How Did We Grow Our Organic Traffic by 69X in 15 Months? (with $1500/mon budget)

[reallyray79]

We had 534 organic monthly visitors to our site in 2019 July when I first purchased the poorly run blog. But by 2020 October, we had 37,680 organic UV/mon. That’s a 69X growth in 15 months from blogging! Yes, 6,900% growth! And more astonishingly, we only spent only around $18K on content creation in 15 months.

Here's how we did it:

Including buying the old domain, we’ve spent around $18K in total. But we still grew by 69X in 15 months. Our hyper organic growth with low costs was only made possible by these 5 factors:

1. Offshore writers: Did I mention they typically cost $1000 per month even if you hire them full time?
2. High DA score: We bought an old domain with high Domain Authority (52);
3. Long-form content: Our “ONE strategy” forces us to stick with long-form content;
4. Incoming guest posts: Guest posts were all we had during the 10 months without any content creation budget

Edit: for readers who DM me to ask for the full post or ask questions, please ask here so that other readers can benefit as well. PS, I removed the post link because of the "No self-promotion" policy.

Comment below if you want me to unpack each factor.

 

[atheistquestion]

@reallyray79 Maybe lacking here but by offshore talent do you mean outsourced talent? I hear what you're saying about onlinejob though. Sourcing talent from the Philippines is great. Never had a problem yet.

 

[reallyray79]

@atheistquestion I mean hiring people from India, the Philippines, Pakistan, Ukraine on Upwork, onlinejobs.ph and freelancer.com

 

[atheistquestion]

@reallyray79 Got you. Thanks for the reply

 

[ablues13]

@reallyray79 How much editing and management do you do with your offshore team? I've found I've had to be very, very particular with product quality to get the blogs where I need them to be (meta data, subheads, actually well-written, etc.).

In my experience, there's a vast gulf between "writing a lot" and "writing a lot of material that people actually want to read and does well in search." Then again, my niches have always been pretty high-competition.... And my starting domains have always had low authority.

(How does a made up statistic like DA -- purely created by the various web tools -- even impact search, anyway? Or are we just using it as shorthand to describe a back link profile?)

 

[billyc37128]

@reallyray79 How did you find and vet offshore talent?

 

[reallyray79]

@billyc37128 Great question:

• Find: Upwork, onlinejobs.ph and freelancer.com (I typically hire them on part-time/contractor basis for 2-3 months first, then decide whether I want them full time)
• Vet: just like hiring any local workers, with interviews

 

[ginaingram8]

@reallyray79 What’s the blog’s subjects/themes?

 

[reallyray79]

@ginaingram8 Solar equipment procurement...

 

[sgtmattkind]

@reallyray79 Do you have like a template brief you give to the Offshore writers, would be great if you could share. Like a document that tells them what you will be looking for per title. Also do you create the titles yourself?