# How a Personal Finance Blogger Became a Publishing Tycoon using Automated Content

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imOK2-4fMZI
Duration: 13 min
Language: English
Words: 2551
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/imOK2-4fMZI

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[0:00] [Music] [Music]

[0:14] everybody I'm gonna tell you today about how I built an email list of about 1/2 million people and how I built a network of financial news websites I get between 3 and 5 million pageviews per month using the automated content and then at the end I'm going to share some tips so let's see if I can get this right nope run there we go so the this business really began in 2007 I ran a network of personal finance blogs called American consumer news you know today the cool business model is to import products overseas sell them on Amazon through FBA back then it was to start a personal finance blog and tell

[0:51] everybody how you're getting out of debt so I jumped on that bandwagon and we did pretty well with it we by 2010 we were probably getting seven eight hundred thousand page views a month and we had a few writers writing for us we made 130 grand that you're just from these networker blogs but there were some kind of flaws with it our average article length was about 400 words the content wasn't very good a good chunk of our revenue was souring links to SEO agencies so I it was going well until February 23rd of 2011 happened can anybody tell me what happened on that date it yeah first

[1:30] panda update so the Panda update my websites alive half the traffic disappeared overnight text link ate you know buyers they stopped renewing the business just became a shadow of its former glory so I really needed to reinvent the business figure out something new to do you know in order you know for the future so I went over my StatCounter County went through all the domains I owned I thought okay you know what is still working here and there was a website called American banking and market news that we had started at the domain is American banking news calm its toe up and we had some traction with that from publishing

[2:06] news about publicly traded companies and the reason that site was still doing pretty well was because it didn't get traffic from Google organic it got traffic from MSN money in stock twits and Google Finance so places where there's news about publicly traded companies they would send us traffic about three to four hundred page use per article so it was not a lot but enough the only challenge with this was that the shelf-life of our content was about 72 hours because after that it was just old news and nobody cares anymore who cares you know what United did to screw their customers last week we want to know what they're doing to screw

[2:38] their customers this week eventually I kind of figured out though it's that we could write really short formulaic articles about like earnings announcements analyst recommendations dividend announcements through the EDC to write those stories because it's just telling the facts so I got really good at publishing these I use like text expander to come off macros to write stories really quickly about say an analyst upgrade and I was able to get it down so I was publishing around maybe 50 of these stories in a couple hours every morning and that worked out really well for us we got that same three to four hundred page views but per article we

[3:14] were just able to publish a lot more articles that eventually I figured out wait a minute oh there's that site eventually I figured out wait a minute I could use software to do this because there's nothing that I'm doing that software couldn't do so I've made a little script it's a simple web form that was an early version of it where I just fill out some information and then our software would create an article about it it would pull in some data from Yahoo Finance and Reuters like a company description and the current stock price and that would post it to our WordPress website using xml-rpc

[3:44] and that was just a very that's kind of the first iteration if the technology now we've got over like 25 templates for different types of articles that we can do and we publish probably about 2,000 stories per day but when we first started doing this we had gone from maybe 300 400 thousand pages a month to about a million and a few months just by using this strategy we really didn't want to stop there either it was working really well but we were still really dependent on other people sending us traffic from a few big sources and we had already kind of learned that lesson the hard way we didn't want to be

[4:17] reliant on web traffic and advertising revenue so we took that same kind of article creation technology and we made and there's an example of one of the articles but we took that same article creation technology and we made a free daily newsletter that's basically contained a summary of analyst recommendations so that's kind of what that looks like with today with an ad and you know some news stories at the top that's our newsletter you can subscribe to it at market beat com if you want to see what it looks like and we started sending that out we put a pop up on our website however news articles

[4:50] so that we collect the emails about six months into it we had about 10,000 subscribers so we had grown Atlas pretty quick and I said people seem to like the newsletter we were getting some really good feedback from it so I thought maybe there's an opportunity for a subscription play here so I emailed the list and I said hey what do you like about the newsletter what don't you like about the newsletter and I got feedback so I took the feedback I got and I made a better version of the newsletter and sold it for $15 a month so people that pay for the premium newsletter they get it

[5:18] earlier in the morning they can create a larger watchlist they get SMS and email alerts just pretty much a better feature set so at the end of the first year we probably had like a hundred people sign up for it so it wasn't a total failure but it wasn't a giant success either I just didn't really know what I was doing at the time so we it was really by the end of 2012 when we really had that business model figured out we've really grown up since then so the business was called analyst ratings network if you talk to me at microcon for two years ago

[5:47] whenever i've pronounced the name of you guys and like you guys taught it back to me you got it wrong like I heard analysts network ratings network it was just a really bad name and coming to this conference two years ago just reiterated that fact so I was able to find the domain name market be calm for ninety five hundred dollars which really was a steal if you think about it and I we changed the brand to market beat this is what it looks like today on the website and we've done a bunch of other things to grow the business as well we built out like a good better best

[6:17] product line so the price points are now free fifteen dollars a month and then $35 a month for our subscribe web-based research tools we built out relationships with a couple of the biggest financial media agencies in the world that sell you know to pretty much every big financial media company you've heard of and we've really grown the business since then it is really still the same underlying technology though we publish a couple of thousand articles per day using automated content get traffic from MSN Money Yahoo Finance Google Finance stock to its Twitter all the places that have news publicly traded companies our stuff is there so kind of where we're at today

[6:55] we did 2.75 million in revenue last year of that we did about 2.15 million in profit last year we had 37 point 5 million unique visitors we have four hundred and forty five thousand email subscribers of that 2.75 about 595 thousand of that is subscription the rest is advertising it's a very lucrative space for advertising so we've done very well with that he was telling dedicated emails and newsletter sponsorships and web ads and then we were number 529 and the Inc 5000 list of fastest-growing companies they're privately held in United States last year so that is today that's the business I've got five minutes left and

[7:33] I really believe conferences should be actionable and have really good tips and tactics and strategies so the last five minutes of my talk are five strategies that are working for me in my business right now so the first thing is web push notifications this is a desktop browser technology built into Chrome Firefox and Safari that allow you to send a push notification to anyone even after they're not on your website anymore so you go to market beat you'll get asked if you're on a desktop computer if you want to receive push notifications if you do we'll send you a daily notification when that days analysts recommendations are available

[8:07] we've got about 50,000 people to sign up for push notifications in the last six months and whenever we send one out we get about 1500 clicks in a matter of an hour there are ton of uses for these things you can use them for cart abandonment so you can send somebody a push notification saying hey come finish your you know buying experience you can push new content out for these so like blog post you can get people back on your website you can use it to sell we've got advertisers that buy these for like a dollar or click so you know suddenly one of these out it's an easy

[8:35] way to make fifteen hundred dollars for us from an advertiser just to kind of use this we use a technology called one signal calm and there's a few others that do it like push Crew I'm familiar with and I know they've got some competitors but we use one signal the next one is right really short emails I've had really good luck reading like a nine word email this is the terminology that digital marker use digital marketer uses to describe these things but I was doing a fundraiser for my local today's chapter is primarily just using my email list because I figured it would work and it did we raise like 17 grand

[9:09] and the email that worked the best was this short email that said hey are you still interested in helping out with the March of Dimes funders or question mark if you are click this link to make your donation and we probably got about three thousand dollars in donations from this one email and the reason it works is because it's short people actually take the time to read it and then it's a simple yes-or-no question do I want to take action based off this email so definitely test it out you know when you're emailing your audience and you know use it as part of your sequence and

[9:37] maybe I'm user that's a follow up it doesn't take a long to write one of these and they tend to work pretty well the next one is google amp and Facebook instant articles so these are two mobile friendly publishing platforms that Google and Facebook are using - they're pretty much a subset of HTML so they load really fast and smart phones but Google is favoring these and the search results with the news carousel so if you do some searches sometimes at top there's like a carousel of amp stories we wanted to get in on that action so we made all of our sites amp friendly and

[10:06] we actually get about a hundred thousand page views every week from these news carousel stories and that face begins their articles I think they are favoring them in the kind of newsfeed right now I think we're still trying to figure out Facebook instant articles but I think there's definitely an opportunity there obviously the the ad rpm isn't as high as desktop stuff that's true of all mobile stuff but we've done a pretty good job of figuring out an ad placement that kind of works so if you go to I think American bacon news.com you find an article you type slash amp on the end you can see kind of what it looks like

[10:40] on the phones I highly recommend anybody that's doing news content and soon to be ecommerce content I use these publishing I guess tools number four is structured data so if you do a search for any kind of question on Google now sometimes at the top they try to just answer the question indirectly in the search results and not send you to a web page some marketers refer to this as position zero in Google and a lot of times they reference other people's websites in these questions or are these answer boxes and the way that you can get some of these rankings for your website is to

[11:14] use the schema.org structured markup especially their list specification and your question specification so if you go to market be calm and you like look and one of the company profile pages for like Apple or Microsoft or whoever there's a big fact section and all those are are schema.org questions designed to get some of those rankings so like there might be a question like what is Apple stock price today so we put that in a schema dad or question specification answer the question and hopefully someday we'll get some of those rankings it's pretty new to us but I've heard really good things about it the last question or last tip is use

[11:47] session replays so most of us we don't actually know how users interact with their content on our website we think we know how people use our website but typically we don't and if you use a session recording software like hot jar or click tale or Mouse flow is another one you can actually see how real people are using your website like what they're getting stuck on what they're clicking on what they're not clicking on and it's really a good way to say see where people are getting stuck and maybe aren't getting to that next step that you want them to take so that is the fifth tip if you wanna get in touch with

[12:21] me here's how to do so my website my email my facebook my myspace page and of course my ICQ number if you want to chat with me in 1995 thanks everybody [Applause] you

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