Building a New Brand & Monetizing Website — Case Study Part 1
Branko Kral
Organic growth advisor for purpose-driven companies, author. Ex head of Backlinko growth at Semrush, content agency founder with exit.
We recently rebranded to Chosen Data? and launched a new website for it. You’ll see we love our designer. You’ll also see we own the domain, the trademark (thank you Forrest for the legal work), full branding assets, initial website assets, and growing domain authority based on backlinks from big marketing sites. We also have a team that has built up content website for our clients.
When we publish on one of my favorite marketing blogs — Moz, Orbit Media, Supermetrics, WordStream, or SingleGrain, when Google Analytics tweets about us, when I get publicly recognized, or when a team member becomes full-time with us, I tell myself we know what it takes to build a profitable content website. Now we’re finally doing it, too. We’re building a platform we own. I’m thrilled.
The signs of pursuing the right flow have been outstanding. Everything I touch in this project is received well, and support has been coming in unexpected ways.
Brand & Website Goal #1: Authority in Marketing Best Practice
The primary goal is to become the authority for resources related to expert marketing work, with focus on the aspects of SEO. Whether it be tools, agencies with results to speak for them, courses, templates, events, or custom Slack emojis, ha. Whether they’re made by us or by other expert marketers. Whether we get a commission or not. We want to help do marketing right.
— Image above: Content and resources section from tech SEO agency page
Goal #2: Steady Stream of Agency Work from Smart Marketers in Knowledge Areas with Positive Impact
Every word is in the long definition for a reason.
Steady stream
Some of the most appreciative and profitable clients we’ve had are those who found us through our content. With a steady stream of best practice content coming out, we also aim to make the stream of leads steady.
Agency work
We continue offering client services. It allows us to work in a variety of topics, channel mixes, or leadership styles. We get to execute a variety of recipes, then often publish about them. We love our clients for giving us the opportunity.
Smart marketers
We are careful about choosing who we work with. We've been able to do so since late 2019, when we started to have more demand for client services than bandwidth. It adds to the quality of life for our team and I, so we will continue choosing carefully.
We think a marketer is smart when they’re demanding and helpful about the deliverables they’re getting from us. When their involvement in our work makes the work better, and when we can make decisions free of ego. This allows us to rank and convert high. Dan McGaw is a client like that - his company brings difficult work to us, then enables us to be successful with it, then reaps the fruit. Try and search Google for “mixpanel vs amplitude” or “hire for marketing operations”.
When it comes to business people without marketing expertise, we find that the smart ones know when to trust in the process and let us do our best work.
Not getting in your own way when hiring specialists is super important. You wouldn’t hire a plumber for a new house and insist on designing the layout of pipes yourself. Otherwise, you waste time and money.
This can happen to a baby boomer CEO with hierarchical thinking who tells the team to make their own decisions because they were hired as experts, then scraps those decisions in favor of his own bad ideas like if the team was hired as movie extras. I’m writing “his” because this is a true story that we just lived through recently and that we will avoid down the line. I also want to avoid working for a young gun marketing director who came from advertising, hires an SEO team but runs the project like it’s still in advertising, changes content without strategy or optimization, then runs out of patience when organic clicks don’t snowball.
It is important for our new brand and content strategy to help zero in on those who appreciate quality content and the process behind it before they even talk to us the first time. Then we can have results like this:
Data for a snowballing website where we doubled and maintained traffic (& conversion value) twice, then grew it again by 50% and maintained once
— Image above: Data for a snowballing website where we doubled and maintained traffic (& conversion value) twice, then grew it again by 50% and maintained once
Knowledge Areas
Our recipe is to build up websites by developing their authority in the pertinent area of knowledge. Over time, we focused on areas that our core team has a wealth of experience with:
Positive Impact
Money is a great tool, but a problematic goal. I enjoy having it, but it does not imply quality of life. So in 2019, my business partner and I wrote down in our company strategy that we only want to put our effort into companies that have a positive impact. Our entire client portfolio then smoothly turned into being full of companies like that.
The impact can come in a variety of ways. MarTech agency that seats up A/B testing in personalized touchpoints so the users can see what they truly care for. Payment app that commits to not selling users’ financial data to third parties. Dermatology clinic that proactively does preventative checks. Brain supplement that helps people focus at work - yes you should try it. Or a construction company that’s so reliable it refreshes its customers’ faith in moral standards.
领英推荐
The Simple Content SEO Strategy for Achieving the Two Goals
The topics we're building out are tech SEO, content SEO, and SEO analytics. Once we establish a strong foundation of content and a predictable stream of traffic for the above, we have ideas for diving into the broader topics of agency management, remote work, and productivity.
Each topic is built on a cluster. To exemplify by using the tech SEO pillar, each cluster consists of:
The most progress we’ve made so far has been in establishing the design concept and content strategy for our own website, and in publishing guest content with big marketing sites. As a result, we now have backlinks from about a dozen big marketing publishers, including most of the biggest SEO websites such as Moz and WordStream. Next, we need to pick up momentum with the development of custom page templates.
In the meantime, guest post offers keep coming our way, more than we can handle actually. Webinar speaking invites as well. It's been fulfilling.
The content needs proper distribution, too. We have been approached by an investor who’s an experienced, smart marketer, and wants to build the distribution system for a revenue share. We look up to the investor and their systems, so we accepted. The plan is to use social retargeting and email lists. At the start, we’re leveraging personal networks as well.
“Leveraging personal networks” sounds like “bugging friends and family because nobody else cares about us yet”, but that’s far from how it’s been for us. We save the name of everyone we’ve worked with and send them emails when we publish content — the responses have been great. We use our personal LinkedIn and Twitter accounts — LinkedIn is my absolute fave social network for knowledge industries. Finally, every time we publish, we tweet at all the experts and tools we’ve referenced, without asking for anything back — this routinely leads to new friendships as well as invites to more content collabs.
The target persona of our content is an expert marketer. That’s because those are indeed our best clients, and because those have a need for software or resources that we recommend (and sometimes get a commission for).
The impact we aim to have is to help make marketing better for everyone involved. Both the marketers and the users.
Monetization Models for the Two Goals
Right now, we make most of our money from client services. There’s huge demand for quality SEO work. The near-future plan is to shift the ratio. We aim to make more than a half of our revenue from our own monetizing website.
The monetizing website generates or will generate revenue from recommending tools, experts, paid resources, and events. Referrals are the focus. It’ll therefore be an affiliate website, but one where we only recommend what we have worked or currently work with. And we’ll also recommend tools and resources that we don’t get a cut for. As an active agency, we have no shortage of great MarTech to recommend. And through our guest content collaborations, we’re connected with some of our favorite marketing experts.
We’re keeping the agency side of things because it provides us with projects where we can keep our skills sharp, and projects we can publish about. Synergy also stems from the fact that the team we’ve built for the agency projects is the same team we’re using for our own site.?
At the moment, we have the limitation that we tend to get too busy with the client projects that are making us money already. Then we run out of time and resources for our own website as it is only at the start of making its own revenue. The financial pressure of investing long term is also noteworthy. But the more work we’ve done, the closer we are to overcoming the hurdles, and my recent conversations about a new round of funding seem promising.
In specific numbers, the goal is to maintain revenue from the agency side at $40–50k/mo. We’re close to that now and hoping to be in cruise mode by the end of the year. The clients are at $4–$12k/mo each, and that’s a range we’re sticking to for now. The goal for the affiliate side of things is to pass the agency side by Q2 2022. There’s no ceiling to where that part should grow, the revenue is scalable by nature.
— Image above: Some of our fave and most used MarTech
What’s Next
For us, heaps of work. For you, a series of posts on our own blog in the making, about our own internal case study. We’re going to try and figure out how to make the affiliate website go from the current fluctuating 0–$1k to a steady $10k in monthly revenue by the end of 2021. That’s level 1. Then we redo the strategy and publish a second part of the series, about going from $10k to $50k in monthly affiliate revenue.
We’re going to try and figure out how to make the affiliate website go from the current fluctuating 0–$1k to a steady $10k in monthly revenue by the end of 2021. That’s level 1. Then we redo the strategy and publish a second part of the series, about going from $10k to $50k in monthly affiliate revenue.
We think those are modest goals.
This story will be worth watching. Stay tuned, we'll entertain you. The best ways to keep following, before we build out our distribution system, are to connect with me here on LinkedIn, or email me at [email protected].
PS: The Honorary Fate of B King Digital
I believe that quality marketing has an impact on everyone involved. The marketers as well as the users. Likely more impact than most would want to admit. With data and high moral standards, every marketing asset can be made such that the user enjoys it. That’s the core of our SEO approach. And I want to help establish that approach as the only marketing approach that’s applied. For that, we need a brand that people take seriously from the very first time they interact with it. “Chosen Data” seems to resonate that way.
All along, B King Digital was just a play on words using my name. When you translate Kral from my native Slovak, it means King. That sure is a fun family name to grow up with, and it stuck as a company name for several years, too. But I don’t want the company to depend on me or revolve around me, so now we’re parting ways with BKD.
You know we will absolutely not throw away the art that the one and only Andre Vitorio executed. The BKD home page is going to continue to live on, the best domain of all time, 1800goodtimes.com. One day, it’ll be a hyped up NFT — if you act fast and buy now, I’ll sell you the below screenshot for 33 ETH.
— Image above: We’re keeping the old site for the art of it :)
The page about the workshops I do to train remote professionals is going to live on mountainremotes.com.
Video production that scales.
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