This is not a Textbroker review. As much as I think they should, Textbroker is not compensating me at all for this post.
I prefer Textbroker over all the other sites offering content and writing services. I feel the quality of their writers is better than most. I also find that I rarely have to ask for revisions at Textbroker.
Now, let’s dig into this case study.
Aside from work-related tasks, people go online for one of two reasons… to buy something or to consume content.
Content is what fuels the internet… whether it’s articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts, etc. Even Amazon relies on its sellers to provide content in the product description of each item being sold.
As a marketer trying to promote a product (either as an affiliate or a product owner), you have two choices… free traffic or paid traffic.
Free traffic takes time—time to create the content to promote it and time to wait for that content to get exposure—and paid traffic takes money.
Most people usually have more of one, than the other (time or money). Both traffic strategies work. It’s up to you to decide which one suits you more.
However, there is a hybrid option too. If you choose the ‘free traffic’ path, you don’t need to create the content yourself.
You can use a service like Textbroker and pay people to write your content for you. The key is to make sure you hold them to high standards as far as quality goes.
Again, this is NOT a Textbroker review.
You can use any content and article writing service to accomplish the exact same thing I did here.
Here’s how I used this strategy in our gardening business to get more than 600,000 free organic search visitors…
A number of years ago my dad and I sat down for one of our usual brainstorm sessions. Instead of our typical discussions, my dad asked me a simple question.
He said, “how can we double the business this year?” It’s kinda weird but when you’re asked that question, in that way, it almost immediately becomes crystal clear what you need to do.
It makes you think to yourself, “why have we not done this already?” Because the answer is so simple. Do whatever you’re doing right now that’s working… twice as much.
For example, let’s say you have an email list of 20,000 subscribers in the survival niche and that list is generating $20,000 of monthly revenue ($1.00 per month, per subscriber, is an average figure many marketers use to determine the value of an email list).
To double that, and get to $40,000 per month, do whatever you’re doing right now that’s working… twice as much.
That might mean you have to decide what you should be doubling in a business like this. You have a few options.
Here’s the first one… double your subscriber count to 40,000. Sounds easy and actually, it is easy. Just work the problem backward. You need to add 20,000 new subscribers over the next year.
That’s 1,667 subscribers per month or 55 subscribers per day on top of whatever you’re already doing right now. 55 subscribers per day may sound like a lot but it’s really not when you already have a $20,000 per month business you can use to fund the growth. Even at a cost of $3.00 per new subscriber, that’s only $5,000 per month.
If you’d rather not buy an extra 20,000 subscribers, there’s the second option for you. Send twice as many emails to your existing list or make twice as much money from each email without increasing the frequency.
Sorry for going off on a bit of a tangent there but I thought it might be a useful example for you to see.
In our gardening business, we have a fairly large email list, close to 150,000 subscribers now (after recently cleaning it).
Like the example above, the “easy” option to double that business is to just double the size of our email list.
However, since we rely mostly on organic SEO traffic now, we didn’t really want to mess with any kind of paid traffic campaigns.
Instead, we could just double our organic SEO traffic, which in time would double our email list.
We have over 1,000 pieces of content online, spread across 3 or 4 sites. However, we were lacking content in some pretty popular areas and only because my dad wasn’t as knowledgeable in those areas.
So, I decided to hire writers from TextBroker to write articles on these topics. Here is the complete list of articles I outsourced and the results of those articles (as of September 4, 2019) since they were posted on our blog in 2013:
- (Aug 2013) How to Keep Squirrels Away – 212,559 new, unique organic search visitors ($22.63 – 1,015 words)
- (Aug 2013) How to Attract Deer – 95,199 new, unique organic search visitors ($26.70 – 1,216 words)
- (Aug 2013) 7 Reasons Why You Should Get a Goat – 83,797 new, unique organic search visitors ($24.30 – 1,500 words)
- (Jul 2013) 5 Homemade Mosquito Repellants – 47,579 new, unique organic search visitors ($19.84 – 1,221 words)
- (Jul 2013) How to Control Creeping Charlie – 29,219 new, unique organic search visitors ($16.70 – 1,025 words)
- (Jul 2013) 17 Must-Have Gardening Apps – 18,360 new, unique organic search visitors ($19.52 – 1,201 words)
- (Jul 2013) 7 Organic Homemade Insecticides – 18,119 new, unique organic search visitors ($17.18 – 1,055 words)
- (Jul 2013) How to Control Mosquitos – 17,697 new, unique organic search visitors ($16.92 – 1,039 words)
- (Jun 2013) 11 Tips for Growing Pumpkins – 12,005 new, unique organic search visitors ($17.05 – 1,047 words)
- (Jul 2013) 8 Ways to Purify Water at Home – 12,046 new, unique organic search visitors ($17.88 – 1,099 words)
- (Jun 2013) 9 Things to Consider Before Moving to the Country – 8,386 new, unique organic search visitors ($23.13 – 1,427 words)
- (Jul 2013) How to Attract Bees – 6,938 new, unique organic search visitors ($24.30 – 1,528 words)
- (Aug 2013) Bamboo Plant Care for Beginners – 6,053 new, unique organic search visitors ($24.30 – 1,626 words)
- (Jul 2013) 5 Uses for Chickens in the Garden – 5,550 new, unique organic search visitors ($24.30 – 1,501 words)
- (Jun 2013) 7 Ideas for Homemade Compost Bins – 4,867 new, unique organic search visitors ($18.59 – 1,143 words)
- (Aug 2013) 5 Unique Ways to Build Raised Garden Beds – 2,876 new, unique organic search visitors ($18.46 – 1,135 words)
- (Jun 2013) 9 Tips for Rainwater Collection – 2,996 new, unique organic search visitors ($19.04 – 1,171 words)
- (Jun 2013) Top 20 Gardening Blogs of 2013 – 2,815 new, unique organic search visitors ($19.93 – 1,227 words)
- (Aug 2013) How to Attract Hummingbirds – 1,790 new, unique organic search visitors ($24.24 – 1,088 words)
- (Aug 2013) Vertical Gardening for Beginners – 1,991 new, unique organic search visitors ($24.30 – 1,500 words)
- (Jun 2013) Top 17 Websites for Raising Chickens in 2013 – 1,207 new, unique organic search visitors ($16.96 – 1,041 words)
- (Aug 2013) How to Grow Hops at Home – 1,005 new, unique organic search visitors ($26.70 – 1,260 words)
- (Jul 2013) 9 Tips for Breeding Goats – 965 new, unique organic search visitors ($19.56 – 1,204 words)
- (Jul 2013) How to Plant Raspberries – 845 new, unique organic search visitors ($19.64 – 1,209 words)
- (Aug 2013) Planting By the Moon – 845 new, unique organic search visitors ($16.54 – 1,015 words)
- (Aug 2013) How to Make a Rain Barrel – 744 new, unique organic search visitors ($24.30 – 2,316 words)
- (July 2013) How to Care for Goats – 784 new, unique organic search visitors ($21.48 – 1,324 words)
- (Jun 2013) How to Make Wine at Home – 563 new, unique organic search visitors ($24.30 – 1,551 words)
- (Jul 2013) How to Make Maple Syrup – 623 new, unique organic search visitors ($24.30 – 1,554 words)
- (July 2013) 21 Container Vegetable Gardening Tips – 543 new, unique organic search visitors ($24.30 – 1,506 words)
- (Aug 2013) How to Build a Bat House – 483 new, unique organic search visitors ($21.12 – 1,301 words)
- (Jun 2013) How to Keep Bees a Beginner’s Guide – 523 new, unique organic search visitors ($16.38 – 1,005 words)
- (Jul 2013) 15 Mouth-Watering Edible Weeds – 442 new, unique organic search visitors ($24.30 – 1,525 words)
- (Jul 2013) How to Grow Herbs at Home – 101 new, unique organic search visitors ($19.66 – 1,210 words)
- (Jul 2013) How to Plant Roses – 141 new, unique organic search visitors ($22.68 – 1,399 words)
- (Aug 2013) Top 20 Homeschooling Blogs of 2013 – 161 new, unique organic search visitors ($24.30 – 1,680 words)
- (Aug 2013) 10 Ways to Be More Self-Reliant – 60 new, unique organic search visitors ($23.21 – 1,432 words)
- (Jun 2013) Saving Seeds: A Beginner’s Guide – 40 new, unique organic search visitors ($21.98 – 1,355 words)
- (Jun 2013) 7 Ways to Have a More Energy Efficient Home – 20 new, unique organic search visitors ($16.75 – 1,028 words)
We spent a total of only $827.77 over the course of three months to have those 39 articles written for us.
Those 39 articles have since sent us more than 600,000 brand new, unique visitors to our website. That’s A LOT of traffic. Even spread out over that 6-year period of time, that’s still over 100,000 visitors a year.
These are people who did not know us beforehand and people who were not already on our email list. These stats were pulled from our Google Analytics account and the traffic numbers are only from new, unique organic search visitors.
You can see this site has received more than 4.4 million organic search visitors in the last six years. 600,000 of that came from these 39 articles and 391,555 of that came from just THREE of these articles!
You can see those three articles in the screenshot above. Currently, there are 739 posts (articles) on that one website right now. Out of all of those posts, three of the top ten are outsourced articles that I paid no more than $27.00 each to have someone write.
If I were to start a brand new affiliate business today, in a niche I knew nothing about, I would use this “hybrid” traffic strategy and hire TextBroker writers to pump out content for me on a consistent basis.
Sure, it’s a long-term traffic strategy but look at the results. Most people can’t see that far out. They need that instant gratification that only paid traffic methods can provide. Paid traffic will swallow you whole if you don’t know what you’re doing.
So, how do you make money from all of this? Well, my answer to that question is usually always… build an email list.
Let’s go back to the stats from the outsourced articles from our gardening site. If we were to build an email list JUST from the 600,000 visitors those 39 articles generated, that alone would be a pretty substantial income.
Here’s what I mean… an average opt-in rate for general articles like this is about 10%, given the opt-in “bribe” is somewhat related to the content of the article.
10% of 600,000 total visitors is 60,000 email subscribers. The industry average number thrown around online for how much each of your subscribers should be worth to you every month is $1.00.
So, if you have a list of 10,000 subscribers, you should be earning $10,000 per month from your email list.
With a list of $60,000 subscribers, you should be earning $60,000 per month from your email list. $1.00 month is the average. It varies from niche to niche.
We’ve found in our gardening business that each email subscriber on our list is worth about $0.25 per month. That’s really because what we sell is not even related to what brought them to our site initially.
We sell a business opportunity… for gardeners. You can go back up and see the topics covered in the articles I listed. None of them have anything to do with what we sell.
No one goes to Google and searches for what we sell, so we have to bring them in using different but semi-related topics.
How to monetize your email list is really out of the scope of this blog post. I cover all of that stuff inside The Newsletter Academy.