Matt Oney is a digital marketer living in California. He has been working in the tech industry for about 7 years and has dabbled in several marketing areas, but has primarily focused on SEO.
He recently quit his full-time job to focus on his side hustle: an affiliate marketing-based content site.ZenmasterWellness is ostensibly a site that publishes objective reviews and comparisons of popular products and brands in the mental health and wellness space.
He conducts extensive keyword research to discover exactly what people are searching for on the Internet. He then creates affiliate partnerships with hundreds of brands and receives rebates when readers click through to the brand's website and make a purchase (or become a lead). It's a fairly standard affiliate marketing business model.
After about two years, Zenmaster was generating about 80,000 visits per month (almost exclusively through SEO).
Over the past 6 months, the average monthly revenue has been approximately $40,000 dollars. Due to the nature of the business, this is almost pure profit. Recently, however, due to Google's algorithm updates and market conditions, revenues have dropped to about $15k.
Birth of an Idea
After graduating from the University of San Diego, Matt returned to the Bay Area, where he grew up, to work at a startup called Guidebook. He convinced the company to let him join the marketing team because he had always loved marketing.
The skills accumulated over the years have become the cornerstone of Zenmaster. Especially SEO , but his experience in content marketing, marketing operations, and common technical tools also play a very important important.
priming process
As someone with little to no programming experience, building a website on WordPress did present some difficulties. But with Youtube and the support team at Generatepress, he was able to build a pretty good site.
After the site is set up with Google-related configuration, he immediately starts writing. The process is as follows.
- Conduct in-depth keyword research to develop a content calendar
- Prioritize the content calendar
- Step-by-step completion of each piece of content: become proficient not only in each brand, but also in its industry
- Focus on writing
Although sometimes overwhelmed by the myriad of things an early-stage entrepreneur has to deal with, he's learned to categorize things better, theFocus on one or two tasks at a time.
Ways to attract and retain customers
Matt has made good use of his specialty: SEO. by focusing on what he does best, he's been able to eliminate a lot of distractions and thus continue to move the business forward.
But at the same time, it limits itself in the following ways.
- Not utilizing email marketing effectively. Even though it's a skill he uses every day at work, he hasn't even implemented Mailchimp on his website, let alone developed a proper email sequence.
- Completely ignored social media marketing. At the time, he didn't think it was a critical factor. It's hard to justify spending time on social media without more staff.
Current status and future outlook
The site gets about 50,000 visits per month - about 90% from natural search. Revenue is currently about $15K per month with a profit margin of about 85%.
At its peak, the site was receiving 80,000 visits per month and generating $40,000 in monthly revenue. However, due to fluctuations in the telemedicine market, this number has dropped significantly. Fortunately, overall revenue remains relatively stable at this time due to the diversification of income.
Tools and platforms used
Free/low-cost tools
- Google Analytics / Google Search Console / Google Drive
- Figma - excellent free design tool
- WordPress
- GoFullPage Chrome Extension
- Unsplash - Free Gallery
- Elicit - GPT-3 Driven Research Assistant
- Cron - The Best Calendar Tool
- Notion - Excellent and versatile note-taking app
Mid-range tools
- Superhuman - A better email tool than Gmail!
- Cloudapp - Screen Recording Tool for Mac
- Affluent - for tracking the performance of individual affiliate networks
- Bill.com - Invoicing
High-priority tools
- GeneratePress Pro - Lightweight, SEO Friendly WordPress Theme
- GenerateBlocks Pro - Page Builder from GeneratePress Creator
- Elementor Pro - the page builder currently in use
Advice for other entrepreneurs
If you're waiting for a brilliant idea to come out of nowhere, or an exciting business opportunity to come automatically, stop waiting.The most important advice is to get started.
Even if you fail 3, 5, or 10 times before you find a successful program, it's a tremendous wealth of experience and learning. This knowledge will stay with you for a lifetime and have a compounding effect on every business you build in the future.
If you are a perfectionist who always tries to plan everything in advance, you need to try to get rid of this way of thinking. While it's important to be prepared before you start an important project, the most important thing is to get started right away.