HOW WE MAKE MONEY ONLINE
Currently, we’ve 3 different online business models that generate all of our income. Each business is separate from the next, but they do slightly overlap in places, as you’ll see if you read the specific page that details each business model.
The 3 businesses are:
1. Freelance Writing
2. Link Building & Outreach
3. Lead Generation & Local SEO
In this post, we’re going to be delving into the link building and outreach side of our business.
Link Building & Outreach
We were first introduced to the concept of link building/selling back in 2013 when we first arrived in Thailand.
It was something that really opened our eyes to the possibility of being able to make pretty epic money online.
Brainstorming for a month in Asuncion, Paraguay back in 2014
Link Building in a nutshell
Again, without going into the technical aspect of the whole thing, here’s a little breakdown of what’s involved in this process;
You find expired or expiring domains that have some power already established on them.
You rebuild and re-host that expiring domain into something like a travel site, business blog, financial site etc. This means getting a logo created, creating more blog posts that are aligned with the theme of that website.
So if you make it a travel site, then obviously you need to keep the content and material travel related.
You contact various “link buyers” or companies that may need to buy links for their clients.
You publish these posts from these “link buyers” on the site and they pay you afterwards the pre-arranged fee you agreed with them.
Thanks basically it.
Now you may be thinking why would someone pay you to publish a post on one of these sites?!
Well in each of these articles will be a link to a company or other website. This link could look something like this:
Did you know that travelling with invisalign is easy?
You’ll notice that the words “travelling with invisalign” are hyperlinked to a post Florence wrote back two years ago.
Well this is what’s called a “link” and the words used to link back are called “Anchor text”.
That link back to a company or website is what the client is really paying you for. This link from a powerful domain carried what I like to refer to as “link juice”.
Well this is what’s called a “link” and the words used to link back are called “Anchor text”.
That link back to a company or website is what the client is really paying you for. This link from a powerful domain carried what I like to refer to as “link juice”.
Test for ourselves
Believe it or not, but there’s crazy money to be made in this link selling industry.
We decided to try this model out for ourselves.
We invested over $10,000 over a 2 year period and bought and recreated over 40 sites in various niches (mostly travel).
Our current content clients along with a list of “link buyers” we had from the travel industry were who we targeted.
We made our money back and then some, but the problem was that Google was getting smarter with their algorithm and if they suspected sites were being built with the sole goal of selling links, then they would deindex those sites from the search results!
Getting slapped by Mr.Google
This happened to a lot of our sites initially and it was totally our fault as we didn’t put the effort into making the sites look like actual real sites.
They looked spammy and as a result, when they got a manual review inspection, bang, they were blown out of search results.
But links are still one of the most important ranking factors and there are plenty of “link buyers” out there who are happy to pay a price to get those backlinks, so we had to adjust our thinking a little bit.
Manual Outreach
That’s when we decided to start contacting other real website owners who had their own real blogs, complete with real traffic and viewers.
We agreed on a price with them per post to publish on their site and all we had to do then was mark-up the price on our end to the clients and link buyers that we contacted!
This was a perfect blend and it worked AND is still working for us today!
We’ve currently made personal connections with over 500 different bloggers in various industries and we’ve published guest posts/sponsored posts on about 80% of them so far.
In some cases we’ve published multiple posts on the same sites for different clients/link buyers.
The perfect Scenario
This really was the perfect solution in our eyes for a few reasons:
- We didn’t have to spend a penny buying sites and taking the time to rebuild them.
- We didn’t have to worry about creating loads of articles to publish on the site to make it look “legit”.
- We didn’t have to worry about renewing the domains each year (this can get very, very expensive if you have hundreds of sites).
- We didn’t have to worry about hosting each domain (again, this gets very expensive as you have to make sure each domain has its own unique IP address).
The Disadvantages
- You don’t and never will own or control the sites.
- You act as a middleman and therefore lose a % of each link you sell, as you have to pay the actual owner of the site(s).
However, the advantages have far, far outweighed the disadvantages for us for this business model.
Our main concerns were finding decent websites in various niches (travel, tech, business, lifestyle, parenting, health etc), contacting the owners and agreeing a set rate for each article we sent them!
Automating the process
Our next concern was finding more and more new clients to sell link placements on these blogs to!
Luckily we already had and continue to have a nice little pool of link buyers – in the form of our content clients from our freelance writing agency!
You see, the content that we write for those clients, in most cases, have a backlink inserted in them – which then gets placed on various websites!
So we just positioned ourselves as a one-stop solution for them to not only write the content for them, but also find suitable sites to publish that content on!
Winner winner!!
Obviously, all this outreach, emailing and negotiating takes a lot of time so we needed to find a better and more scalable solution.
This is where good outsourcing processess come into play!
Hiring a virtual Assistant
We hired ourselves a remote assistant who basically takes care of everything in this business model for us.
- She contacts website owners – based on the metrics we need
- Negotiates the fees
- Contacts the “link buyers” list every month to update them with new sites
- Works with a few of our freelance writers to get the content written
- Sends the content to the website owner when the writers are finished with it
- Verifies that everything is ok once it’s published on the website
- Informs us that we can pay the website owner in question
- She then emails the link buyer with the link of their published article(s) and invoices them for payment!
It’s really such an easy and profitable income stream that we’re scratching our heads as to why we didn’t think about doing this a lot sooner.
However, I don’t think just anyone can do this straight out of the box as it does take a little groundwork initially to get trusted by the link buyers who are going to be paying you for this service.
We use Upwork to find our Virtual Assistants
Having a list of buyers/clients already
We had our content clients who gave us a foot in the door and then once they saw that we were able to help them with their link placements, they started ramping up the volume, along with referring us to anyone else they knew.
Again, this was how we grew our content agency (by referrals)!
You may be wondering why don’t these “link buyers” just skip the middleman (us) and go straight to the actual website owners themselves and get the link cheaper than what we charge?!
Well, some of them do as it makes a lot of sense if you think about it.
However, most of them are looking for that one-stop-shop solution.
Remember, these link buyers have a budget from their client(s), and don’t want to waste time going over and back negotiating with the individual website owners constantly.
Think about it this way:
You’re a link buyer and you have to get 50 articles written up and then published on 50 different websites (1 article per website).
Now, which route would you prefer? (if you had a set budget and needed to use it up);
- Research and find 50 suitable websites in a specific niche, find a contact email for each one, write up an email explaining that you’d like to buy a sponsored post placement on that site, wait to hear back from the owner, negotiate a price and then go about getting that article written for that site that meets the requirements that the website owners outlines….
OR
- Give the entire order to Mr.Middleman (Us) who already has relationships built with over 500 website owners, who will both create and publish the articles on each of the 50 individual sites in a timely matter and send you the published links as they are published!
If you’ve got more time than money, then you’d go with option 1 for sure, but if you’ve got more money than time (and most of the clients we target think this way) then you’d much rather go with option 2 and use a middleman to cut out all the headaches in between!
Building trust
A key ingredient for us succeeding in this business model was to build up trust with the clients we were dealing with.
We have link buyers that come back each month, simply because they know they can trust us completely – even though we are charging them a mark-up fee.
They don’t mind because we handle their headaches in an efficient way, and they’re happy to pay for that help.
There’s some uncertainty…
This business model is an extremely profitable one, but it’s hard to predict the monthly income it generates as some months, some clients don’t need any link building services.
In saying that, we’ve built up a nice fully outsourced manual link building business for ourselves that currently generates a nice steady revenue stream each month consistently.
We utilised our pre-existing content client base to help us leapfrog the process, so building upon the content business model worked out favourably in this instance.