From a website we bought on Flippa to a money club.
This article discusses some of the things we are doing now to turn the affiliate website we bought into a money club for makers.
This article is a follow up to our previous articles:
Instead of continuing with a pure affiliate approach, we are going to use several ways to generate income.
All the strategies require a lot of traffic to the site.
Therefore, this first wave of income strategies needs to somehow implement writing articles, posting images and videos, and getting other websites to link to our domain.
Those are some of the high-value SEO things we can do early on to help show up high in Google search results.
The idea is to try to monetize something while we build the actual product.
As a money club for makers, the “something” in this case will be our knowledge, expertise, and experience.
We will use those to drive traffic and build an audience.
The “actual product” will be something like a premium club for people who want to make things that help create financial independence.
The initial income strategies, therefore, involve creating content that drives traffic.
Not just any traffic.
We want people interested in making or using tools for financial independence.
The strategies include:
Old affiliate site
Newsletter
Videos
Code Samples
Coding Courses
These methods will start with just free options, but eventually we will have content that only paying subscribers have access to.
The free content will generate tons of great content to help drive traffic to the site.
The way we will try to monetize this content is primarily through subscriptions to the more premium content and affiliate links.
The subscriptions and affiliate programs will be low-value and therefore require a lot of sales.
Once we have traffic, we then will focus on adding income streams that do not drive as much traffic but that we can sell for more money per sale.
These include:
Club memberships
Merchandise
Subscription to software tools
Custom software building
Regardless of the income strategies, we need to create high-quality content that people want and helpful tools that people want to use.
Read below about our thoughts on some of these strategies. We would love your thoughts too, so reach out and let us know.
Old Affiliate Site
The old affiliate site has tons of great content that either already ranks well in Google search results, or that has potential to do so, for money topics.
Therefore, instead of taking down the articles, I moved them to a subdomain.
The new home to the old site is app.thacash.com.
By keeping the articles live online using a subdomain, they can still help us drive traffic to the site by ranking high for Google search results related to money products, sports betting, and cryptocurrency.
It will take some time for the subdomain to rank on Google, but I think the switch is a good long-term move and better than just taking down all the articles.
The people searching for those topics are likely to be interested in a money club for makers, or at least more interested than people searching for chainsaws.
So as a traffic strategy, the site stays up. We will need to find time to optimize and maintain it.
Newsletter: Free and paid subscriptions
The newsletter is a new addition to the site.
We are using Substack for our Newsletter service.
Substack seems like a no-brainer for driving traffic. I was thrilled to discover it.
Here are just a few reasons how Substack can be a great platform to help us drive traffic.
It has robust newsletter features, like email, subdomain with articles, subscriptions, statistics and more. It would take us forever to build it from scratch and WordPress probably does not have an equivalent. All people have to do is subscribe, and then we can stay connected to them through their inbox. This will help drive and retain traffic to our website.
Substack allows podcasts and videos. Podcasts and videos give us another way to connect with our audience, and videos are great for optimizing search engine results.
Substack has a great domain ranking. So links from Substack to our domain will hopefully help increase the domain ranking for our site.
The Substack community is a powerful way to get noticed. Instead of having a stand-alone newsletter, ours is connected to a community of authors and readers. People can find us by searching and browsing Substack or in a Substack community email highlighting or recommending Substack newsletters.
We can add paid subscriptions. Substack makes it super easy to setup. Once we have enough subscribers or content, hopefully we have the pricing power to start getting some paid subscribers.
We can put affiliate links in the newsletters, so once our traffic is high enough on Substack, that could potentially be another revenue stream.
Code Samples and Courses
Another new addition to the site are the code samples and coding courses.
The code samples and courses each give us a two for one. Like a four for two, actually.
They each give us traffic-generating content, plus they are tools that we offer to makers for them to use.
In other words, the code samples and courses are not just content. They are content plus.
I post the code and explanations in GitHub. Makers can view and download the code there.
Then, I display on my website the code explanations stored in GitHub.
Here is an example for a basic Flask app in Python.
I wrote code so that once the examples are posted to GitHub, they are also automatically displayed on my website.
Although it took some upfront work, the payoffs will be big now that the information is effortlessly posted in two valuable places just by me putting it on GitHub.
In addition to the SEO benefits of this, it makes me more efficient. As a one-man band, it is important that I find efficiency.
By creating one code sample or course, I am actually creating two things: content for SEO plus tools that makers can use.
Videos
Videos are also a new addition to the site.
I post videos on YouTube and put links in the description back to the newsletter and website.
Plus, I display on our website the information posted on YouTube — the videos, written descriptions, and dates.
Like with GitHub, we just post the information on YouTube, and it appears on our website, too.
It is for sure a two-for-one. Maybe three-for-one.
Like the code samples and courses, the videos serve multiple valuable purposes:
Videos are good for SEO, so by embedding them in our website, we are helping drive traffic to our site
Not only can we embed the YouTube video on the website, we also pull the text from YouTube and display it on our site, which adds more content to help increase Google rankings
YouTube gives us another community platform to find users and place links to our website
Authenticity — videos add a stronger chance to connect with people by having a human-touch that articles lack
For each article, code sample, or course, I am making videos to help explain things that I write about.
For instance, the first cluster of newsletter articles is about buying the affiliate site from Flippa. So I recorded a few videos to supplement the articles.
Check out the YouTube playlist with affiliate videos for the money club.
Currently, I am working on code samples for learning how to make money projects using code.
Check out my first code sample explanation for the money club.
The End
Okay, that is it for this newsletter.
In upcoming letters, I will explain more about additional ways we will try to make money and have fun.
What money and software topics do you want to learn more about?
How can we improve our newsletter?
Let us know or just reach out and say hi!