? Mostly, I'm going to talk about the secret to scaling any business. And this is something I usually only share with my one-on-one coaching clients because it really gets such amazing results, and it's also super simple and incredibly effective. So let's dive into the episode. Today's episode is brought to us by Niche Website Builders, which is a company a few of my clients are using for content creation and link building services.

They do everything from start to finish. So from keyword research all the way to uploading your completed article, We've also had Bob members use ready-made affiliate sites built by Niche Website Builders. So if you're looking to outrank your competitors' content and build better backlinks, Niche Website Builders and I have a special deal for you. Head to nichewebsite.builders.com I'll put a link in the show notes for you, but again, that's www.nichewebsite.builders.com

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First things first, in this episode, I'm going to talk a lot about tactics, strategies, and all of these different things when we're going to scale the content site. But the main focus when you're growing a content website, the 80-20 of it is creating content. So all of this is going to be about creating content, but creating better content that's going to help you actually grow. Okay, and I'm going to break down all that in a little bit more detail shortly. But the 80-20 of it is that when you're growing a content site—call them content sites—we have to create great content.

And if you're just putting content out there, article over article and article, and you're not getting your results, your traffic isn't compounding, you're not growing, and your income isn't growing as well, you're doing something wrong. So that's what we need to do. We need to break that down, come back to the basics, the foundations, and build a great foundation to grow our website on, understanding how we should actually do this. The first thing is that I want to talk about silos, pillar articles, supporting articles, and all that sort of stuff. When people are trying to scale a content site or build a content website, what I find is that most people go way too broad and way too quickly. So I'm going to talk about that shortly. But how do you structure your content? You want to create content that actually allows your traffic to grow and compound over time.

If you go away and try to cover broad topics, you're going to be trying to cover too many areas, and people aren't going to know what your actual website's about. But what you need to do is actually build a brand, you need to build authority in a particular space. So how we do that is we cover one main topic until we've covered it super well, and then we move on to another topic that's similar to our main topic. So let me give you an example.

If you're in the phishing space and you have a phishing content site, maybe there are, you know, three main categories. It may be cleaning a fish tank. It may be how to clean a fish tank or fish tank cleaning, whatever you want to call it. I don't know the categories. I don't know the keywords for this niche in this space. It may also be about how to keep your pet healthy. What to feed your pet So feed your pets, feed your fish, and maybe also feed your fish tank vegetables.

You know how to keep your animals, your pets, and your fish in a good environment without other fish that may eat them or other things in the tank that may not be very good for them in terms of their health. As you can tell, I don't know a lot about fish, but you may have those three main categories. What you don't want to do is just keep adding category after category after category and go too broad out of that, because then you're not going to be seen when you create content and publish content because you're focusing on things that you shouldn't be focusing on.

You should be focusing on one particular thing, keeping fish. Stick with that, don't get distracted. And when you do have those three main categories, have a pillar category for each, a pillar article for each of those categories, and then have supporting articles around that. Now, what does that actually look like? Let's stick with fish tank cleaning as our first category. We could have an article on how to clean a fish tank.

And then it could be the main hub article that covers a lot about how to clean different types of fish tanks in different ways, and then off of that, you can have internal links with supporting articles around how to clean a fish tank in five minutes, how to do a deep clean on a fish tank, how to clean a fish tank for this type of fish, how to clean a specific big fish tank, a small fish tank, a medium-sized fish tank, how to clean a fish tank with this filter, and how to see where I'm going with this your pillar article and also come out of your pillar article to send people to other content on your website.

And this is how you keep people on your page longer. That's the goal is we wanna keep people on our website longer, which is gonna allow us to have multiple things happen. Google algorithm is gonna see that people are on your site longer, the bounce rate is low, the time on page is high, builds up your SEO profile, your brand and your authority in that actual space. But also it allows people to stay in a place where they can help your website make more revenue. If they're longer on your page and you've got ads on your page, it's potential to make more ad revenue.

Affiliate links, the longer they're on your page, the more potential for them to click on those affiliate links. So that's our goal, is we want to keep people on our site and build an authority. And that's how we can do it, it has a great structure of pillar articles with supporting articles. That's very, very important. And what I believe happens with so many people with content sites feel like they're getting burnt out in that niche and they feel like they need to go away and cover another topic that is too far off topic, pun included.

I mean, you don't want to actually just start writing content for content sake on things that may be similar, but actually aren't gonna help you build your brand, aren't actually gonna help you become the authority in what you're trying to cover. So I see a lot of people trying to start or build sites that have multiple different topics and it could be in the home renovation niche and it could all be about flooring and then creating walls and then roofing and a bathroom reno and then a kitchen reno and it's just way too broad.

I know that you want to be in a home renovation space, but if you stick with one type of renovation, maybe just bathroom renovations, you're going to have far more trust and far more authority content within that specific niche, rather than trying to cover absolutely everything. And also when you think about it, when you go to a GP, a general practitioner or a doctor, they're not very specialized. If you have some problem that you actually really need to get solved, you're gonna go to a specialist, aren't you?

This is what I do in my life, and I hope everybody else does the same thing. You actually wanna treat your problem with somebody who knows what they're doing and has authority in that space and actually gets people results. Rather than just getting to the GP, you know things work out and that's what we do with our content when we're going to solve our problems on Google. Type in our questions. Would you rather go to a general site about everything or would you rather go to a specialist site that covers weight, covers the things that you're trying to solve in far more depth? Of course you are. A specialist site.

So that's what we should be doing with our site and I'm kind of harping on about this because I don't think people have really let that sink in especially when you're trying to get from a revenue on your content site to a thousand to two, three, four, five, and up into the five figure per month range. We really need to be strict with what we cover and in our topics. So that's the main thing is having your content and articles structured in a way that actually builds your authority and allows your traffic to compound over time.

Don't go out of your lane. In fact, if you have one niche and it's a specific niche, try not to have any more than the maximum, and that will help you get more in-depth articles. When you feel like maybe you've covered everything in your space, think again. Try and keep finding other angles on how you can make your content better around solving that specific problem and go deeper and deeper and deeper, and that's where the secret sauce is. That's where the really good content comes from. For example, with fish tanks, people must think, Oh, you know, fish tanks; there's only so many fish tanks that are coming out.

There are always new ways of cleaning and new cleaning products to use. There are always different ways that you can keep your fish. And as we grow and as the world grows, there are always new things coming. So you can get far more in depth and just stick in your lane. That's the main thing that I want to say here. Now that's covered, let's move on to the quality of your content. Everyone says this, and I'm repeating it quality content is super important. And I love to hear what you guys have to say.

Please, you know, email me or comment on this YouTube video, or if you're listening to audio in the podcast, email me or message me and let me know what you think about quality content versus quantity content. And there are different ways you can play the game, but I am about quality content, and I stick Sam behind that. So what does quality content actually mean? Number one is quality content that's easy to read. Quality content isn't a big wall of text. We don't want that.

Our content is broken up into different types of content on the page. For example, don't have more than two to three sentences per paragraph. And then you can even break up each paragraph with different headlines like H2s, H3s, H4s, et cetera. Or even an image, you can put a GIF in, a video, a quote, or something that's tweetable. You can put in a bullet point list of things, a numbered list of things, which could be an answer, which can also help you get a featured snippet, which I may talk about shortly.

It could even be an ad that helps break up the content. Now, why is it that I don't condone too many ads on a site? We need to remember to stick with a great user experience. And in fact, there are studies that show that less is more in terms of ads. The fewer ads you have, the more money you can make, which can also lean into the longer people are staying on your page, which is what I talked about earlier. But sometimes an ad can break up the content and make it easier to consume, along with those other things that I mentioned.

Your content should answer the question. It should solve people's problems. And what I usually do with my content, especially when people are getting content upgrades or downloading my resources or whatever it is, is wow them. I like to go above and beyond with the content that I create and provide people. So when they come for a question and they think they're just going to get one simple answer, which could be simple, and I provide them different angles in different ways they can solve the problem depending on where they're at in their position in life or what's specific to them if we're talking about their fish and their fish tanks,

So what I suggest we do with our content is not just create a piece of content that's got keywords that can solve an answer, just one answer is to go all in and go into massive depth in how you solve that problem for people. Go above and beyond, okay? So really impress them, and that's what I tend to tell people with their content. Thirdly, keywords, right? Keyword phrases.

Obviously, you need to know how to do good keyword research. If you don't know how to do keyword research or a lot of the other things that I'm talking about, I cover this in my Growing Online Businesses course in my community, but you need to know how to actually target keywords depending on how big your website is or how much authority your website has. When you're trying to rank for keywords and it's a very small site, you can't rank hard to get keyword authority.

So you've got to use a different strategy in keyword research, like the KGR, which is the keyword golden ratio that Doug Cunnington talks about. So go away and Google that if you haven't heard about it. And then you can start going for bigger keywords. So that's one part of our keywords you need to understand is how to do keyword research effectively. Next, keyword phrases undergo LSI, or latent semantic indexing.

So you've got to have your keyword in your title, slug, meta description, and all that. But the keyword phrases you should be using throughout your article are, and so we're trying to cover how to clean your fish tank. You could have other keywords like how to clean X type of fish tank, how to clean Y type of fish tank, or how to clean X type of fish tank in five minutes or under an hour. So having those different keyword phrases, like fish or types of fish, which could be, you know, latent semantic indexing words, different types of fish, different types of tanks, all those things add up to help the algorithm see that your site or your piece of content is really covering the topic in depth. But you shouldn't overstuff them in your article as well. You need to write for humans. And these actual keyword phrases and LSI words should actually come naturally, okay?

What you need to do is just come back and add them in, but they should be able to have your article read very easily. Also, there are tools that can help you with this, like Surfer SEO. Next up, you want to have internal links. I don't see enough internal links on articles by themselves, especially for these niche sites that I'm looking at and that my clients are looking at purchasing. I just don't see quality content or a great number of internal links. I'm talking like 20, like 15, 20, 30 internal links themselves, okay, linking to your supporting articles, linking to other areas you decide.

And then, of course, we should be talking about external links, linking to other websites in the space that's covering a topic that's similar to what you're covering or covering a topic that you do talk about in your article but is backing up what you're actually saying in your article, and the higher domain that all those articles you're actually linking to are external articles with your SEO profile as well.

Now let's move on to backlinks, okay? Backlinks are a topic that some people love and some people hate. Backlinks actually work, right? So my suggestion is, yeah, get them, go away, and get backlinks. I prefer people not to go away and buy them. Google does not like this. In my opinion, outreach is better, and collaborating with others in your niche is the secret to relationship building and networking.

You can do that, start to build relationships with people in your niche, and then you can collaborate on content together, and you'll be able to gain backlinks. But don't get backlinks just based on authority. I want to debunk this a little bit, and I spoke to Kyle Roof about this. What Kyle actually says is that most people go away and buy backlinks based on just their DR and how much authority that actual link has. What we should be thinking about, how we should be thinking about our marketing budget.

When we go away and spend money on backlinks, that's our marketing budget. Now, when people are doing pay-per-click ads and pay-per-click marketing, what's their goal? Their goal is to make sales. And how do they get sales? Traffic, relevant traffic. So how much traffic can you get from a link? That's what we should be asking ourselves. And how relevant is that traffic? Okay, so that's what we should be shopping for is backlinks that provide us relevant traffic that can actually end up as revenue for our site.

So optimize your backlink strategy instead of just buying a bunch of links from high authority sites. I won't, I've suggested the latter, right? Definitely go away and buy links based on how much traffic they have and how much money they can make on your site. Lastly, with the content creation and the quality content, do your competitive research. Check out the keyword that you're trying to rank for in the article that you're creating and see what your competitors' articles actually are. And then go away and take what they're doing and do it better, but on your own. Maybe they have a bullet point list of things. Maybe they have more images. Maybe they break up their content better. Maybe it's easier to read.

Maybe they've got cool videos. Maybe the text is just bigger and better or a different style of text, right? Different fonts. Maybe they cover topics or answer questions that you may never have thought to answer before and are providing better solutions than you may have thought you could with your article. The idea here is to go away, do some competitive research, and make your content the best article on the internet for what you're actually trying to cover for that actual keyword.

Now, don't go away and reinvent the wheel here. You can take inspiration from your competitors, but do not, whatever you do, ever go away and just copy their work. What we're doing here is getting inspiration to go away and recreate that for ourselves, right? So we're not totally reinventing the wheel, but we're recreating something based on ideas and inspiration that we have gotten from our competitors. That's what I believe is one of the best tips to go away and make our content better when we're either upgrading our content or when we're starting to create our content and see what is out there in the market and go away and make something that's far superior to that.

And if you do this over and over again with a piece of content, you're going to build great authority in terms of the content that you're putting out there. Next, I want to talk about building a community. This is the big thing, and it certainly helps. The reason I like building a community for a content site is because it de-risks where your traffic comes from. It de-risks your business a bit. And I'm all about de-risking strategies, which are also a big part of the process of becoming growth strategies.

So what a community actually does is allow people to actually come into your sphere through your content on Google. You can then start to create a discussion with your readers. All right, and that's what we actually want to do is you wanna build a hub where people can come and mingle and talk to each other. They can reply to other people's content or comments. They can ask you questions, reply to your questions. And how do we actually do this? How do we build a community for our content website? What does that look like?

Let's use an example. Let's use the phishing website as an example. What we want to do with our content is create a discussion with our readers. So how can we do this? We can ask questions in our content and actually push people to answer those questions by leaving a comment. Ask people to reply to your questions in your articles or email you. They will reply to you via email. When people actually start to build a relationship with a website or a website owner, that connection usually brings them back.

That's what I suggest we do with our content is be personal with our content and approachable with our content, right? And offer massive value. The best way to build a community is to build an email list and an audience of people who want to come back to your content again and again. Another way that you can do this is by having a series of content that, you know, you bring out every month, right?

Or every week or every two weeks, and they want to see that piece of content because they want to see your progress and they want to ask you questions about it. The best way we can really do that is to build an email list, have a Facebook group, or do both, right? Or you could have different content. You could have a YouTube channel, a Facebook page where you go live, or even an Instagram account. Building a community outside of just where people come to congregate and read your content on your website allows people to approach you more; they see you're not just a website without a face.

They see that you've got multiple channels, and you're actually providing multiple solutions in multiple different formats of content for your actual website. And people can be on different platforms. Maybe they like Facebook or Instagram better than leaving comments on your actual article. Push people to contact you, and just continue to ask them questions and build a community.

And then you can put them into a group. It could be a forum, it could be a Facebook group, and then you can repurpose the content that you actually created for your article and put it on these different platforms. Not only is this going to get you more traffic when you share your content on these different platforms, but it's going to get other people talking about things in your niche together, and relationships can build. And that's going to bring them back to your website and bring them back to your brand. And so building a community isn't just about, like, having a Facebook group, because that's not very valuable.

If you have just an email list with people on it or just a Facebook group with people in it, the value isn't there. The real value is the connection that you create between those people and the connection that you create between yourself as the brand and the publisher with them too. That's where the value is. Definitely be approachable. Definitely ask great questions and spark and poke people to bring out their creativity and bring out themselves with you and with everybody else in your community.

So that's what building a community is, and that's how you can actually do it. Last but not least, I was just going to finish up there, but I've got a bonus, right? The bonus is focus. Now this is the thing that I was telling you about at the start of the episode, which I share with my one-on-one coaching clients. What we need to do is focus on what's working and do less of what's not working and more of what's working.

On that, it's that 80-20 principle. Now, how do we do this? First of all, we need to track things on our site. We need to track our best articles. How much traffic is it getting? Where is it ranked? How much revenue is it bringing in? And then also, how many links does it have, like backlinks coming to it and all that sort of stuff? We want to track what's working, what our best articles are doing, and why they're performing. How can we do this so we can have a spreadsheet?

Articles and track what's working. Look at what's working. All right, my five articles all have this. Then do this in all of your articles. My five articles all have a featured snippet. Why do they all have a featured snippet? Because they've got a bullet point list or a numbered list of one to five or one to ten answering the questions that people have about how to clean their fish tank. So let's make sure we can get featured for a featured snippet on each of our articles by having a bullet point list or a numbered list, right?

Why do they have more backlinks, and how did that work? Let's go away and rinse and repeat that strategy on all of our other content. So that's what we want to do if we want to do less of what's not working or those articles that aren't actually performing. Let's just highlight why they're not working, highlight why the other ones are working, and do more of what's working. It's a very simple strategy, but I can guarantee you that 95% of people who are listening to me right now will not do this. And that's the difference between seeing someone who's going to be successful and actually grow their site and somebody who doesn't.

We need to do the little things. We need to work out what's working, what's not working, and do more of what's working. Too many people focus on doing what some influencer tells them to do. Or they listen to a podcast, a YouTube video, or an SEO talk about, Oh, this is the new way that we should be doing SEO. This is the new way we should be creating content. No, no, no, no, no. That's external.

We shouldn't be focusing on how we can grow our business. Instead, we should be focusing internally on what's working in our business, because what an SEO or an influencer may be talking about may not actually work for your website. And in fact, so many people do this, is they go away and try and do everything that everybody's telling them, and they run around in circles and get no results because they don't track anything, so they don't know what's working and what isn't working, and they don't know what to focus on. So that's the main thing that I suggest you guys do. Guys, that's it from me, folks. I hope you actually got a bunch from this. I just sort of firehosed you with information in this podcast episode.

If you liked it, please let me know. Just email me at jarydatbuyingonlinbusiness.com if you want to see more solo podcast episodes from me covering specific topics in depth, happy to do this. Also, if you do have a content website and you want coaching from me or you have any online business, I help people scale not just content sites but SaaS and membership sites and also e-commerce businesses, anywhere from five figures to six figures, seven figures, and even eight figures. So if you want coaching from me, email me at jarydatbuyingonlinbusiness.com to scale your business.

That's it from me and I'll speak to you soon. Bye.