Last week I posted about my setback on the $100,000 challenge. Some of you were happy with the results so far, while others were disappointed about how much money I was spending.
In addition, most of you didn’t want me to use my name as you felt it would be cheating. I’ve heard you loud and clear, and I am going to make changes.
Here’s how I will be moving forward to achieve my financial goal:
No more Neil Patel
If you go to Nutrition Secrets, you’ll see that there is little to no mention of Neil Patel. I did this for a few reasons:
- You guys didn’t want me to use my name.
- I don’t know nutrition well enough to be associated with the brand. It’s a legal liability for me to tell you what to do and how to eat when I am not a certified nutritionist.
- I feel like I am providing the world a disservice by creating content on a subject I am not an expert on. I don’t really believe in the “fake it till you make it” philosophy.
- I want to prove to you that a person’s name doesn’t impact how much traffic a website generates.
So I’ve enlisted my good friend Mike Kamo to be the face of the blog. He himself is a nutritionist and will be double-checking the content for facts and writing the content himself.
This means no more interns creating content for free. Instead, Mike will be doing all the writing. I myself have been teaching him how to blog. Look out for future nutrition posts as they will have a similar to Quick Sprout’s writing style.
The deal I’ve worked out with Mike is that he will keep 20% of the revenue, and the rest will be donated to a non-profit organization. After the year is up and the financial milestone is hit, Mike will take full responsibility for the blog, and I will have no more involvement as nutrition isn’t a huge passion for me.
Over the next few days, the authorship of all the comments I wrote will change from my name to his name.
I only ask that you don’t post comments on the Nutrition blog addressing me by my name. You can post comments addressing Mike, but I don’t want people to think I am still using my name to grow the traffic.
Why Mike got into nutrition
When Mike was growing up, his dad was constantly working in order to make enough money to put food on the table. Eventually, his dad started doing well enough for his family to live a comfortable life.
Mike’s stepmom was taking care of Mike and his siblings. But instead of cooking each day, she got the kids fast food. From McDonalds to Pizza Hut, fast food was what Mike and siblings ate for almost every meal.
As a kid, Mike didn’t know any better, but as he got older, he realized how unhealthy it was. It got so bad that his younger brother wouldn’t eat unless he was presented with French fries or hash browns.
Mike not only started to work out to become healthier, but he also started learning about nutrition. Eventually, he got certified as a nutritionist. He also helped out one of our mutual friends, Ajay, who is a partner in Kimberly Snyder’s business. He wasn’t really doing it for the money—he was doing it because he wanted Ajay’s family to live a healthier life.
This is why I thought Mike would be a great person not only to be the face of the nutrition blog but also to create the content and make sure it is factual. The last thing I want is someone reading bad advice, taking action based on it, and ending up unhealthy as a result.
For this reason, no new content has been posted in the last week or so. Mike has been cleaning up the blog as well as the Facebook page. He is also deleting any published information he doesn’t agree with.
Expenses
Many of you think I am spending $10,000 plus dollars a month. That is inaccurate. I didn’t want to address expenses in my last post as I wanted to do a separate blog post on my costs.
I know I had said I was going to try to find an old blog or a website for $100 that wasn’t being updated. If I kept searching, I feel I would have succeeded. And it would have given me a greater head start.
But because it was too time-consuming, I took a quick route of just buying a domain for $1,889.62. The domain was penalized, so I had to scrap it.
The new domain name, Nutrition Secrets, was listed for $3,788.00. Of course, I didn’t want to pay that much as I am on a budget. I ended up negotiating them down to $325. If you want to do something similar, make sure the email address you use to write to the domain owners can’t be traced back to someone who is well known.
For example, when I negotiate domain purchases, I present myself as a college student and throw out random amounts. I then negotiate, and if they keep coming back to me, I always say “let me get back to you; I have to see if I can borrow money from my parents.”
You can do the same with newly listed domains for sale, but the longer a domain has been for sale, the more flexible the owners will be with its price.
As for Facebook ads, the total I’ve spent is $112.07. Sure, the fans I have been getting are junk, but it has helped create leverage that I can use for the “shout out for shout out” tactic.
I’ve spent a total of $48.05 on boosting my Facebook posts. It didn’t work well, so I stopped doing it.
I also purchased Optin Monster for $99.
And I am also using Aweber, which is costing $19 a month.
The WordPress theme was $48. And as for hosting, I am using my existing server for NeilPatel.com to save some money.
So the total I have spent so far is: $2,540.74
You may feel there were other expenses such as content, images, etc. But I was using interns for the content creation (which I stopped, and now Mike is writing the content).
And for images, I use my Fotolia account as well as royalty-free images. Sites like Flickr have a ton of great royalty-free images.
How I achieved over 30,000 visitors in 15 days
When I shared my traffic stats, many of you were skeptical.
You shouldn’t be skeptical on the traffic. It’s not paid for… most of it came from Facebook, which isn’t sticky. And in future monthly update posts, I will show a breakdown of traffic stats, including referrer information and keywords.
The reason there is so much traffic is because it is a broad consumer niche. Just look at the number of people interested in nutrition.
That’s why I was willing to start a blog on it. Just look at the NeilPatel.com blog. I share my traffic stats each month. If it were on a broader subject, the blog would probably be at 800,000 to a million visitors.
Plus, the nutrition space isn’t as competitive. Sure, a lot of people are in that space, but very few of them are marketers. With Quick Sprout, KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, and NeilPatel.com, I am competing with other knowledgeable marketers, which makes it much more difficult to succeed in the field.
If you want to grow your traffic at a fast pace, pick a big niche that isn’t filled with a ton of smart marketers.
Conclusion
Over the next week or so, you’ll see new posts coming up. They may be a bit rough at first, but they will get better over time.
I’m having Mike follow my blogging requirements that I’ve listed in this blog post. So far his rough drafts look pretty good, but he needs a few more rounds of revisions before his content is production quality.
At the moment, it is taking him 5 to 6 hours to write a blog post, but I expect that to speed up as he gets used to blogging.
As for monetization, once the site gets to a few hundred thousand visitors a month, I’ll start throwing up ads. I don’t expect that to generate $100,000 a month in income, but it will generate some cash flow so I can spend money on things like infographics.
Eventually, I’ll come up with some better monetization plans, but I don’t have any solid plans yet.
Do you have any questions I can answer?
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