If you’ve had trouble picking a niche, this episode is for you. I spoke with Pamela Slim, business coach and author of the best-seller, Escape from Cubicle Nation and her latest book, Body of Work. We talked about how to develop the language to attract the right people and repel the wrong people to your business. If you like what you hear, write a review, subscribe on Apple Podcasts and, one more thing, be sure to sign up for my Quick Tips from Marketing Mentor.
The Hallmark Channel prides itself on steering clear of controversy, but the network has landed itself in a major fracas, smack in the middle of its most lucrative time of the year, during its Countdown to Christmas marathon. On Thursday, in response to pressure from a conservative group, the network pulled several ads from wedding…
And yes, who doesn’t want to be at the top of Google for some of the most competitive terms? But the reality is, we don’t all have the budget or time.
So
then, what should you do?
Well, what if I told you there were simple ways to get more organic traffic and, best of all, you don’t have to do one bit of SEO?
Seriously.
So,
what is it? And how can you get more organic traffic?
Well,
this story will help explain it…
The
old days
When
I first started my journey as an SEO, I got really good at one thing.
Getting
rankings!
Now to be fair, this was back in 2003 when it wasn’t that hard to rank on Google (or any other search engine for that matter).
Stuff some keywords into your page, your meta tags, and build some spammy rich anchor text links and you were good to go.
You
could literally see results in less than a month.
SEO wasn’t too complicated back then. So much so, that I even started an SEO agency and created a handful of sites.
I was starting to rank my sites at the top of Google but they didn’t make a dollar. Literally, not a single dollar.
In fact, I was actually losing money on them because I had to pay for the domain registration expenses and hosting.
So, one day I decided that I was tired of losing money and I was going to do something about it. I took the keywords that I was ranking for and started to type them into Google to see who was paying for ads for those terms.
I hit up each of those sites and tried to get a hold of the owner or the person in charge of marketing.
I asked them how much they were paying for ads and offered them the same exact traffic for a much lower price. I was able to do this because I already had sites that ranked for those keywords.
In other words, I offered to rent out my website for a monthly fee that was a fraction of what they were paying for paid ads.
Next thing you know I was collecting 5 figures in monthly checks and my “renters” were ecstatic because they were generating sales at a fraction of the costs compared to what they were spending on paid ads.
So, what’s the strategy?
Well, it’s simple. Back in the day, I used to rent out my websites… the whole site.
These
days I’ve learned how to monetize my own site, so I don’t rent them out.
So why not rent a page on someone else’s site? From there, modify that page a bit to promote your products or services?
I
know this sounds crazy, but it works. I have one person that just reaches out
to site owners asking if we can rent out a page on their site. We do this for
all industries and verticals… and when I look at how much we are spending
versus how much income we are generating, it’s crazy.
Here are the stats for the last month:
Rental
fees: $24,592
Outreach costs: $3,000
Legal
costs: $580
Copywriting
and monetization costs: $1,500
Total
monthly cost: $29,672
Now
guess what my monthly income was?
It
was $79,283.58.
Not
too bad.
Now
your cost on this model won’t be as high as mine because you can do your own
outreach, monetize the page you are renting on your own, and you probably don’t
need a lawyer.
And don’t be afraid of how much I am spending in rental fees as you can get away with spending $0 in the first 30 days as I will show you exactly what to do.
Remember, it’s also not what you are spending, it’s about profit and what you are making. If it won’t cost you any money in the first 30 days and you can generate income, your risk is little to none.
Here
are the exact steps you need to follow:
Step
#1: Find the terms you want to rank for
If
you already know the terms you want to rank for, great, you can skip this step.
If you don’t, I want you to head to Ubersuggest and type in a few of your competitors’ URLs.
Head
over to the top pages report and look at their top pages.
Now
click on “view all” under the estimated visits column to see a list of
keywords that each page ranks for.
I want you to create a list of all of the keywords that contain a high search volume and have a high CPC. Keywords with a high CPC usually mean that they convert well.
Keywords
with a low CPC usually mean they don’t convert as well.
When
you are making a list of keywords, you’ll need to make sure that you have a
product or service that is related to each keyword. If you don’t then you won’t
be able to monetize the traffic.
Step
#2: Search for the term
It’s
time to do some Google searches.
Look
for all of the pages that rank in the top 10 for the term you ideally want to
rank for.
Don’t
waste your time with page 2.
What
I want you to look for is:
Someone who isn’t your competitor. Your competition isn’t likely to rent out a page on their site to you.
A page that isn’t monetized. Not selling a product or service. (If the page has ads, don’t worry.)
A site owned by a smaller company… a publicly-traded company isn’t likely to do a deal. A venture-funded company isn’t likely to do a deal either (Crunchbase will tell you if they are venture-funded).
Step
#3: Hit up the website
Typically, through their contact page, they should have their email addresses or phone number listed. If they have a contact form, you can get in touch that way as well.
If
you can’t find their details, you can do a whois
lookup to see if you can find their phone number.
What’ll
you want to do is get them on the phone. DO NOT MAKE YOUR PITCH OVER EMAIL.
It
just doesn’t work well over email.
If
you can’t find their phone number, email them with a message that goes
something like this…
Subject: [their website name]
Hey [insert first name],
Do you have time for a quick call this week?
We’ve been researching your business and we would like to potentially make you an offer.
Let me know what works for you.
Cheers,
[insert your name]
[insert your company]
[insert your phone number]
You
want to keep the email short as I have found that it tends to generate more
calls.
Once you get them on the phone, you can tell them a little bit about yourself. Once you do that, tell them that you noticed they have a page or multiple pages on their website that interest you.
Point
out the URL and tell them how you are interested in giving them money each
month to rent out the page and you wouldn’t change much of it… but you need
some more information before you can make your offer.
At this point, you’ll want to find out how much traffic that page generates and the keywords it ranks for. They should have an idea by just looking at their Google Analytics (you’ll find most of these sites don’t use Google Search Console).
Once
you have that, let them know that you will get in touch with them in the next
few days after you run some numbers.
Go back, try to figure out what each click is worth based on a conservative conversion rate of .5%. In other words, .if 5% of that traffic converted into a customer, what would the traffic be worth to you after all expenses?
You’ll
want to use a conservative number because you can’t modify the page too
heavily or else you may lose rankings.
Once
you have a rough idea of what the page is worth, get back on the phone with
them and say you want to run tests for 30 days to get a more solid number on
what you can pay them as you want to give them a fair offer.
Typically,
most people don’t have an issue because they aren’t making money from the page
in the first place.
Step
#4: Monetize the page
If
you are selling a product, the easiest way to monetize is to add links to the
products you are selling.
For
example, if you are selling a kitchen appliance like a toaster, you can add
links from the article to your site.
The easiest way to monetize a blog post is to add links to products or services you are selling.
Don’t delete a lot of the content on the page you are modifying… adding isn’t too much of an issue but when you delete content sometimes you will lose rankings.
As
for a service-based business, linking out to pages on your site where people
can fill out their lead information is great.
Or you can just add lead capturing to the page you are renting out. Kind of like how HubSpot adds lead forms on their site.
I’ve actually found that they convert better than just linking out to your site.
When monetizing the page you are renting, keep in mind that you will need disclaimers to let people know that you are collecting their information for privacy purposes. You also should disclose you are renting out the page and nofollow the links.
Once you are monetizing the page for a bit, you’ll have a rough idea of what it is worth and you can make an offer on what you’ll page.
I recommend doing a 12-month contract in which you can opt-out
with a 30-day notice.
The reason you want a 12-month agreement is that you don’t want to have to keep renegotiating. I also include the 30-day opt-out notice in case they lose their rankings, you can opt-out.
And to clarify on the op-out clause, I have it so only I can opt-out and they are stuck in the agreement for a year.
Conclusion
SEO isn’t the only way you can get more organic traffic.
Being creative, such as renting pages that already rank is an easy solution. Best of all, you can get results instantly and it’s probably cheaper than doing SEO in the long run.
The only issue with this model is that it is really hard to
scale.
If I were you, I would do both. I, of course, do SEO on my own site because it provides a big ROI. And, of course, if you can rent out the pages of everyone else who ranks for the terms you want to rank for, it can provide multiple streams of income from SEO.
The beauty of this is model is that you can take up more than one listing on page 1. In theory, you can take up all 10 if you can convince everyone to let you rent their ranking page.
So, what do you think of the idea? Are you going to try it out?
Instagram Stories was one of the most dynamic social media channels in 2019. So much happened with Stories — from new developments with the product to strong returns on Stories ads and organic reach.
And at Buffer, Stories has been a major focus in 2019 as well. Within the Buffer product, we debuted Stories scheduling to help you plan and manage your Stories content, and we released advanced Stories analytics to help you know what’s working.
So when it comes to picking some of the best Stories campaigns of 2019, we really have a lot of options. And it’s hard to choose.
The Best Instagram Stories of 2019
We’ll run through a list of our favorites. If there are any favorites of yours that we missed, please do let us know by using #bufferpodcast on any social media channel.
Let’s get right to it then.
1. Tastemade
Some of the best Instagram content is food content. And Stories is no exception! Especially the folks at Tastemade.
Tastemade is a community of food, travel, and design lovers. Their website is chock full of beautiful food videos and shows. They do a great job translating it to their Instagram Stories.
In particular, their “tap fast” format has been so fun to watch.
That’s right. Many of the stories on the @tastemadeuk handle use “tap fast.” These Stories piece together dozens of photos in stop-motion fashion — each photo just a slight movement ahead of the previous. And then you are the one who animates all the images into a moving picture by tapping quickly from one Story to the next.
Collectively, it makes a self-propelled stop-motion video of a biscuit baking or a cooking dunking. It’s awesome. And it’s good for your Stories stats, too. There’s a ton of incentive to tap all the way through to see how the Story ends up.
Another way that brands have taken advantage of this is sharing playlists through Instagram Stories.
Brooklinen, for instance, has a great series of playlists. They’ve even branded them with their own name: Brooklinen Beats. Each time Brooklinen shares a a playlist on Stories, they add a swipe up link that sends people to Spotify to listen. Brooklinen debuted a new playlist every week at the start of 2019, and they’ve saved all their playlists to their Stories highlights for people to check out anytime.
3. Burrow
Next up, one of the most creative Stories we saw this year came from the furniture brand Burrow.
They basically created a coloring page for their audience to fill in.
Yeah, the set of Stories was called Dream Sofa. Burrow asked its followers to describe their dream sofa — it could be as wild and imaginative as they liked. Then Burrow provided the sofa template. Burrow shared a drawing of a couch — just the outline in black, on a white background. They posted this to the Burrow Stories, along with instructions on how their community could download the picture and add to it. Then people grabbed the template, added their own stickers and colors, and shared to their personal accounts. Burrow was able to re-share the Dream Sofa Stories back to the Burrow account.Talk about great community engagement and incredible user-generated content!
4. Potluck
For our next top Instagram Story, we’re going back to the world of food. Cookware brand Potluck had a great campaign based on one of the neatest — albeit underutilized — features of Instagram Stories: custom AR filters.
Potluck created its very own Instagram Stories filter called Yes Chef. The filter adds a chef hat and mustache to any faces in the photo.
Many people in their community ended up using the filter on their photos and tagging Potluck in the Stories. The Potluck team was then able to reshare and collect these photos into their own Stories collection, which remains on their profile in their Stories highlights.
Each time Potluck shares a new Yes Chef pic, they give a shout out and an @mention to the person who originally made the photo, another great way to build community support for the brand.
Cookware brands really had some awesome Stories this year. Our next pick is from another cookware brand, or rather, from its parent company.
Pattern Brands, which release Equal Parts cookware products this year, had a fantastic series of Stories content that told a really compelling brand story.
(Pattern is the brand featured in our new podcast series that follows the introduction of Pattern, going from nothing to a new product over the course of a few months. You can listen to this series by searching for Breaking Brand wherever you listen to podcasts.)
Pattern’s Instagram Stories campaign is quite simple in concept. They created wallpapers that their audience could download and use as phone backgrounds. We’ll share a couple examples in our show notes. They’re beautiful.
And what’s particularly compelling about how they approached this is that they told a larger story: the backgrounds are watercolors in a soft, calming palette, designed to promote a sense of peace when you’re spending time on your phone. This is right in line with the brand story that Pattern is telling.
This strategy is such a wonderful display of customer service and value. Allbirds takes these FAQ Stories and adds them to their Stories Highlights so the FAQ is always visible from their Instagram profile. This gives potential customers the chance to find answers to their questions quickly and easily, right from the profile page, without having to wait any time at all to hear back from an Allbirds person.
7. Monica + Andy
Speaking of making great use of Stories highlights, Another Stories campaign we love is the way that brands have built out almost an entire library of content within their Stories.
Take Monica + Andy, for instance. The kidswear brand runs its own podcast, and each podcast episode gets a shoutout on the brand’s Instagram Stories.
What’s particularly great is that each Story shoutout follows a similar template. There’s a photo of the podcast guest plus some nice typography and titles. What Monica + Andy do then is take these Stories and put them all into a Stories Highlights. When you tap on the Highlights, you can thumb through the entire podcast archive, one after the other, and all the images look great and on-brand.
8. Its Nice That
The online design magazine puts together a weekly newsletter to share on their Stories at the end of every week.
It’s a ton of great content, packaged perfectly for Instagram. Each story is its own slide, designed with a unique background and with strong headline copy. You swipe up to go to the Its Nice That website to read more. They’ll share about five to ten articles each week this way — the top content and news from the past few days in a very digestible format.
A Story template is simply an image with graphics and text that includes a number of blank spaces for people to fill in their answers. Picture a questionnaire or a mad lib.
The Hopper blog listed a huge number of different options of ways to use these templates, many of which we saw on several brand accounts in 2019.The list includes:
Trending topics, like a “follow Friday” template or a “Five Women who inspire me” on International Women’s Day
Current affairs, like sporting events, where you can run a guess the score template
and a personal favorite of mine — Fill-in-the blank emoji templates where you pick an emoji that describes, say, your current mood or the weather or what you did today
How to say hello to us
We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!
Instagram Stories was one of the most dynamic social media channels in 2019. So much happened with Stories — from new developments with the product to strong returns on Stories ads and organic reach.
And at Buffer, Stories has been a major focus in 2019 as well. Within the Buffer product, we debuted Stories scheduling to help you plan and manage your Stories content, and we released advanced Stories analytics to help you know what’s working.
So when it comes to picking some of the best Stories campaigns of 2019, we really have a lot of options. And it’s hard to choose.
The Best Instagram Stories of 2019
We’ll run through a list of our favorites. If there are any favorites of yours that we missed, please do let us know by using #bufferpodcast on any social media channel.
Let’s get right to it then.
1. Tastemade
Some of the best Instagram content is food content. And Stories is no exception! Especially the folks at Tastemade.
Tastemade is a community of food, travel, and design lovers. Their website is chock full of beautiful food videos and shows. They do a great job translating it to their Instagram Stories.
In particular, their “tap fast” format has been so fun to watch.
That’s right. Many of the stories on the @tastemadeuk handle use “tap fast.” These Stories piece together dozens of photos in stop-motion fashion — each photo just a slight movement ahead of the previous. And then you are the one who animates all the images into a moving picture by tapping quickly from one Story to the next.
Collectively, it makes a self-propelled stop-motion video of a biscuit baking or a cooking dunking. It’s awesome. And it’s good for your Stories stats, too. There’s a ton of incentive to tap all the way through to see how the Story ends up.
Another way that brands have taken advantage of this is sharing playlists through Instagram Stories.
Brooklinen, for instance, has a great series of playlists. They’ve even branded them with their own name: Brooklinen Beats. Each time Brooklinen shares a a playlist on Stories, they add a swipe up link that sends people to Spotify to listen. Brooklinen debuted a new playlist every week at the start of 2019, and they’ve saved all their playlists to their Stories highlights for people to check out anytime.
3. Burrow
Next up, one of the most creative Stories we saw this year came from the furniture brand Burrow.
They basically created a coloring page for their audience to fill in.
Yeah, the set of Stories was called Dream Sofa. Burrow asked its followers to describe their dream sofa — it could be as wild and imaginative as they liked. Then Burrow provided the sofa template. Burrow shared a drawing of a couch — just the outline in black, on a white background. They posted this to the Burrow Stories, along with instructions on how their community could download the picture and add to it. Then people grabbed the template, added their own stickers and colors, and shared to their personal accounts. Burrow was able to re-share the Dream Sofa Stories back to the Burrow account.Talk about great community engagement and incredible user-generated content!
4. Potluck
For our next top Instagram Story, we’re going back to the world of food. Cookware brand Potluck had a great campaign based on one of the neatest — albeit underutilized — features of Instagram Stories: custom AR filters.
Potluck created its very own Instagram Stories filter called Yes Chef. The filter adds a chef hat and mustache to any faces in the photo.
Many people in their community ended up using the filter on their photos and tagging Potluck in the Stories. The Potluck team was then able to reshare and collect these photos into their own Stories collection, which remains on their profile in their Stories highlights.
Each time Potluck shares a new Yes Chef pic, they give a shout out and an @mention to the person who originally made the photo, another great way to build community support for the brand.
Cookware brands really had some awesome Stories this year. Our next pick is from another cookware brand, or rather, from its parent company.
Pattern Brands, which release Equal Parts cookware products this year, had a fantastic series of Stories content that told a really compelling brand story.
(Pattern is the brand featured in our new podcast series that follows the introduction of Pattern, going from nothing to a new product over the course of a few months. You can listen to this series by searching for Breaking Brand wherever you listen to podcasts.)
Pattern’s Instagram Stories campaign is quite simple in concept. They created wallpapers that their audience could download and use as phone backgrounds. We’ll share a couple examples in our show notes. They’re beautiful.
And what’s particularly compelling about how they approached this is that they told a larger story: the backgrounds are watercolors in a soft, calming palette, designed to promote a sense of peace when you’re spending time on your phone. This is right in line with the brand story that Pattern is telling.
This strategy is such a wonderful display of customer service and value. Allbirds takes these FAQ Stories and adds them to their Stories Highlights so the FAQ is always visible from their Instagram profile. This gives potential customers the chance to find answers to their questions quickly and easily, right from the profile page, without having to wait any time at all to hear back from an Allbirds person.
7. Monica + Andy
Speaking of making great use of Stories highlights, Another Stories campaign we love is the way that brands have built out almost an entire library of content within their Stories.
Take Monica + Andy, for instance. The kidswear brand runs its own podcast, and each podcast episode gets a shoutout on the brand’s Instagram Stories.
What’s particularly great is that each Story shoutout follows a similar template. There’s a photo of the podcast guest plus some nice typography and titles. What Monica + Andy do then is take these Stories and put them all into a Stories Highlights. When you tap on the Highlights, you can thumb through the entire podcast archive, one after the other, and all the images look great and on-brand.
8. Its Nice That
The online design magazine puts together a weekly newsletter to share on their Stories at the end of every week.
It’s a ton of great content, packaged perfectly for Instagram. Each story is its own slide, designed with a unique background and with strong headline copy. You swipe up to go to the Its Nice That website to read more. They’ll share about five to ten articles each week this way — the top content and news from the past few days in a very digestible format.
A Story template is simply an image with graphics and text that includes a number of blank spaces for people to fill in their answers. Picture a questionnaire or a mad lib.
The Hopper blog listed a huge number of different options of ways to use these templates, many of which we saw on several brand accounts in 2019.The list includes:
Trending topics, like a “follow Friday” template or a “Five Women who inspire me” on International Women’s Day
Current affairs, like sporting events, where you can run a guess the score template
and a personal favorite of mine — Fill-in-the blank emoji templates where you pick an emoji that describes, say, your current mood or the weather or what you did today
How to say hello to us
We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!
If you’ve had trouble picking a niche, this episode is for you. I spoke with Pamela Slim, business coach and author of the best-seller, Escape from Cubicle Nation and her latest book, Body of Work. We talked about how to develop the language to attract the right people and repel the wrong people to your business. If you like what you hear, write a review, subscribe on Apple Podcasts and, one more thing, be sure to sign up for my Quick Tips from Marketing Mentor.
And yes, who doesn’t want to be at the top of Google for some of the most competitive terms? But the reality is, we don’t all have the budget or time.
So
then, what should you do?
Well, what if I told you there were simple ways to get more organic traffic and, best of all, you don’t have to do one bit of SEO?
Seriously.
So,
what is it? And how can you get more organic traffic?
Well,
this story will help explain it…
The
old days
When
I first started my journey as an SEO, I got really good at one thing.
Getting
rankings!
Now to be fair, this was back in 2003 when it wasn’t that hard to rank on Google (or any other search engine for that matter).
Stuff some keywords into your page, your meta tags, and build some spammy rich anchor text links and you were good to go.
You
could literally see results in less than a month.
SEO wasn’t too complicated back then. So much so, that I even started an SEO agency and created a handful of sites.
I was starting to rank my sites at the top of Google but they didn’t make a dollar. Literally, not a single dollar.
In fact, I was actually losing money on them because I had to pay for the domain registration expenses and hosting.
So, one day I decided that I was tired of losing money and I was going to do something about it. I took the keywords that I was ranking for and started to type them into Google to see who was paying for ads for those terms.
I hit up each of those sites and tried to get a hold of the owner or the person in charge of marketing.
I asked them how much they were paying for ads and offered them the same exact traffic for a much lower price. I was able to do this because I already had sites that ranked for those keywords.
In other words, I offered to rent out my website for a monthly fee that was a fraction of what they were paying for paid ads.
Next thing you know I was collecting 5 figures in monthly checks and my “renters” were ecstatic because they were generating sales at a fraction of the costs compared to what they were spending on paid ads.
So, what’s the strategy?
Well, it’s simple. Back in the day, I used to rent out my websites… the whole site.
These
days I’ve learned how to monetize my own site, so I don’t rent them out.
So why not rent a page on someone else’s site? From there, modify that page a bit to promote your products or services?
I
know this sounds crazy, but it works. I have one person that just reaches out
to site owners asking if we can rent out a page on their site. We do this for
all industries and verticals… and when I look at how much we are spending
versus how much income we are generating, it’s crazy.
Here are the stats for the last month:
Rental
fees: $24,592
Outreach costs: $3,000
Legal
costs: $580
Copywriting
and monetization costs: $1,500
Total
monthly cost: $29,672
Now
guess what my monthly income was?
It
was $79,283.58.
Not
too bad.
Now
your cost on this model won’t be as high as mine because you can do your own
outreach, monetize the page you are renting on your own, and you probably don’t
need a lawyer.
And don’t be afraid of how much I am spending in rental fees as you can get away with spending $0 in the first 30 days as I will show you exactly what to do.
Remember, it’s also not what you are spending, it’s about profit and what you are making. If it won’t cost you any money in the first 30 days and you can generate income, your risk is little to none.
Here
are the exact steps you need to follow:
Step
#1: Find the terms you want to rank for
If
you already know the terms you want to rank for, great, you can skip this step.
If you don’t, I want you to head to Ubersuggest and type in a few of your competitors’ URLs.
Head
over to the top pages report and look at their top pages.
Now
click on “view all” under the estimated visits column to see a list of
keywords that each page ranks for.
I want you to create a list of all of the keywords that contain a high search volume and have a high CPC. Keywords with a high CPC usually mean that they convert well.
Keywords
with a low CPC usually mean they don’t convert as well.
When
you are making a list of keywords, you’ll need to make sure that you have a
product or service that is related to each keyword. If you don’t then you won’t
be able to monetize the traffic.
Step
#2: Search for the term
It’s
time to do some Google searches.
Look
for all of the pages that rank in the top 10 for the term you ideally want to
rank for.
Don’t
waste your time with page 2.
What
I want you to look for is:
Someone who isn’t your competitor. Your competition isn’t likely to rent out a page on their site to you.
A page that isn’t monetized. Not selling a product or service. (If the page has ads, don’t worry.)
A site owned by a smaller company… a publicly-traded company isn’t likely to do a deal. A venture-funded company isn’t likely to do a deal either (Crunchbase will tell you if they are venture-funded).
Step
#3: Hit up the website
Typically, through their contact page, they should have their email addresses or phone number listed. If they have a contact form, you can get in touch that way as well.
If
you can’t find their details, you can do a whois
lookup to see if you can find their phone number.
What’ll
you want to do is get them on the phone. DO NOT MAKE YOUR PITCH OVER EMAIL.
It
just doesn’t work well over email.
If
you can’t find their phone number, email them with a message that goes
something like this…
Subject: [their website name]
Hey [insert first name],
Do you have time for a quick call this week?
We’ve been researching your business and we would like to potentially make you an offer.
Let me know what works for you.
Cheers,
[insert your name]
[insert your company]
[insert your phone number]
You
want to keep the email short as I have found that it tends to generate more
calls.
Once you get them on the phone, you can tell them a little bit about yourself. Once you do that, tell them that you noticed they have a page or multiple pages on their website that interest you.
Point
out the URL and tell them how you are interested in giving them money each
month to rent out the page and you wouldn’t change much of it… but you need
some more information before you can make your offer.
At this point, you’ll want to find out how much traffic that page generates and the keywords it ranks for. They should have an idea by just looking at their Google Analytics (you’ll find most of these sites don’t use Google Search Console).
Once
you have that, let them know that you will get in touch with them in the next
few days after you run some numbers.
Go back, try to figure out what each click is worth based on a conservative conversion rate of .5%. In other words, .if 5% of that traffic converted into a customer, what would the traffic be worth to you after all expenses?
You’ll
want to use a conservative number because you can’t modify the page too
heavily or else you may lose rankings.
Once
you have a rough idea of what the page is worth, get back on the phone with
them and say you want to run tests for 30 days to get a more solid number on
what you can pay them as you want to give them a fair offer.
Typically,
most people don’t have an issue because they aren’t making money from the page
in the first place.
Step
#4: Monetize the page
If
you are selling a product, the easiest way to monetize is to add links to the
products you are selling.
For
example, if you are selling a kitchen appliance like a toaster, you can add
links from the article to your site.
The easiest way to monetize a blog post is to add links to products or services you are selling.
Don’t delete a lot of the content on the page you are modifying… adding isn’t too much of an issue but when you delete content sometimes you will lose rankings.
As
for a service-based business, linking out to pages on your site where people
can fill out their lead information is great.
Or you can just add lead capturing to the page you are renting out. Kind of like how HubSpot adds lead forms on their site.
I’ve actually found that they convert better than just linking out to your site.
When monetizing the page you are renting, keep in mind that you will need disclaimers to let people know that you are collecting their information for privacy purposes. You also should disclose you are renting out the page and nofollow the links.
Once you are monetizing the page for a bit, you’ll have a rough idea of what it is worth and you can make an offer on what you’ll page.
I recommend doing a 12-month contract in which you can opt-out
with a 30-day notice.
The reason you want a 12-month agreement is that you don’t want to have to keep renegotiating. I also include the 30-day opt-out notice in case they lose their rankings, you can opt-out.
And to clarify on the op-out clause, I have it so only I can opt-out and they are stuck in the agreement for a year.
Conclusion
SEO isn’t the only way you can get more organic traffic.
Being creative, such as renting pages that already rank is an easy solution. Best of all, you can get results instantly and it’s probably cheaper than doing SEO in the long run.
The only issue with this model is that it is really hard to
scale.
If I were you, I would do both. I, of course, do SEO on my own site because it provides a big ROI. And, of course, if you can rent out the pages of everyone else who ranks for the terms you want to rank for, it can provide multiple streams of income from SEO.
The beauty of this is model is that you can take up more than one listing on page 1. In theory, you can take up all 10 if you can convince everyone to let you rent their ranking page.
So, what do you think of the idea? Are you going to try it out?
And yes, who doesn’t want to be at the top of Google for some of the most competitive terms? But the reality is, we don’t all have the budget or time.
So
then, what should you do?
Well, what if I told you there were simple ways to get more organic traffic and, best of all, you don’t have to do one bit of SEO?
Seriously.
So,
what is it? And how can you get more organic traffic?
Well,
this story will help explain it…
The
old days
When
I first started my journey as an SEO, I got really good at one thing.
Getting
rankings!
Now to be fair, this was back in 2003 when it wasn’t that hard to rank on Google (or any other search engine for that matter).
Stuff some keywords into your page, your meta tags, and build some spammy rich anchor text links and you were good to go.
You
could literally see results in less than a month.
SEO wasn’t too complicated back then. So much so, that I even started an SEO agency and created a handful of sites.
I was starting to rank my sites at the top of Google but they didn’t make a dollar. Literally, not a single dollar.
In fact, I was actually losing money on them because I had to pay for the domain registration expenses and hosting.
So, one day I decided that I was tired of losing money and I was going to do something about it. I took the keywords that I was ranking for and started to type them into Google to see who was paying for ads for those terms.
I hit up each of those sites and tried to get a hold of the owner or the person in charge of marketing.
I asked them how much they were paying for ads and offered them the same exact traffic for a much lower price. I was able to do this because I already had sites that ranked for those keywords.
In other words, I offered to rent out my website for a monthly fee that was a fraction of what they were paying for paid ads.
Next thing you know I was collecting 5 figures in monthly checks and my “renters” were ecstatic because they were generating sales at a fraction of the costs compared to what they were spending on paid ads.
So, what’s the strategy?
Well, it’s simple. Back in the day, I used to rent out my websites… the whole site.
These
days I’ve learned how to monetize my own site, so I don’t rent them out.
So why not rent a page on someone else’s site? From there, modify that page a bit to promote your products or services?
I
know this sounds crazy, but it works. I have one person that just reaches out
to site owners asking if we can rent out a page on their site. We do this for
all industries and verticals… and when I look at how much we are spending
versus how much income we are generating, it’s crazy.
Here are the stats for the last month:
Rental
fees: $24,592
Outreach costs: $3,000
Legal
costs: $580
Copywriting
and monetization costs: $1,500
Total
monthly cost: $29,672
Now
guess what my monthly income was?
It
was $79,283.58.
Not
too bad.
Now
your cost on this model won’t be as high as mine because you can do your own
outreach, monetize the page you are renting on your own, and you probably don’t
need a lawyer.
And don’t be afraid of how much I am spending in rental fees as you can get away with spending $0 in the first 30 days as I will show you exactly what to do.
Remember, it’s also not what you are spending, it’s about profit and what you are making. If it won’t cost you any money in the first 30 days and you can generate income, your risk is little to none.
Here
are the exact steps you need to follow:
Step
#1: Find the terms you want to rank for
If
you already know the terms you want to rank for, great, you can skip this step.
If you don’t, I want you to head to Ubersuggest and type in a few of your competitors’ URLs.
Head
over to the top pages report and look at their top pages.
Now
click on “view all” under the estimated visits column to see a list of
keywords that each page ranks for.
I want you to create a list of all of the keywords that contain a high search volume and have a high CPC. Keywords with a high CPC usually mean that they convert well.
Keywords
with a low CPC usually mean they don’t convert as well.
When
you are making a list of keywords, you’ll need to make sure that you have a
product or service that is related to each keyword. If you don’t then you won’t
be able to monetize the traffic.
Step
#2: Search for the term
It’s
time to do some Google searches.
Look
for all of the pages that rank in the top 10 for the term you ideally want to
rank for.
Don’t
waste your time with page 2.
What
I want you to look for is:
Someone who isn’t your competitor. Your competition isn’t likely to rent out a page on their site to you.
A page that isn’t monetized. Not selling a product or service. (If the page has ads, don’t worry.)
A site owned by a smaller company… a publicly-traded company isn’t likely to do a deal. A venture-funded company isn’t likely to do a deal either (Crunchbase will tell you if they are venture-funded).
Step
#3: Hit up the website
Typically, through their contact page, they should have their email addresses or phone number listed. If they have a contact form, you can get in touch that way as well.
If
you can’t find their details, you can do a whois
lookup to see if you can find their phone number.
What’ll
you want to do is get them on the phone. DO NOT MAKE YOUR PITCH OVER EMAIL.
It
just doesn’t work well over email.
If
you can’t find their phone number, email them with a message that goes
something like this…
Subject: [their website name]
Hey [insert first name],
Do you have time for a quick call this week?
We’ve been researching your business and we would like to potentially make you an offer.
Let me know what works for you.
Cheers,
[insert your name]
[insert your company]
[insert your phone number]
You
want to keep the email short as I have found that it tends to generate more
calls.
Once you get them on the phone, you can tell them a little bit about yourself. Once you do that, tell them that you noticed they have a page or multiple pages on their website that interest you.
Point
out the URL and tell them how you are interested in giving them money each
month to rent out the page and you wouldn’t change much of it… but you need
some more information before you can make your offer.
At this point, you’ll want to find out how much traffic that page generates and the keywords it ranks for. They should have an idea by just looking at their Google Analytics (you’ll find most of these sites don’t use Google Search Console).
Once
you have that, let them know that you will get in touch with them in the next
few days after you run some numbers.
Go back, try to figure out what each click is worth based on a conservative conversion rate of .5%. In other words, .if 5% of that traffic converted into a customer, what would the traffic be worth to you after all expenses?
You’ll
want to use a conservative number because you can’t modify the page too
heavily or else you may lose rankings.
Once
you have a rough idea of what the page is worth, get back on the phone with
them and say you want to run tests for 30 days to get a more solid number on
what you can pay them as you want to give them a fair offer.
Typically,
most people don’t have an issue because they aren’t making money from the page
in the first place.
Step
#4: Monetize the page
If
you are selling a product, the easiest way to monetize is to add links to the
products you are selling.
For
example, if you are selling a kitchen appliance like a toaster, you can add
links from the article to your site.
The easiest way to monetize a blog post is to add links to products or services you are selling.
Don’t delete a lot of the content on the page you are modifying… adding isn’t too much of an issue but when you delete content sometimes you will lose rankings.
As
for a service-based business, linking out to pages on your site where people
can fill out their lead information is great.
Or you can just add lead capturing to the page you are renting out. Kind of like how HubSpot adds lead forms on their site.
I’ve actually found that they convert better than just linking out to your site.
When monetizing the page you are renting, keep in mind that you will need disclaimers to let people know that you are collecting their information for privacy purposes. You also should disclose you are renting out the page and nofollow the links.
Once you are monetizing the page for a bit, you’ll have a rough idea of what it is worth and you can make an offer on what you’ll page.
I recommend doing a 12-month contract in which you can opt-out
with a 30-day notice.
The reason you want a 12-month agreement is that you don’t want to have to keep renegotiating. I also include the 30-day opt-out notice in case they lose their rankings, you can opt-out.
And to clarify on the op-out clause, I have it so only I can opt-out and they are stuck in the agreement for a year.
Conclusion
SEO isn’t the only way you can get more organic traffic.
Being creative, such as renting pages that already rank is an easy solution. Best of all, you can get results instantly and it’s probably cheaper than doing SEO in the long run.
The only issue with this model is that it is really hard to
scale.
If I were you, I would do both. I, of course, do SEO on my own site because it provides a big ROI. And, of course, if you can rent out the pages of everyone else who ranks for the terms you want to rank for, it can provide multiple streams of income from SEO.
The beauty of this is model is that you can take up more than one listing on page 1. In theory, you can take up all 10 if you can convince everyone to let you rent their ranking page.
So, what do you think of the idea? Are you going to try it out?