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I messed up and I'm sorry 😔
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
I Messed Up And I'm Sorry
10% Off Already Discounted Software
She's Earned $76,000 With Date Night Printables
Learned This Skill In His Car, Now Earns $100,000+
The Projects That Really Take Off
A Quick Google Search Led to His $30K/Year Side Hustle
Fail, Fail, Fail → $418,000
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I Messed Up And I'm Sorry
I included a story from April 2023 in the last edition of the newsletter…
A reader replied that the website in question – ZenmasterWellness.com – got hit hard with Google updates the last several months and now gets almost zero traffic ☠️
Looks like this is indeed the case, which means pretty much all their revenue has evaporated as well.
I should have checked the site's traffic myself before repeating the story in the newsletter.
I'm sorry about that 😔
My goal is for this newsletter to always be a source of information you can trust, and I dropped the ball there.
Going forward, I'll be much more careful checking that stories from the archive are still worthy of your attention before including them.
While we're on the subject, the guys from Authority Hacker recently put out this podcast…
The Future of Authority Sites (YouTube)
The whole thing is worth a listen if you're into SEO or niche sites.
🧐 But the most interesting part to me starts at the 17-minute mark, where they give a couple of examples of sites that have thrived through the recent Google updates…
EpicGardening.com (now earning $45M/year)
The theory is that these sites (and others like them) are still doing well with SEO because they have built up big followings on social media 📈
That seems to be the main thing setting them apart from other niche sites that have gotten hit.
And when it's easier than ever to spin up a legit-looking niche site thanks to AI-generated content, it makes sense that Google would be looking more to social media to see which sites/brands are run by people who are actually considered experts in their field.
Back to Zenmaster Wellness: that site never had much of a presence on social, and while the content seems to be legit, for all Google knows it could have been generated by ChatGPT 🤖
So they're not going to send much traffic their way, instead giving the benefit of the doubt to established media sites, or independent sites that are tied to big social media accounts.
Another niche site called HouseFresh experienced a massive drop in search traffic the past several months and came to the same conclusion.
Search traffic to my site has also been on the decline 📉
Which makes sense, since I'm not very active on social.
My biggest following is on YouTube (12k subs), but I've barely published anything there for four years 🙈
To get my site back on track, the plan is to start publishing regularly on social again, with the goal of building up a significant following on a few platforms.
I'll keep you posted on how that goes 👍
Two more things here…
Of course there are exceptions to the "independent sites without a big social following are getting hit" theory, Retro Dodo being a major one. But it's still the best theory I've seen to explain what's happening.
A big part of my social strategy will be video content. I'm hiring a video editor and coordinator to help with that. More info here if you'd like to apply or know someone who might be interested.
10% Off Already Discounted Software
Today's email is supported by AppSumo's Sumo Day 🥳
AppSumo the #1 marketplace for software deals, and you can get an extra 10% off a bunch of their deals until Thursday.
Such as…
Brilliant Directories
$89 lifetime deal, 800+ positive reviews. Launch, manage, and monetize your own membership website to dominate your market.SendFox
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Keep an eye out for software that would help you quickly provide a valuable service for clients. There are lots of AI tools along those lines.
She's Earned $76,000 With Date Night Printables
Ruta Drungilaite is the founder of A Twist Of Date, a digital products store that offers date-night printable games 😍
Per a recent interview, Ruta has earned $76,000 doing this as a side-hustle.
💬 She says…
The idea for A Twist Of Date came to me during one of the Covid lockdowns in 2021. We live in London, so we are usually spoiled when it comes to fun things to do. My fiancé and I have done it all…
However, the lockdown took away all those choices…. It dawned on me that there must be other people out there who also struggle to come up with creative date ideas at home (not just a movie and dinner).
So, I started to think about how I could solve that problem for couples.
She didn’t start off digitally but rather…
My first idea was to create date night boxes delivered to you, which would have everything set and planned for a romantic evening at home….
Couples loved these boxes, and I received a lot of good feedback, but making the boxes by hand was extremely labor intensive, profit margins were razor thin/nonexistent, and the volume of sales was not as high as I had originally hoped for.
Ultimately, the date box idea was not a scalable or financially viable one for me to continue.
🧪 Ruta then experimented with "date idea cards"…
As this idea went well, I pivoted my business away from physical date night boxes toward digital products, expanding my range with romantic board games, cold case files, escape rooms, conversation starters and more.
6 months into the business…
My total revenue was less than £3,000 (about $3,800).
Seven months in, I had my "Flirty Dice" printable board game go viral on TikTok, which brought in over £700 (about $890) in just three days, which is when I knew I was on to something and started to see more growth from leveraging organic social media to drive sales.
Now, it looks like she’s getting most of her traffic from TikTok (262k followers) and Instagram (52k).
And Ruta recently announced that she's quit her corporate job to focus on the business 🥳
Wise words from this first-time founder…
Prioritize action over perfection. Learn to be comfortable with releasing your ideas into the market and testing them before they're perfect. The more messy and scrappy action you take, the quicker you'll get the feedback you need and be able to learn from it.
This is another great example of creating a business by scratching your own itch.
Keep an eye out for problems or frustrations that arise in your own life 👀
If it's a struggle for you, it's likely a struggle for many other people.
Come up with a good solution, and you could have the seed of a winning business.
🗂 Learned This Skill In His Car, Now Earns $100,000+
From the archive, published November 2023…
Web developers that often build websites for more than $5,000 a piece, what does your business look like?
💬 Which prompted a response from Ryan Postell…
I started out by teaching myself web development in my car while I did Uber.
In between rides I was coding and watching tutorials and doing online self paced bootcamps.
After about a year and a half of that I got good enough at it to start freelancing.
And here I am 5 years later with a full time front end developer job and I run my agency that makes 6 figures a year working it part time.
Looks like Ryan’s agency is Oak Harbor Web Design.
How he gets clients…
In the beginning I just cold called from google and yelp. Then after about 30-40 clients the referrals started to come in and my website was ranking well locally. Now I get all my work from my website and referrals.
Btw, Oak Harbor is a small city in Washington, USA. Population ~25,000 🇺🇸
By naming his business the way he did and building up a bit of a reputation, Ryan now ranks #1 for keywords like web design oak harbor.
He also has this article ranking #1 for hand coded website 😎
Yes, Ryan hand-codes client websites rather than using something like WordPress. He says the appeal of a hand-coded site is the speed and security.
He adds…
I made my own templates in HTML and CSS that I reused for clients whose business suited the design. This cut my work dramatically. Why reinvent the wheel?
Regarding pricing, Ryan reveals…
I sell static brochure sites for $3500. 5 pages. Every page after that is $100 per page. $500 fee to add a blog. Shopify e-commerce sites start at $8k…
Here’s an example of an $8k site: madscientistbbq.com
An example of a $6k site: striveptwellness.com
And a $3500 site: realdealpainting.net
Really impressive how Ryan went from driving an Uber to now having a thriving web design business, all thanks to those skills he learned between rides 💪
What skill could you start building in your spare time?
Even if it’s only 30 minutes a day, that adds up to 182 hours in a year. Enough time to go through a few courses and get good enough to start taking on simple client projects.