Ep 287: How To Increase Blog Revenue By Building Your Blog Into a Brand with Mads Singers

How do you keep your content website alive in 2024 and beyond with all these Google changes and how do you turn this content website into something special that lasts the distance? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Business podcast and today I'm speaking with Mads Singers, who is a people management coach and owner of Mads Singers Management Consulting. He has been a management coach for more than 12 years now and he's worked with large companies like IBM, Xero, Shell, and Coca-Cola.

And Mad's primary goal is to achieve effective people management. And he believes in companies having a core strength that lies in empowered team play. He also owns six of his own companies, one of which is an SEO company that acquires content sites and media businesses. And Mad's and I have a fascinating chat on how to grow your content website out of this Google update from March 2024.

We'll still talk about how you should be thinking about your content website, which is what I call a media business now, and what you should be thinking about as a whole moving forward without single source dependency and what a brand looks like. We talk about why Google loves brands and e-commerce businesses. We also talk about the companies that MADS owns and runs.

And then we move on to talking about acquiring companies to grow and how larger businesses and brands do this and how Matt is a friend who also does this with his e -commerce business. I talk about the opportunity for growth by acquiring content sites or media businesses and how to build out a holding company basically of micro online businesses that can allow you to weather the storm from just single source dependency on maybe Google traffic or pay per click traffic or Amazon or another source or YouTube or whatever it is.

So thinking about business more holistically now versus just buying one smaller business and having it try to weather all the storms when it can be very reliant on one revenue or traffic source. Now that there's so much value in this podcast episode, I'm sure you're going to absolutely love it. I do talk about buying businesses here. And so if you haven't got my due diligence framework on how to save hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars on acquiring the right business,.

It's what I use and what my clients use. Make sure you go away and get it. It's saved us millions of dollars and made us millions of dollars. So you can get that at buyingonlinebusiness .com for just free resources. Now let's dive into the point. Have you been lied to about how to increase organic traffic and grow your website? I, too, used to think that all you needed to do was add more content and gain backlinks. But this just doesn't work. More content and more links alone are not the answer.

Nor do you need to butcher your website with generic SEO changes you picked up on some crummy online tutorial, leaving you with a Frankenstein website that's slow and clunky. And because I got sick of seeing great people with great websites struggle to grow them, I decided to do something about it. I created an SEO service, which is not just about publishing content and getting links. Sure, we offer that. But first, we give you quick wins, which are SEO tweaks we can make to your website that actually boost your rankings.

And then we lay out a killer SEO strategy to acquire more traffic and revenue that outranks your competitors with less content and fewer links. We've thoroughly tested this service on many websites before launching it and have achieved incredible results, which you'll see on our landing page, which I'm about to share with you. Now you can finally buy a business and give it to us to grow it for you. To check out our SEO service, head to buyingonlinebusinesses.com forward slash SEO hyphen services and book a call to chat with us to see what is the best growth strategy for you and your website. That's buying online businesses.com forward slash SEO services and the link will be in the description too.

Welcome back to the Buying Online Businesses podcast. Thanks for your time. Thank you very much, Gerard.

It's a pleasure to be back. Yeah, man.

It was episode 39 and we're up to episode 280 or something now. So it's been three to four-ish years. So it's definitely been some time. How have you been?

In other words, I'm a bit slow, I guess.

It was my fault for not getting in touch sooner.

Your name popped up and I was chatting with Alex Cooper and he was talking about the affiliate gathering and you chatted at the affiliate gathering. Congrats on that. What did you speak about at the affiliate gathering? I was trying to give people a little bit of feedback on how to look at all this online business a little bit differently.

One of my pet peeves has always been SEOs looking at SEOs as the thing or, as you know, they don't look at SEO as traffic or as a traffic source to a business; they look at SEO as the business and I've always been a little bit uncomfortable with that because for me, SEO is a great traffic source; it's probably the traffic source where you can get the most proportionate returns.

Like when you're doing ads, you put in a bit of money in the slot machine and get out a bunch of money and it's relatively consistent input output. Whereas with SEO, when you look through it, you can over time get some crazy returns from not so crazy investment. And that's how I've always looked at SEO. What I talked about specifically at Affiliate Gattling was very much around helping people think more as a CEO.

Think more as, you know, a focus on products; think more as a focus on, like, building out funnels, because reality is whatever way you acquire customers. When you do it with SEO, when you're a PBC, you have a core cost to acquire each person, right? Because you pay money or time for content, you pay money or time for links, et cetera.

And over time, like every single customer you have, that's a value added to them, right? Or there's value in how much you pay to acquire them. So the whole goal of business is really essentially about figuring out how can you make the most money for the customers that you've already acquired, right? So I talked a lot about funnels and how to fundamentally utilize them to sell more to an existing audience.

I shared a bunch of examples. One of the examples I'd seen a lot of people succeed with was around the courses and so on. Fundamentally, again, when you pay to acquire a customer, you get hold of their email or whatever. The question is, what do you sell? When you're building out funnels, one of the big issues I see affiliates have is that they keep just linking to other affiliate products.

What I said fundamentally is that the more you can own a product, the more you can secure yourself in multiple ways because, as an affiliate, if you start owning a product, it doesn't matter if it's a physical product or a soft product; if it's ebooks or courses or whatever, when you start owning that, your business totally opens up because what happens is you can start having other affiliates linked to you.

So if you own for example, a great course, you can literally give other affiliates 100% commission to promote it and what happens is that when you start doing that, you effectively get your competitors to link to you. And if I learned one thing about SEO, it is that having your competitors linked to you is not a bad thing.

Fundamentally, that's one of the sort of core mindsets behind it. Now, what we also talked a lot about is how to acquire these courses. So a lot of time, particularly around affiliates, they're not necessarily experts in the niches that they have sites in. That's the same for our in-house team.

We have built a lot of sites in niches that we are not experts at. What we started focusing on was how can we actually go out and find people who are good at this stuff? Initially, we started out looking for people on YouTube who had a little bit of traction, but they were not super successful. We knew they were good on video.

We knew they wanted to be influencers; they wanted to make some money. And in the early days, what we did was we asked these guys to, we went with them, we did a bunch of research, and we're like, okay, we want, let's say, gardening; we want a course on how to do race garden beds. I don't even know what that is. But yeah, that's the concept. We would then go out and find a relevant course.

We would then kind of see the structure of it and so on. And then we would go to one of these smaller influencers and say, Hey, now can we pay you two grand to build this course out? It seems like you're an expert on this gardening stuff. I'm sure you could figure this out. We're happy to keep your name on it.

So we will keep the person's name on it and build the course, right? Because what we were really interested in was authors that had some kind of legitimacy rather than some random persona that we made up for the site. So that worked. It did take a while. It wasn't always super effective. It wasn't always the best result. But generally, we got some results. In this process, what we figured out was that there were a ton of people, like Udemy, who had spent a massive amount of time putting courses together.

not really utilize them. You know, and the beautiful thing is that you can see how many reviews it has and how many sales it has. And if someone built a course two years ago that I've had three sales, so they made five bucks, you know, they put a lot of time and effort into building it, most likely. I re-assume they had some kind of idea what they were doing, but they were just port-mounting it, particularly in competitive niches, right?

So if there are 500 courses on how to grow tomatoes, some of them will not sell so what we did was go to some of these people who have had calls on the platform for a long time and have not done any sales and we'll say, Hey, can we buy the rights to this course? Like again, we'll still keep your name on it, which is totally yours Sometimes, in the courses we bought, people had an interest in having coaching afterwards, so we'll keep their name on it.

We'll give them those opportunities but we fundamentally bought the right to the course. Again, sometimes it was $1,000, sometimes $2,000. I think we even paid $2,500 at some point. Most of the time for most people, this was a bit of money they got for a product they never expected to see any more money out of. So we could make some really good deals. The benefit was that when we did this, we could physically acquire products to put into our funnels that we owned 100% of and that we could keep selling again and again.

Most of the products we sold were somewhere between $20 and $50. So if you buy a course for, let's say, $1,500, you don't need to make that many $50 sales to make a profit. And what it also did was turn it into a real business. We had real products on our site and obviously, from a Google standpoint, they like that sort of stuff.

So that was some of the things that we tested out that worked really well, but the essence of it really, and I think a lot of people sort of drooling a lot on this course idea, but the essence of it was really the whole funnel piece, right? Like build out your email funnels, build out like your sort of email acquisitions and all of that stuff.

That's really where it starts, because if you have an email list, like one of the guys we work with, you have an email list of 40 ,000 people now. And every time it's Black Friday and they send out emails, they make 10, 15 grand. So you can make a lot of money from a list. And most important, what I always tell people is that when you spend the time and effort acquiring the customer, you have to figure out how to get more money out.

I've been harping on about that for a long time. Mads, since I've been in this game, the first thing that I learned before even starting businesses before I even acquired any businesses is that you need to own lists and you need to have a list. And that has not, and I've been talking about this for people who will call them content sites.

There's a map, like the shift that needs to go on within people personally to take a content site and see it as a real business, which is probably the most fundamental step here to get past a content site struggling for just ad revenue and affiliate revenue. We know that ad revenue and affiliate revenue are not what Google really wants to promote or content that's just for ad revenue and affiliate revenue alone without seeing a brand.

A real brand offers different products and services along the journey of a user of that website. For example, if somebody is trying to learn how to fish, having the 10 best fishing rods affiliate posts, and then also having ads on that, and then having all content like that on just one website, Google's going to see that you're just trying to get traffic to a quick little sale to make a little bit of money, and you're actually not serving.

the person who is starting out fishing to go from not knowing anything about what fishing rod to buy, where to fish, how to tie a knot, lures, tackle baits, all the way to becoming a professional fisher person because you're just trying to make a quick grab of money and you're not really surfing them all the way through.

And that's where the mindset of changing from owning a content website to owning a brand allows people to have capacity and space, when you think about that. If you think about it, if you own a brand, then you have space and capacity underneath that to go.

Okay, if I own a brand, what products and services can I sell? And if I already have an email list, I can sell it right away. But then also, how do I get people who just found out about phishing to go? I love this, I love this, this, just this piece of content on how to tie a knot.

And then I'm going to get them on the email list. And then, how do you take them from learning how to tie a knot to going through my course on how to buy a fishing rod for these types of fish to catch? Or how to fish for these types of specific fish with a course. I've got a client that I've been working with for over a year now that has been transitioning from only ad revenue and affiliate revenue to selling courses.

And then, eventually, we're going to turn that into a membership because he has quite a large email subscriber base and has gone and found industry experts. And what he talks about is a civic musical instrument. Talks about how to get better at playing this musical instrument. And we found specific experts in that industry who already have authority. And when you get those people who have authority in the space to sell products, services and courses from your site, you don't even need to own the course.

You could just sell it for them and get a commission. You could sell their services, get a commission, or you could just hire them. Like you said, you have Mads to buy the course off of them. Then you're building a real community, right? So, when did you start experimenting with these Mads? How long ago? We've done this for quite a few years, probably three, four, or something like that. So we started.

Three or four years ago, we started an in -house SEO company, which is probably the best way to describe it. So basically, we were building our own sites, scaling them up and eventually flipping them, right? So that was our model. When I first talked to you, we were talking about management and we were talking about virtual teams.

You didn't have an SEO agency then, did you? When did this come into fruition? I don't think so. I mean, we've been starting quite a lot of business. So I have six companies now in total. So we still do—I mean, my core time is still spent building teams and so on. It's the same thing with this business, right? I mean, the time I've put into it has been absolutely minimal.

Yeah, I don't actually remember exactly when we spoke, so I don't remember if we had this in the cards already or not. So you've got six companies. What are your six companies? So we have management coaching at MedSingers.com. We have Aristo Sourcing, which is a recruitment company where we hire a lot of remote staff, particularly in South Africa, which is our number one favorite spot to hire.

Very similar cost to Asia, but just more like Western mindset, Western time zone and so on. That's brilliant. And we run the SEO Mastery Summit, which is obviously the best SEO conference in the world. I have a SaaS tool called Heyramp.com, which is also about management, how to manage your people and so on. And then we have a job site in South Africa called virtualjobssa.com. And then we have the SEO company.

We did also have a content business for a while. Let's just say AI got the better of us. Yeah, like so many of us. What about acquisitions? Have you grown by acquisition or do you acquire? The content business we actually bought, and that was probably right after I talked with you last time. We had that for a couple of years.

It did really well; I scaled it up quite significantly and then our tagline was cheap native English content. Let's just say that was perfect target for AI. So that did not last too long after AI come out. We were obviously looking to see if it made sense to pivot but we had about 80–90 writers at the time. They just weren't the type of people who were going to go from writing cheap native English content to writing high quality whatever. So we just decided to shut it down, as a store just ran out and so on. Still a good business.

Most of the other companies, let me just think, I think all the other companies are generally built from the bottom up. So the SaaS tool is a tool we're building ourselves. The job site was, we basically saw that it was impossible to hire in South Africa and we're like, there is no good job site specifically for South Africa, so let's build it, and that's what we did.

But yeah, the other companies have been built from scratch; obviously, in the SEO company, the sites we're acquiring often tend to be; they're all acquired, right? So we're buying content sites. So our math is very simple. If we know, like, let's say we build a site in the garden each, if we build a really good funnel for that site, we can go out and buy other sites that are just monetizing traffic with simple affiliates and sort of simple ads.

And we can obviously build a very similar funnel or sometimes even copy and paste a funnel onto it. And that way, it instantly makes it worth more. Right. And are you acquiring a gardening niche site and then plugging it in, copying and pasting it basically, changing a little bit with the branding or are you looking at buying any type of content site?

Yeah, I mean, we have sites in many different niches. So obviously, the benefit of buying sites in different niches is that you find out what niches are very good. So therefore, we have, I think, two or three niches that we're kind of stuck with. Unfortunately, the content site has had a pretty heavy hit.

There have been a lot of sites that we would usually look at and buy that no longer have any interest or any traffic, right? So that's been a bit of a shame. Yeah, we have a couple of niches that are doing really well and that are really, really interesting for this stuff. Yeah, excellent. And so are you, with this SEO company; are you just acquiring smaller content sites for yourselves or are you bringing on clients that are looking for SEO services as well?

We don't bring on clients, no. Just our own stuff. One other thing, most people sit around in agencies and they're like, you know, I hate making these clients so much money and being paid so little and what I tell them all is, Why don't you do it on yourself then? Right? Yeah. So we're not looking for clients at all. Cool.

And so what are some of the other changes that you have made or are going to be making that you're going to start? Let me rephrase that. I'll ask you in one question and then ask more as we go along. What are some of the changes that you have made that have started to see results with some since the Google update in March 2024 have started to sort of allow you to sort of see some results moving forward?

Yeah, I think realistically, a lot of our sites were hit as well. Google has been very keen on getting rid of content sites, I think. Fundamentally for us, what I see is a lot of people giving up and that always makes me excited because when people are giving up, that creates more space. That's really the angle I look at it from. We're consistently looking at different angles, different business models, different businesses, even the likes of e-commerce and so on, right?

There are also a ton of e -commerce sites out there that sell very few products. Again, if they've acquired a list, many of them don't email often enough. They don't take good care of them. We are generally very keen on good business in general. Have you considered, instead of just acquiring content sites, acquiring e-commerce brands for growth or acquisition for some of the content sites in the same niches that you have? We definitely have.

What I would say is that, and with full disclosure, I have sold multiple e-commerce sites in the past, but fundamentally, e-commerce is a very, very different game. Battling it out with Amazon and so on is, one, it's a very different game.

I mean, you might feel Google is tightening the screws on your fingernails. Amazon is definitely in the same business. We haven't, at this point, acquired any larger sites. We have one or two small businesses; it's mostly people who sell their own product that we have sort of taken and put into some of our sites. But we haven't gone out and acquired any large scale e-commerce sites for growth in that direction.

Honestly, it's because the team that I have in place is running this now; it's not their expertise. So that's the core reason. Yeah, really good call. Especially with, you know, marketing, paid marketing moves so much faster than SEO. And it's funny to think that because sometimes people are coming into this space, typically in my realm, wanting to acquire a business and initially they're leaning on content science.

I am now, and I've always thought of them as business businesses and media businesses. And they are media businesses, although I want to start allowing more people to see them as media businesses than just content sites. I have seen that these content sites or media businesses have grown through SEO and believe that it changes fast. Well, it's very different when it's Ecom.

You know, there's a lot of money in the space, advertising rules change fast, and algorithms on the advertising platforms change very, very fast. And it's a bit more of a higher stakes game. Now it is what, what, what I would say on that point, though, is that I, honestly, look at a little bit of content on sites like PPC. The thing is, if I go out and buy a content site that has a hundred thousand visitors a month and I can acquire that for sometimes $5,000,.

Now if I poured $5,000 into PPC, I would not get a hundred thousand eyeballs a month, right? Typically. So I look at acquiring content sites like a bit of a game in a similar realm. So basically, acquiring multiple content sites is a similar game to doing paperclips. Because it's like when you put it in that mindset when you're saying, okay,

I'm buying 100,000 traffic. I have a funnel I can put on top of this. I have a bunch of lead magnets I can put on this so that I can harvest a lot of it. But reality is, if I just do that, if I just put some lead magnets on it and put a funnel on it, the site will still keep making at least the same amount of money. But I can maybe bring in eyeballs to other products or services I own and so on. Absolutely.

It's a very smart way to think about it because this is what people are doing with seven, like small seven figure, eight figure and nine figure businesses. I've started to help people acquire and build out holding companies where they have an e-commerce brand. And this is a suggestion that I open you guys up as listeners to think about as well is they have a primary business, a platform business. The first business they earn is an e-commerce brand. And let's say it's in the phishing space and let's say they have a marketing budget of a million dollars a year.

Now they can go and spend a million dollars on Facebook ads and Google ads, so maybe 500k on each. But maybe they just say, Let's put 250k into Facebook ads, 250k into Google ads, and let's spend our other 500k from our marketing budget to acquire content websites that already have an email list and already have an audience of organic traffic going to them.

And I think it's a really good time for e-commerce brands to clean up right now where they can go away and see these sites that have been hit and see where they've stabilized out at and acquire these assets or these, these content sites that have been hit but have a stable traffic value, the business or the media business content site, whatever you want to call it at that stabilization rate, and then go away and swoop in, allow that you know, build their audience off of that; you know, emerge and it's a really good time.

Like you said, it's a lot of people that are giving up, but it's, you know, the people that think differently in the space and do business at a different level. I'm just going to absolutely clean up. And that's my word of warning to everybody coming into the space Start to think differently.

And you should not give up and treat it as a long-term game, and you can really come out on top, can't you, Matt? Definitely. What, you know, for people that do have media businesses slash content sites moving forward, what are you guys doing in your SEO agency? And what are some of the things that you would be suggesting other than just, you know, selling more physical or non-physical products on your site?

Number one, we definitely start treating them way more like a brand. So we look a lot at, for example, building out knowledge panels for the sites. So someone like Jason Bernard is great at helping out with that, right? But getting a knowledge panel, you'll see very few, if any, sites that have a knowledge panel get hit by these updates because it's obviously a very strong signal to Google that this is a real brand, this is a real thing.

So definitely, building out knowledge panels and building out more e-commerce features. We're thinking a lot about the structure, particularly the front page. I saw a very interesting talk by Cyrus Shepard about how the Google Quality Radars are going through things and so on and realized that it was very, very easy to see the sort of typical content site setup where you have a lot of links to different posts and so on.

It's very, very easy for Google to see and understand those setups. We're changing a lot of how the front pages look. Honestly, on many sites, we now have a shopping cart and make it look a bit like an e-commerce site on the outside. Anyway, on content sites, the front page doesn't matter that much because, on content sites, people land on the landing pages. But definitely for Google, we want to make the sites look like real businesses in one way or another on the initial landing page, right?

Spending more time on EEAT, spending more time getting experienced writers set up and connected to it. And yeah, just make it a real brand. So not just look alike, but create real brands out of it. And then one of the things we've seen a lot is that brand searches are specifically very important.

That's definitely something we look at. We have one site in particular that had very, very few to nearly no brand searches. And we ended up trying to do some creative PPC campaigns and doing a few other creative things to increase those brand searches. I probably can't share all of that because that's probably a little bit on the dodgy side of things.

Definitely, brand searches are something that we see as very valuable and particularly if sites have very few brand searches for the brand name, that's definitely an issue today.

Yeah, it's one thing to have a website, which is like howtofish.com. And then, you know, having that brand be the howtofish brand is two massively different things when you've just got a content site that's just producing content for affiliate links and adding revenue on howtofish.com versus howtofish is a brand that helps people.

I don't know what fishing is or what sort of rod I need? What sort of fish am I searching for? How do I tie knots on lures and say that if somebody does have a how to book or a fishing website as an example, they can easily find the number one affiliate product that they're selling?

It could be through Amazon and go away and work out how can they own that product? How can they sell that product on their own, on their own store? And no, you don't need to go away and get it manufactured in China and you can still do all that sort of stuff.

You could drop ship it. Literally, you could drop ship it and you would save yourself having to do the order fulfillment and all that sort of stuff. But you're actually selling this product that you own under your own brand and you're drop shipping it.

I'm glad that you mentioned that Mads is it rings true with a bunch of other SEOs that I've had on looking about building a brand, building a real business, selling physical products and digital products and actually helping people the whole way through their journey, not just let's just make a quick buck by slapping an affiliate link or some ads on a site.

Well, what I would say I've seen as well is that one of my very good friends has a site in the pet niche and he's basically been buying up content sites and merging them into his e-commerce store and he's getting ridiculous traffic. We're talking over a million organic traffic a month, so he's been doing that and that's been exceptionally successful, but again, he had an e-commerce store that had a good brand, lots of good links and authority, and so on, and just putting content on the back of that has been absolutely fuel.

Yeah, it goes back to that strategy I mentioned earlier that larger brands do is they spend part of their budget on direct ads and then go away and acquire what we would call market share of the attention that's already being grabbed and caught, acquiring that market share that way. So yeah, Mads, thanks so much for coming on. I'm looking forward to seeing where you're at in two years with this. I hope you end up acquiring a bunch more.

Econ brands and content sites and just build a good conglomerate and a holding company that, you know, weathers all storms. And that's, I think, what people should be thinking about is how they can get not just the latest thing—our content sites are hot right now, our e-commerce site is hot right now, or I need to buy a SaaS or membership business. How do you build a business that has all of these elements that you're not super reliant on—just organic traffic or super reliant on paper?

Paper click ads or super relying on Amazon. Relying on one platform is definitely difficult, right? When you're relying on one platform, it doesn't matter if that's Amazon, Google, YouTube or whatever; relying on one platform is definitely both difficult and dangerous nowadays. Yeah, absolutely. So, man, you got a lot going on. Six companies. Congrats on where you're at.

How do we decipher where we should send people to find out more about you and what you're up to? What sort of links should we be putting in this pod episode in the show notes? Madsingers.com is a great starting point, but I also share a ton of content all the time, right? So madsingers on LinkedIn, Facebook, anything always works. I am still the only person in the world with the name, so it is easy to find me.

I love it, guys. I'll be linking to madseeingers.com and Mads on LinkedIn. And again, Mads, thanks for coming on. Everybody is listening. Thank you so much for listening and I'll speak to you guys soon.