Behind The Scenes

Key Takeaways

um [Music] hey everyone welcome to the copyblogger podcast my name is tim stodder thank you for joining us as always i have my partner ethan brooks with me ethan how are you i'm doing good man happy friday yes likewise okay before we get started two quick announcements i have to make first off last week i found out in editing that my actual studio mic wasn't hooked up the audio came through my uh cam mic my webcam mic so if the audio last week was a little bit jacked i really apologize we took a lot of time to mess with the editing for the audio so that it sounded pretty good but my apologies i'll make sure we don't screw that up going forward and second of all we needed to take a moment ethan you and i to solidify that two episodes ago we said we will come back and say for sure whether sub stack allows the user to still collect the email address even if you hit subscribe on the app and in credit to sub stack they do do that you do still get to collect the email address so i suppose that's another check in the win column for substack on our on our episode that we had for them so i feel positive about that i still wouldn't recommend somebody build a legitimate business on substance but hey what do i know there's people doing it every day and i wanted to make sure that we were we were honest and we gave the fair the fair spectrum on both sides of the coin for that one and that's all i got so what's the point well well first of all i didn't know you were i didn't know you're going to mention this but i'm glad that you did for anybody listening yeah it was two episodes ago it was two or three episodes ago we talked about whether or not sub stack just nuked your email list and we did to be fair include this in the show notes so for anybody who hasn't heard that episode yet i have a sub like a subset that i use for testing stuff and tim tried to sign up for it using the app and i wasn't able to access it immediately on the show but we did go back and check later and the email address does still come through so kudos to substance for still being creator-centric in that way i'm curious what what brought this top of mind did they like reach out to you or anything like that or did you just kind of remember that we hadn't closed this loop yeah i just remembered we were going to talk about it last week but the episode last week got jacked up because we were both traveling and so we didn't have a an opportunity to put that in there and it just yeah it popped in my head a couple minutes ago that it would just be irresponsible you know as much as uh journalism is is uh under the microscope these days right like i still think it's just important that people on all sides of every story do their best to tell the truth about things and the truth is that yeah sub stack did do the right thing with their app and uh and i just think it's important that that we show that element of it so like you said kudos to sub stack blink twice if somebody from sub stack is in the room with you right now hey miss didn't reach out to me okay sent like an enforcer no for anybody who is like interested in that to whether you're new here didn't catch that or if you just skipped a week if you are looking at building a content business or something like that you may enjoy going back to listen because we we basically looked at some changes that sub stack had made but used those as the basis for talking about content businesses in a wider context and some of the pros and cons of building on a place like substance so like you know pros obviously it's a very easy on-ramp if you're looking to put all your content in one place that can be a little overwhelming for some people khan you're building a reputation that is effectively helping substance not necessarily your brand so all the seo all those backlinks you develop they go to help a substit which is why one of the reasons that tim keeps saying like i wouldn't recommend building there so if you're looking at that avenue you haven't heard of or if you haven't heard that episode go check it out but yeah hats off to sub stack for still being pretty creator centric given all the competing priorities or all the different priorities that they're they're managing today's gonna be kind of a special episode because tim is running a relaunch of one of the companies that he runs a sober nation uh what we wanted to do for this episode is kind of pull everybody behind the scenes and give you a look at what these kinds of relaunches really entail not only the things that he thought through ahead of time but some of the things that are still on his mind two or three days pre-launch uh just kind of talk about them throw some ideas around i think this is gonna be cool because if you've been through a launch like this before you kind of know how it goes but a lot of people haven't and they don't and one thing that always bothered me especially since i started my career kind of in front of the content paywall so to speak like i saw a lot of content brands i saw a lot of companies doing this stuff but i wasn't really on the back side understanding how it all worked i think it's very common to underestimate the amount of preparation that goes into a launch like this and that's troublesome because when you all of a sudden see somebody succeeding you think it's because like it was easy and that somehow you're doing something wrong because like success didn't just automatically happen for something that you started so we're going to dig into this but my intention is for everybody listening hopefully this provides a window into like what these types of relaunches really look like and the amount of preparation that goes into them which is significantly more than i think most people would expect if you haven't been through one before so with that is the context and by the way i haven't seen this yet so i'm gonna be reacting kind of in real time uh as tim talks me through some of this first of all for anybody who hasn't heard of sober nation what is the brand and then what was the impetus behind the relaunch why did you guys decide to do this now well we decided to do it like a year and a half ago and it's taken that long to get us to this point yeah so okay i'll start the very beginning most people know my story so i won't spend too much time on it i got my start on the internet basically by blogging about getting sober i've been in recovery for a little more than 12 years now and it all started for me on a blog spot basically i would just wake up and write about what i was going through and what the experience was like and didn't know that anybody was listening or even cared until one day i discovered that google drives traffic to pages of content via an algorithm and that's basically how i got into seo so sober nation is where it all started for me and it continues to be a really really big part of my life the way sober nation becomes a business and i guess i should preface this part as well by saying that like sober nation has been a colossal failure over and over and over and over again right like i really mean that out of all the things that i've done it has by far been like the lowest roi on my time but in a way it's it's also been the highest because i've learned everything i know from working on this website and those skills have allowed me to just bring it to other places and to take the lessons that i've learned and and apply them to like other projects maybe and so for your agency and stuff like that or for sure it's like the testing ground you can testing ground testing that's a really great great way to say it look here's why it's so scary because there's a lot of really high level technical seo on this website and we're about to really really change some things which could potentially be catastrophic i feel really really good about it because all the data that we've collected over the last couple months years really say this is how you want to do it but you don't know until you do it right so it's scary just to confirm when you started that blog 12 years ago was that sober nation like has it's been the same site the entire time or were there different kind of iterations along the way no just one iteration it was on blog spot block spot doesn't even exist anymore right now actually i think i think it still exists i just don't think you can create an account i'm not really sure but the original name of it was i think just timestarter.blogspot.com i learned about domains and eventually started a website called serbination after probably nine months of just blogging on this blogspot account once i like discovered seo and started getting into it got it and you mentioned already that you consider this to be sort of a laboratory in one respect where you get to test a lot of things from an seo perspective which plays directly into what happens over at like stasi your marketing agency do you consider this to be a business too and if so like what's the how does it monetize what's the actual business model definitely a business and it's actually my favorite kind of business because there's not a whole lot to think about other than generating valuable traffic so it's a lead generation website basically the way here's the industry in a nutshell all healthcare sucks at marketing and it's because they're doctors right and like they went to school for years and years and they thought if i pay a hundred something thousand dollars and i get this degree then like i'll just be able to do work and and make a lot of money and that's true to the extent that they figure out how to do marketing so sober nation specifically generates phone calls for highly highly reputable addiction treatment centers across the country and it fluctuates in regards of like what regions of the country get sent to certain centers you know it's always a little bit of a of a game just to see who's like the proper fit for a certain person because it's medical so there's insurance and [ __ ] that you got to think about right but uh but the reason why i love this kind of website is because actually i don't have to think about that too much like my only job is to get is to generate resources that are so valuable that they help people so much to the fact that they think okay i trust this website i'm going to call this number to get help and i've taken this same exact model by the way and built a moving lead gen website so you know people move all across the country and it's actually a big business with brokers you know like being a broker to figure out who they're gonna hire to to to be the movers right pack up the trucks and drive the [ __ ] across the country i've done this in the stem cell industry i'm really really interested in stem cells and regenerative medicine and there's a lot of lead gen business there as well and we've dabbled on the idea of doing it with um certain medical supplies so diabetic strips catheters actually there's some legislation within the last 10 years that people that have spinal injuries that need to use catheters they get a new catheter every single time because it helps reduce infection so there's actually like a really really valuable and lucrative lead generation market within the medical supplies so i know i'm getting a little bit off topic here but the point i'm trying to make is that these websites are my favorite because i don't have to do anything after the phone call right like i don't have to sell advertising i don't do any advertising um it's not like copy blogger where people sign up for an email list and then i have to like write funnels and and try to sell them products or it's not like stati where like they have to call me and i have to sell them on the service it's quite literally just make the best website possible so that people trust the resources that we put together and they generate leads to a lead buyer let me pause here for just one second i do want to keep going through the launch in a minute but it occurs to me that people listening to this might be hearing you say this and thinking wow this is a really interesting business model how might i apply this to different areas in my life where i'm kind of interested in like how would i identify a good niche in which i could replicate this same business model so you mentioned a few that you like you've replicated this in a couple different areas how do you typically analyze an industry to decide whether or not there's like a good lead gen opportunity there interesting question and i do it just all through search data all through sem rush yeah i guess it takes a little bit of calling people as well you know the the answer to this actually while i think about it is i spent so much time in florida and florida has call centers like you would not believe you know and so like i just got a little bit inundated with the world of call centers and and phone pits if you ever seen boiler room you know like i actually really get off on that [ __ ] like i really love it so it's just industries that need phone calls industries that need phone calls like what is an industry that you can't quite sell something without talking to a person and then you cross-reference that with the search data and then you cross-reference that with like is is the sale on the back end of the product lucrative enough that people are going to be willing to pay a good amount of money per lead that gets driven to them so i mean they're everywhere you know like really lawn care i think is a huge one that's coming up people don't want to cut their grass anymore you know lawn care is pretty damn big mobile car wash is another one like really and this is why i love it so much because you can do it local you know like you don't have to be a national brand like me let's say you live in nashville and there's a ton of mobile car wash companies around here and all them kids the 24 year olds they buy a van they put a hose in the back of their van you know they want phone calls and i i just i know someone listening to this could start a mobile car wash lead gen site right now and make it'll take some work but you'll make 60 grand a year for sure well this is so interesting to me i want to hear a little bit more about how you think about the business side of this especially for somebody who's considering doing this themselves real quick i want to bring up this guy i follow him on twitter his name is i'm giving you the screen bro i really like the uh screen sharing part of it oh cool right here johnny robinson so his name is johnny robinson first of all he's got a great twitter handle it's called squeegee god so if you want to find this guy on twitter he's at squeegee god and uh the reason he i think he's cool is that he's big on lead gen businesses too and he does a lot of great work on twitter showing just how accessible this is as a business model so what he does is he does i think he would call it like remote uh there's remote home service basically yeah right that's a great word for it right there yeah remote home services so he'll basically build a website where he's getting leads for different home services uh he's got one that's a window cleaning company and then another i think he's done that's like you know just uh cleaning companies as well and similar to what you said there's a ton of demand you can build these businesses locally and the the key factor for his kind of niche is that a lot of these contractors who are offering things like cleaning remote car care all these other things they don't want to do the marketing they're terrible about it these are people who they they're good at a thing they want to go do that thing for a living and they're willing to pay in his case up to like you know half the cost of the job in order to not have to do the marketing side of the equation so he just builds out the marketing and then basically subcontracts out the jobs so again that's johnny robinson he's at squeegee god over on twitter people want to check him out he publishes a ton of great content on this but and his big thing is similar to what you just said he's like you can build a remote home services business that cash flows like 10 grand a month and basically all you're doing is you're pulling in leads and bidding jobs and i think what's a little bit different between what he does and what you do yeah you're picking at what point in the chain are you jumping out of the way and like handing the lead over so he actually does the bidding and in that way that means you know he basically gets to control what his upside looks like what about you though when you reach out to a company let's say you're looking at a new space you mentioned the at-home car washing like let's say you were to do that kind of from scratch right now and you you did your search check you've you've analyzed it and you feel it's a strong local opportunity what's the next thing you do do you reach out to people who are already on google and like they're offering this service by a phone call and you have a conversation with them what is that actual next step how do you go from being able to like bring people to a website actually turning that into money yeah that is that is the skill part of the monetization here because you basically have to make deals what i would do you know let's say it's a mobile car wash company i would just find the most what what i would assume to be the most savvy car wash company that there is and i would call them and basically say hey i got phone calls how much you want for them and usually what i do is i start off with like a really really low number and i get them really excited about it until the point where somebody else wants the phone calls it's like oh this person's willing to pay this much right like like because actually what that is it it helps me determine the actual value of the phone call because it has to have a positive cost per acquisition for them or they're not going to do it you know so if they're if they're charging 120 bucks for a car wash and they're paying 20 bucks for a phone call and they're closing one out of every five you know what i mean it's a hundred dollars for a cpa it's only 20 20 bucks that they're gonna make so that probably wouldn't make sense but if i'm charging 20 bucks for a phone call and they're closing one out of every two you know it's a 40 cpa and sure they're gonna make a ton of money so the first thing i would do is just probably call the one that's ranked number one on google my business because at least that means this person is like interested in getting reviews because reviews are like very active and so like i know that they're actively trying to to promote themselves on google and uh that person usually every single time will say yes like these people want leads they want business i think that's one of the things that scares people the most about this kind of business is they think no i just want to be a creator you know and i just want to sit back and have people hit the subscribe button then i'm going to wake up and stripe is going to tell me how much money i made while i was sleeping you know that has not been the path to success for me the path to success for me has been generate leads and then like get after the people that need them so that's how i would do it i like that a lot i want to take one second to just emphasize something for people listening here because you said like when you're charging for these you really need to be mindful of who the the company that's ultimately making like the company that's paying you how much they're paying for leads what's their price per acquisition yeah and how much money they're making on top of that and i just want to reiterate i think we talked about this in a past episode as well how important of a concept that is when you're pricing any kind of advertising product there's a lot of people out there who and it's very tempting too especially if you're new to the industry to come in and say okay well i've built a newsletter and i have 10 000 subscribers how much should i charge for ads and there's like there's basically two answers to this because you know one answer like there's always somebody who's going to just give you a number say well you should be charging at least 500 or whatever it is but that's not the real answer the real answer is you need to know how much your advertisers are paying for their customers and then you need to kind of charge appropriately based on how many customers you can drive to them and make it look like not only a good deal from their perspective but also somewhere like maybe a slightly better deal than what they're getting elsewhere because then they're going to keep investing in your medium because they're tracking all that stuff so that i just wanted to emphasize that cost per acquisition is the most important factor when you're pricing any kind of advertising business and this works for what tim's talking about but also for things like content and other i guess other ad driven businesses so oh it looks like he had one more thing to say about that i want to emphasize that even more and here's the other reason why double emphasis yeah because here's the other reason why when people start off it's let me get as much money as i can possibly get and they learn very very quickly how expensive it is to continuously find new people to either buy your leads or buy your ad and just interesting believe me believe me if you have a buyer that has a set price and in the back your mind you might be thinking oh i know i can charge more for this what if i can find the other person but this buyer is committed and they're loyal and they're going to stay on for the person that's been buying my leads i've been working with this these people for three or four years and like i know for a fact absolutely i could ratchet it up but why because i get to focus all of my time on doing nothing but making my website the best that it could possibly be and i just i really really see people get stuck in that idea like i need to be a better sales person i need to get i need to get more i need to get more like let me leverage these people against each other to try to jack up the price and and what they're doing is they're they're increasing the amount of costs that their time is because like you could be using that time to instead of charge more per lead generate more leads right and then that's how it really scales like that's how you get that exponential factor or the thing just ramping up that is a great piece of insider insight i'm glad you stopped to share that oh believe me man there's there's nothing worse than bouncing all around playing a [ __ ] game like there's nothing worse you just you want to get to a point where you focus fully on creating the best website possible i'm betting that that was the main push behind this rebrand or this relaunch as well your you're you're shooting for some kind of optimization uh that you don't feel you were getting up to this point right can you talk me a little bit talk me through that a little bit i will and i'm gonna share my screen for this it'll be very helpful to watch this video so for the people just listening it's on youtube just search copy blogger on youtube and uh and it'll be on there however i'm i'm pretty good at explaining seo so you know try your best to just visualize it in your mind's eye but this is what we're doing i have the current sober nation website this is the website that's live and really there's only one section of the website that has the huge overhaul because for the most part the content you know the pages the resource pages we made a directory for collegiate recovery there's a lot of programs in colleges that like give students who are sober kind of housing and resources so that they don't get so they can find stuff to do in college without going through the the party scene you know so for the most part all of this stuff is saying the same and this is pretty straightforward even if you're launching if you're relaunching a blog or something like that like as long as you're not changing the urls and as long as you're not switching links around everything will be pretty simple what we're doing is we're redesigning the whole thing so it's going to look completely different and i guess in a way the the code of the design will could have an impact on search if it's faster or maybe it's lighter code or or possibly it's hard to say with that and it's not as important as getting this right so this is the important part of the website so i'm on sobernation.com rehabs and this rehaps page this is the parent page for our entire directory and our directory is seo through location so the first link on this page is new york so i'm going to click on new york and it's going to say sobernation.com rehab not rehabs because the the plural is the parent page and so now this is the state page and re yes rehab new york correct yeah sobernation.com rehab new dash york so this is the state page and there's a lot of information on this page but mostly what this page is is a link to every single city in new york state and so it's almost like like a factor tree in a way if you remember doing factors in school i'm terrible at math so if i get this right which wrong which i might please don't make fun of me on twitter but i think what is it like 64. was that eight times eight you know what i mean and then it breaks down and you're talking to the wrong guy but it sounds very yeah and then you could be like 64 maybe 16. but eight has like a four and a two and then you can break down the four into two and two so that's basically what we've built you know like this this parent page is just the top of the hierarchy and then you go into the state page and this is one level down and it has all of the cities of the state and then if you click on a city so the first city on this page is albany and so then what happens is it's sobernation.com rehabs slash albany can i ask you just as a novice like an seo novice why does the rehab switch back to rehabs once you click through to this city level because if it didn't then well yeah is there is there a reason that the like the state level is effectively like in a different directory or because if it didn't then okay so remember how i just talked about the factor tree yep at the top it splits into two right and so we're creating a silo a silo is almost like a website inside a website where it's like the pages that all have to do with something basically linked together so on the rehabs parent page the silo is the states so all of the states it will get really complicated let's say we we visualize this through a network you know and we had a huge board on the wall that showed lines between all the pages that link together that network would show that all of the state pages link down to the city pages and link across amongst themselves and so in order to keep it clean for google to basically see like okay this silo is connected to each other and the style is connected to each other we do that by separating the parent page let me also say that this silo [ __ ] was really really important when we started the website it's not so much anymore because google is just so damn smart that they even can recognize if you're building silos which is you know technically manipulative you know because it's just not the way that a website would naturally form you know if you were just like doing it one page at a time and creating content in the right way so i don't think the new site has a silo in the same exact way although it might and if it does it's just because we don't want to change the urls too much got it got it yeah it does but all right so i cut you off there once you click through to a city page you're looking at yeah so once we click through their city page i'm back on the new york parent page and i'm going to click on albany and now these are all the rehabs we call them listings these are all the listings in albany so what we have is basically three things four things we have the main rehab parent page sobernation.com rehabs we have the states okay and in this state page we have a list of cities this is where we need to change and i will show you how the results of this actually impact the internet so i'm on sem rush right now and i just searched sobernation.com if you can hear that banging by the way i'm really sorry my kid's beating on a bucket downstairs yeah he literally has a mallet that he carries with him everywhere it's just a stick with a giant red like whacking machine on the top of it but uh yeah all right you can see that in october 2019 we had our highest traffic ever and right around this time google released a series of algorithm updates called hummingbird and hummingbird is basically it's not so much an algorithm change as it is just incremental updates to how google indexes pages because it's machine learning that is figuring out through the billions and billions of searches on google like what people actually mean when they search things so an example for this could be if you go into google and you just search cars right well maybe you're looking to buy a car maybe you're looking for the movie cars right maybe you're looking for how cars are built who knows there's a million different ways that like google can interpret things that get searched and so hummingbird is basically machine learning that just you know gets like 0.0001 more accurate every time somebody searches something and then like sees what they clicked on when they searched that thing and so that's relevant here yeah for anybody listening so as tim just mentioned was that would you say january 2019 roughly it was that it's been 15. yeah oh wow okay so october 2019 and then it basically falls 70 or so over the last couple of years so this is what i'd like to i'd like to know if like google's goal in doing that was to say okay well right now there's a bunch of people who are searching like under in ideal circumstances they're saying a bunch of people are searching for something and they're not quite finding exactly what they're looking for right so we're trying to dial this in you as the guy running the business what have you noticed on the business end like because traffic can fall that doesn't necessarily affect the business if those 90k other people weren't quality leads to begin with so did you notice uh like a correlating drop in revenue or would you just say the average visitor is now way more targeted than it was before a little bit of both so two things happen with this traffic drop one of them is that google started to recognize clickbait a lot and so all of the articles and so we're talking about two things here we're talking about articles that we've written and the directory all of the revenue comes from the directory i'd say 90 percent of the phone calls come from from the directory so that would be somebody searching like uh rehab in albany right that's exactly right that's exactly right yeah but so a lot of the click bait stuff you know like top 10 celebrities in recovery [ __ ] like that that isn't actually like helpful but it's just like very very traffic driving um a majority of the drop comes from those pages being way pushed down the search results because google just kind of figured it out like you're not looking for celebrity stuff you're not looking for this this is clickbait go post this on reddit do whatever you're going to do with it so as a result like we've basically stopped doing all of that content it's not a magazine we just went full in on like medically reviewed content that is created to help somebody looking for help right okay so there's that but there's also a significant piece of the traffic which we have seen a decrease in revenue in the last last two years i'm down i'd say 15 month over month you know so like we're i'm very fortunate in that the reason why i like these kind of businesses is because they're so lean right it's just me and my partner who manage all these websites so we don't need a team and so it hasn't necessarily affected my life that much but we're bleeding and we will keep bleeding unless we do something and here's exactly why and you actually nailed it ethan when you said when people are searching for things they're not getting exactly what they're looking for right so i have the current site still up and once again i'm on this new york page and so if i search let me just ask you if i search for drug rehabs in new york what do you think i'm looking for rehab centers somewhere in the state of new york right and i know that sounds so obvious because technically this site the one we have now is perfectly seoed for google it's not perfectly seo for the user because if you go on this page there's not a single rehab center in new york listed there's just a whole bunch of links to the city right and so like it's this kind of semantic [ __ ] that google has been figuring out where it doesn't matter how crafty you get with seo and silos and site structure and hierarchy and all that kind of stuff we are looking to solve our users problems as quickly as possible and so what do we got we got bam this is the new website by the way it's on staging it's not live yet i am going to go to the directory which has the same exact site structure right but let's go to the new york page again and what do you see we're seeing listings at the top of the page it says 15 addiction rehabs in new york and just looking at the right out of the gate orchard the listings are in orchard park new york new york so new york city if you scroll just a little bit are these predominantly did you uh how are you creating these results is this dynamic like it's just it's just pulling it from a database or did you decide you do some research and you're like you know when most people say new york what they really mean is new york city so we're gonna put the new york city ones at the top even though like albany is you know alphabetically the first place that you would that would pop up great question so you froze on my end for a bit there what ethan said when i said we're on the news site when we go to the new york page what is it that you see ethan said i see a whole set of listings that are rehabs in new york as opposed to the old website which is just links of of cities so we're going to edit that if you hear like a weird glitch right there that's why it froze on my end but to answer your question ethan yes all of this information is pulled through various databases all across the internet and then what made sobernation very very successful in the beginning which actually isn't that big of a deal anymore because a lot of people just copied us which is totally fine is that my developer he's just kind of a genius i'm very very lucky to have him on my team and so he wrote this specialized code that pulls the ip address of the person searching and figures out basically where they are and then serves the the rehabs to them in proximity to where they are so it's a little bit tough because i'm in nashville right now and i'm searching this and granted it's never going to be totally perfect because like the internet is always changing and like some of the addresses change and like business is shut down and all that stuff but if i were in new york well it'll be that way now so like this top one this is the closest one to me in new york and then it just goes further and further away on some kind of algorithm he wrote depending on like the circumference of the 50 mile radius of wherever you are so so that's how the data gets served and then subsequently the listings are just much more like informative whereas on the old website the listings just didn't have as much to them and we're going to continue to build up the listings now yeah see even this one's a 404 like and this is a this is a direct result of the fact that this this particular listing that i'm looking at is probably shut down and so the data that gets pulled doesn't see it anymore wow but the listings that we created on the new site are just going to be super informative they're going to have the phone number you know so like we always want to keep the option open and it's super honest and transparent and like by the book so if somebody comes here and they want to just call the listing directly like they can do that they don't have to call our call center but if they want to help and talk it through and work their insurance out and do all that we can provide that service for them and so and so you know like it's been a year and a half and i can explain this to you in in a couple minutes right but believe me this has been grueling anxiety provoking terrifying work okay i want to dig into that in a second but i just want to take a second to acknowledge the scale of this overhaul so i think when people myself included heard well you've been doing this for a year and a half one of the first thoughts is what's been taken so long this is big it looks like you wrote a bunch of custom content i mean i saw for people listening there's there's categories on these listings now that go beyond it's not just a description of like where the place is it's who do they serve do they even talk about whether or not they use certain drugs in their treatment right did i see that accurately exactly yes and so there's it seems like there's now a pretty crucial content creation component that's going into these listings that maybe wasn't there before that's pretty cool yeah so just hats off this is a huge project it's cool to see that's coming to fruition and now it's going to launch in three days and so what i'd love to do oh okay so uh just a little bit over maybe five four or five days so what's on your mind right now man what was harder about this than you expected like what surprised you what was surprisingly difficult about this overhaul the anxiety like and i really mean that the technical stuff i've been working with my team for years and so you know like we can scream at each other and get frustrated with each other and be patient with each other i mean he they're all in my wedding right like the the people that i built these companies with they're all my best friends i just got really really lucky that i found these people at the time of my life the part about it is just the anxiety because there's still a there's still a piece that says what we have isn't perfect but it's great you know like anybody would be so grateful to have this website that generates this income for them and it's like a real passion project and i know that i can depend on that but i also know i can depend on that to like slowly deteriorate over the course of the next 18 months and what is it that i want you know do i want to actually continue to fulfill this like purpose that i have which is to create these resources and find people and let them know that they're not alone and you know hopefully be like an example to them in like whatever small capacity i could and like in order to do that like we have a saying within my crew you gotta risk it to get the biscuit right and so like the anxiety of risking it to get the biscuit is has cost me a lot of sleep and i'm not saying that as like to be tried or trivial like it's cost me a lot of sleep so the just to make sure i'm clear the the major source of anxiety is the potential for this to completely tank your s your existing seo yeah is that how you guys are like is that your most effective competitive lever right now because you said other people have come in they've started copying you on this they just haven't been able to outfox your seo or is like if that goes away the business craters that is that am i understanding that properly yeah and this is actually perfect to the part that i wanted to talk about with my plan because i think it'll be cool for people to see how there's always an opening and i i try to drive this point across a lot it's hard because people sometimes ask me questions about like their particular website and without doing research you know if i'm on like one of the academy master classes and we do the questions people always like look at my website like what's the opening there and it's hard for me to like on the spot find it but this is a good analogy because within the last 10 years there's been dozens of websites that have come up trying to get into the healthcare space and some of them have significant marketing budgets and i don't i honestly don't have any interest in playing that game this is not where i'm at with my life and my lifestyle and so i can show you how we've slowly gotten smothered by some of these companies with marketing budgets but i can also show you that there's still openings and a lot of times it's better to be fast and agile and small because you don't have to actually win you just have to find the one thing and so i am going to share my screen again and i will show you okay so i'm gonna have a couple things open i'm gonna have a screen and then i'm gonna click back and forth to sem rush for a little bit and i'm just gonna show you what i'm working on so i'm gonna go to google and i'm gonna search drug rehab new york let's just keep using new york as an example i'm always positive start your recovery is going to come out number one okay addictioncenter.com huge website probably the coolest website on the internet and i really mean that as much as like as much as i get really really competitive and i like stare at my competitors and i think of all the ways that i'm going to take them down you know i have a lot of respect for the people that built addictioncenter.com it is a brilliant masterful piece of art and i believe that okay okay just to give people perspective i'm looking at it on similar web right now it's saying about 1.8 million visits per month so that's a big big site big traffic big site and they did it the hard way too because they the difference between them and us is they're not programmatic well they are they have a directory but they straight up wrote hundreds of i mean thousands and thousands of pages of content like one page at a time and built a whole entire team of like outsourced doctors that would review the content form and like stamp their name on it you know i hate addiction center but i really i also really love them got it all right and then under there you got startyourrecovery.org monster website these guys crushed it addicted.org um you don't usually see them in the top three but i'm not surprised too rehabs.com these guys are huge as well and so like if you're immersed in the seo space you'll notice right away that this is different because typically when you search for a business and a location the search results you get is an actual business in that location as to oppose as opposed to like a massive resource website you know so typically brickrecovery.com which is an actual rehab facility in new york would be number one but these websites are so monstrous and have such savage seos on them that to think of me and david actually winning this search query drug rehab new york is very very unlikely and it would take a significant amount of time and resources that would just be really counterproductive all right so what do i do right like how on earth is measly sober nation going to compete with these guys well check this out so i'm at scm rush i'm gonna search i'm gonna go to the home page just because sometimes i get lost back here and i'm gonna go to sobernation.com i'm gonna click search i'm gonna go to the top organic keywords i'm gonna click view details and you'll see i can do some really cool research back here and i can do it with advanced filters so what i'm going to do is i'm going to find the position of two different pages first i'm going to say drug rehab in the keyword actually no i'm not going to do that i'm just going to look at positions i'm going to go to the advanced filters i'm going to include the url containing and then what does the cities have i forget rehab so remember we were talking about before with the different urls this is why okay and then if you're looking at this there's a whole bunch of different ways i can categorize the results i'm going to click on this position button so that all of the ones that rank number one go to the top and then they're going to list in chronological order so look at all of these little cities that have small search volume that there's possibilities for you know so i'm already ranking number one for alcohol rehab cinco ranch that's in texas so there's a a small town in texas called cinco ranch and about 50 people search for that query a month right it's not a lot it's really not a lot but i rank number one for it right so let's say that generates one phone call a month it's 50 bucks well just actually so for i'm looking down the list a little bit getting i'm getting a little bit ahead of ourselves but the first there's four results in here all for cinco ranch and if i total them up it looks like it's almost it's closer to 400 searches a month total so does that start to feel is that start that's a little bit more significant right like 400 searches a month in this one little city that you dominate for that's where the opportunity is you're totally getting it because i'm trying not to get too technical but remember that algorithm about hummingbird well hummingbird figured out through machine learning that if you search for alcohol rehab or you search for drug rehab or you search for cinco ranch alcohol rehab i suppose to alcohol rehab cinco ranch like you're looking for the same thing right so now all of a sudden you don't have to be so specific about the keyword that you're going for rather you're you're kind of grouping keywords together because you know that google can basically figure out like this is what you're looking for all right and so as you scroll down i'm on all of the pages i have that rank number five right so potters will rehab north carolina there's about 50 searches a month for it and the competition is about 21 so i can easily win that keyword i'm gonna go into the second page now let's find some things that are ranked like eight or so which is my favorite for whatever reason i just i love going after things that are number eight uh can you talk a little bit more about that why why because is that like just like a sweet spot where competition is yeah it's just a sweet spot okay um so we're looking at eight well and this is why for for the people that are watching the video you can see now that we got to number eight the keyword difficulty has gone up so there's a little color code on the keyword difficulty and they've all been green which means like yeah sure this is a toss up go get it but now we're at like 31 and this means it's a little bit more difficult which core relates to higher search volume doesn't necessarily mean it but it's more difficult because more people are trying to rank for it usually right like sometimes these layouts are cool but the bang for your buck isn't really there eight is still first page too right in under most circumstances yeah correct so i know i'm almost there like i can win this you know i'm not on page 100 climbing pushing a boulder up the hill you know like i can i can isolate this long this is cool that's actually a perfect example because longhorn is a city right outside philadelphia i know exactly where it is so we're ranked number eight for longhorn rehab it's it's tough to say these things without like you have to recognize that there's people here and there's people suffering and believe me i live in that world and i do it every day however from a search volume i know that there's people in longhorn because i've been there right like i know that there's people who are searching for this so this is another great example and so my i can go through this all day i got what do i got i got 95 pages of potential keywords but if i were to take this spreadsheet and take everything number 10 let's say number four to number 20 where they're really really small towns and cities that probably get anywhere from 50 to 140 searches a month right and i take these let's call it 500 pages and i say we're going to go through these pages one by one and get these little cities so number 10 to number one or number two now we're talking about real real serious revenue real serious revenue and so and so when we talked about that anxiety before like yes it's very very scary however there's like a path to success here and it's just it's gonna just be about executing this is really interesting and it reminds me of something else that's i think tied into content businesses more broadly which is that uh one way to compete in this space is to look at what large companies don't have the time to go after and that's essentially what you're saying here you're saying like we're going to dominate across a large category of small searches because you know it starts your addiction they can't they literally can't even turn that into an roi positive endeavor because in order for them to like try and approach that they're going to have to hire a new person that person is going to come on like 60 grand a year whatever it's hard to turn that into a profitable scheme for them and or even if they could make it profitable it might not be profitable enough to get over whatever bar they have internally for deciding we're going to do this project or we're not going to do it and i think there's there's a lot of examples of this in the content business in fact one way you can track this is to look at old legacy content companies look them up on wikipedia and look at all their acquisitions because it'll like the best ones are just old newspaper companies or magazine publishers a lot of them have been around for 50 60 80 100 years and so they've done a lot of acquisitions and they've gone through a lot of media cycles and a lot of things haven't worked out so they've shut a lot of businesses down but that doesn't mean that those aren't viable businesses it just means that like for a billion dollar company like the new york times they have a bar where they're like well this has to make 5 10 20 million dollars in order for us to even think about investing in it otherwise you know like we're not going to be able to justify it to our shareholders or whatever so a lot of times you can go through and you can look at these like that what you just highlighted was amazing and i hope people will go look at the video of this because that kind of inside baseball just like here's exactly the buttons that you click in order to see how to do this super helpful but one other way people can do this is go look at like legacy media companies and just look at look at who they acquired because that should give you an indication of like where they see value because they do a lot of due diligence and stuff on these deals and then look at what they shut down and like i'm thinking of one right now it's the company i blanking on the the media company's name but they used to own flying magazine craig actually just craig um fuller just bought flying magazine from them close to a year ago i was looking at this media company's history and they've been around for a long time same thing i'm saying during the 90s and early 2000s they acquired a whole bunch of video game media properties so like the biggest gaming magazines that were being published at the time and since then a lot of those have been shut down because they just couldn't make the because the the magazine business wasn't able to work the way that they needed to in order to satisfy their investors and their costs and all that but you know anybody who's listening to this that's a gamer knows there's still tons of interest in that and like some of the like there if you go and look at some of these gaming uh like streaming websites and stuff there's a ton of consumer demand so it's not that these businesses can't work it's just that sometimes these big players can't make them work at the right level in order to justify it that's your opportunity and i hope people will look into that deeper i do too you totally nailed it so those websites that we talked about start your recovery and addiction center dot com are already ranking number one for drug rehab new york you know drug rehab texas they're probably up there if you just search drug rehab and so like why in the [ __ ] are they gonna waste their time trying to get langhorne for 50 searches and it might give them one phone call a month you know that doesn't make sense they got teams of people and so it's not that they can't and it's not even that they wouldn't it's that dollar for dollar the time they spend on that isn't going to be as valuable as the time they spend going after the real big wins and so i'm so glad that you brought that up man because that really is the thing that that even on my blog that i'm still all these years later trying to figure out exactly how to explain to people like don't try to be the new york times don't try to be the guy that has a million subscribers and like we talk about this every single time it's not so much about niche because when we talk about it we think like yeah there's a niche and there's community around all these small niches it's a little bit more analytical than that whereas like find the thing that you can win and then win that thing and actually like get somewhere because it's like a lot it's a better way to live your life first of all because at least you're you're making progress you know and i personally think that like progress is happiness but also just from a pragmatic standpoint there's always opportunity you just have to dig and dig and dig and find it it's it's there no matter what it's always there totally one other way that people can think about this too is so we've discussed you can look for the opportunity that's too small for the big dogs to care about you can also look for the opportunity that isn't like i'm gonna say socially acceptable but it's it's not even that it's like it's not sexy what's the unsexy opportunity i'll give you a great example oh man yeah one of my i mean when you started this i think rehab probably was an example of that right now more and more people have figured out that there's a huge opportunity there so it's it's it's changed but i was just talking to a friend of mine her name's alexis grant lexi grant is she the salesperson that you put me in touch with a while ago uh no that was probably katie huff for selling ads yeah yeah katie's a baller no lexie is also a baller she's like a media veteran she was like executive vp of content at the penny hoarder so she grew that team to 100 plus and then like tens of millions of readers she also built and sold the right life maybe you've heard of it it's another it's like a website all about how to make money as a writer and she recently started a new company called they got acquired which oh cool yeah she's been making the rounds on twitter with it but it's really cool because if you're an entrepreneur you know this there's an issue in like media where the only acquisitions that really get a lot of attention are the only startups that get a lot of attention are the companies that raise these huge funding rounds or make enormous exits and like specifically with funding rounds it's not like on all founders know that's actually not that great right it's it's cool it's it's interesting it's sexy to read about huge sums of money that are getting poured into these companies but the reality is as soon as you raise that money like it from it raises the bar on everything you have to do in order to create returns for your investors and like sometimes it's just not good for your team it's not good for your health it's not always good but it's for whatever reason it's the only thing that's reported on so what lexi's new company looks at is uh companies that get acquired for anywhere from a hundred thousand dollars to 50 million dollars so it's that kind of often ignored small to medium-sized acquisitions and the reason i mention it is because technically she's up against monsters like forbes business insider he's just like huge me uh entrepreneurship and business publishing companies yeah like yeah exactly but instead of maybe going toe to toe and writing the same stories she said well what is nobody writing about here's this thing that everybody knows is that is interesting that probably like the bulk of founders don't want to sell for a billion dollars right like if you if you know what actually goes into that you're like ah i got a life that i want to live you know give me life-changing money but not so much money that i have to have my own like congressional hearing you know yeah yeah yeah so people want it but it's never talked about she went after it and here's the cool part we sat down to talk about the launch phase of her business over the first six months she built that email list up to about a thousand readers and even at that level she was monetizing ads at several thousand dollars a pop right yeah so it you don't have to have these huge businesses that's a point that we hammer on all the time you can find opportunities by looking for the things that are actually a little bit too small for like the big dogs in the industry to monopolize or by looking at what's not sexy what what do people not talk about even though everybody wants to know about it and then i think the third point which is it ties in with lexi's story and also with what you said earlier in terms of pricing leads is you got to know the value of what it is you're selling because that's really the key to monetizing at a high level and and getting the most out of these businesses because it it rather than being distracted by growing something huge like you're able to keep your eye on the ball of creating real value and so in lexi's case again well one thousand person email list is quite small by industry standards but she's able to sell ads for several thousand dollars a pop yeah she knows the value of what she's creating and then same goes for what you said with like phone call leads if you know what your customers are paying for acquisition uh you're able to maximize the business returns on that for anybody listening again go check out the video because tim walked through some really cool stuff visually but he i also just watching this like you did a really good job talking through it so if you can't see the video you're not you you got 98 of the value of this i hope so by the time this gets published the new website should be live assuming everything goes to plan which let's [ __ ] be honest it probably won't you know uh we'll see what david says about it but but man what's following like on on a personal note sober nation is really where it all started for me like the reason why i got hooked on copy blogger was because i read copy blogger every single day and then applied those lessons to sober nation sober nation is just the catalyst of how it all started but it also i've just had a lot of really really important experiences with people that i've met through it so win or lose failure success you know like i'm really proud of it and i i am very very optimistic about it from all standpoints it's just man it's scary so we'll see what happens that's typically how you know you're doing something right so yeah i'm looking at this looks like a great launch you clearly have a good team behind this uh wishing you guys the best of luck and thanks for taking us behind the scenes this was really cool cool all right thanks everyone for listening hit subscribe share the podcast please is the best thing you can do to support the show if we've generated any value for you at all it would really mean a lot to us and we'll talk to you next week [Music] you