Have you heard about famous content marketer Neil Patel’s 100k challenge? Last year, he set out to create a new blog from scratch with the aim of generating $100,000 dollars in revenue from it a month. In this post we take a look at the whole story from start to finish to learn the content marketing secrets Neil employed to achieve this ambitious target.
March
Neil Patel is already well known in the online marketing space. So, to avoid charges of cheating, he decided not to use his own name for this new venture. He also picked a niche he had no prior experience in – nutrition – to make it more difficult to leverage his name and connections.
As for the terms of the challenge:
“The official start date will be April 1, 2015. And within 12 months, I have to get the blog to generate $100,000 in monthly revenue.
To get started with the challenge, Neil gave a few insights as to how he planned to achieve the $100k target.
1. Older domains tend to rank better than new ones
Did you know the age of a domain has an impact on SEO?
Rather than buying a new domain and building it from scratch, Neil sought to purchase an existing domain cheaply.
But as we’ll see later, this plan backfires.
It’s something to bear in mind if you’re starting a new business but if you already have an established brand and website, this isn’t an option. The age of a domain does help with SEO, but it’s not the most important factor by a long way.
If you are interested in purchasing an existing domain, sites like expireddomains are a good starting point:
2. Long articles tend to rank better than short ones
You’ll have heard by now the importance of blogging in generating traffic to your website.
Neil is a passionate advocate of blogging for businesses. In particular, he recommends articles of around 2,000 words in length (depending on the industry) as they allow for more detail. He believes in-depth content ranks better than less detailed content.
It makes sense if you think about it, too. Google wants to provide the best results to its users. So, if yours is the most detailed article on a subject, it's likely to be the most helpful for people searching it. Therefore Google is more likely to favour longer articles.
April
In just two weeks, Neil’s new blog generated more than 35,000 visitors.
Much of this traffic came from Facebook.
3. Facebook is awesome for traffic generation
Neil’s fanpage on Facebook generated 50,000 page likes.
This provided an easy way to increase traffic to the blog. Each time he would post an update, these 50,000 fans would see the post, leading to a boost in traffic.
4. Facebook popularity creates Facebook popularity
To get the initial fanbase of 3,282 likes, Neil used Facebook advertisements.
These generated the numbers necessary to start leveraging ‘shout out for shout out’ deals. This is where you promote another Facebook page on your own page and in exchange they do the same for you.
This, in combination with posting quality content, grew the Facebook page.
5. Don’t just wait for people to link to you, ask them!
We all know how important link building is for SEO.
And creating unique, high quality content is a great way to get people to link to your site. But if you don’t yet have much online presence, nobody is going to see your brilliant content in the first place!
To get the ball rolling, Neil sought out resource pages in the nutrition space (simply by Googling ‘resource page nutrition’) to find pages that were linking to nutrition sites. He also used Ahrefs to find sites in the space that were linking to his competitors.
Having created this list, he sent an email template to them all asking for a link. Simple!
6. Research your domain before you acquire it!
As mentioned earlier, Neil’s idea to purchase an established domain backfired.
The original domain – nutritionalresource.com – had a load of spam sites and reciprocal link pages linking to it. As we know, this kind of link building is actively penalised by Google, so the site was at an SEO disadvantage from the start.
Instead, Neil purchased a brand new domain – nutritionsecrets.com – and started again.
May
The new site generated 33,216 visitors and 53,786 page views in May. However, only 1,786 came from Google.
The majority of traffic came from Facebook (see #3) and the fanpage grew to over 100,000 likes.
7. Quirky topics are more likely to go viral
To really get results from social media, you need to create viral content.
This won’t matter so much for SEO (although more visibility increases the likelihood others will link back to you) but will definitely attract visitors to your site.
In the nutrition space, generic topics like ‘how to lose fat’ are beaten to death. But intriguing articles like ‘why you should freeze lemons’ capture the audience’s curiosity, making them click through and visit your site.
June
Despite only 346 more visits than the previous month, Neil was happy with the 33,562 visits his nutrition blog received. This was because a greater proportion of traffic came from search engines.
Search engine visits were 3,675, a 106% increase on the previous month.
8. SEO takes time
While 3,000 or so visits from search engines will not be enough to achieve the $100,000 revenue target, it suggests things are moving in the right direction.
There are a lot of factors that go into Google’s ranking. Bounce rate and time on site, for example, are indicators of how engaged your audience is with your content. A low bounce rate and a high time on site indicates people find your content useful and engaging.
If these metrics are good and steady over time, Google will reward you. This prevents new sites spamming their way to the top of Google. In today’s SEO environment, there are no shortcuts to the top.
9. Site speed is also an SEO factor
Page loading time is another factor for SEO.
Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to test your own site – both on mobile and desktop devices. If it doesn’t score highly, you could be missing out on organic traffic.
If you use Wordpress, there are numerous plugins that may improve these figures. From image size compression to browser caching, there is a plugin for most common issues. Render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold-content is a little more difficult to optimise, though, and is likely to require the time of an experienced web developer.
July
Overall traffic was down in July – at 26,370 visitors – but organic (search engine) traffic went up to 6,391 (+74%).
This was also the month where Neil explains how he is going to monetise the site: by creating a product. He decided to create Nutrition Secrets branded cod liver oil, he sold on Amazon.
The monetisation tactic is very specific to e-commerce businesses (in particular Amazon marketplace), so we won’t focus on that too much here. If you are interested to find out more, though, you can read more here.
August
Organic traffic rose to 13,431 in August and overall traffic saw 40,870 visitors drawn to the site.
Neil reiterates point #8, that SEO takes time:
“They make sure that you are continually improving and that all the signals look good. If they do, you’ll see more search traffic. It’s been like this for years. Typically, every time I start a new blog, it usually takes 6 to 7 months for search traffic to really kick in. Within this period of time, you should see NutritionSecrets.com reach over 100,000 monthly visitors.”
10. Content strategy is really important!
This isn’t going to come as a surprise to anyone. Content – both quality and quantity – is key to successful online marketing.
To help create high quality, consistent content on a regular basis, Neil shared this content strategy template.
It covers key content marketing areas including:
- Style guide
- Strategic plan
- Visitor personas and buyers journey
- Editorial planner and calendar
- Idea and headline generation tools
- Idea validation (is the topic popular? Etc.)
September
As Neil predicted, traffic – both from social and search – rose sharply in September, the sixth month of the $100,000 challenge.
A total of 66,473 visits were recorded on the site. Of these, 19,595 came from search engines.
But the majority of traffic still came from Facebook. One post - ‘What Happens to your Body when you Quit Sugar’ – was especially popular (See point #3 and point #7).
11. Social media influencers drive traffic
Using Buzzsumo, Neil was able to find the sharers who drove the most traffic for topics like ‘belly fat’.
Having identified these influencers, he used an email template to draw their attention to his content. Neil describes this tactic as 'hit-and-miss' but it clearly works; 30,848 visitors came from Facebook in September.
While there’s no guarantee that any one influencer will share your content, if you contact enough of them, you’re likely to see a positive return.
October
Overall traffic was down this month, but organic traffic continued to rise.
12. More content = more opportunities to get found online
Neil attributes much of this SEO success to the quantity of content that gets posted. Mike, from the Nutrition Secrets blog, posts content every day.
Producing new content like this means your site will be more frequently indexed by search crawlers.
But most importantly, each new piece of content is a new opportunity to be found online.
So when Mike writes an article on the nutritional benefits of green tea, say, that article will be indexed, included in Google's results, and displayed to people searching for green tea. The same goes for any related topic; each article will tap into a nutrition-related niche, attract visitors who are interested in nutrition, and increase the likelihood of a purchase of the Nutrition Secrets fish oil.
November
November continued the trend for increased organic traffic: 36,288 of a total 58,260 visits (62%) came from search engines.
Continued link building and content production contributed to this success.
And sales of the fish oil product also began to take off too: revenue for this month totalled $18,293.94.
December
Despite good traffic figures (69,813 visitors), Neil was disappointed with the returning visitor count. Just 16.2% of traffic came from returning visitors in December.
Getting prospects to return to your site allows you to establish their trust, an important factor in both B2B and B2C sales.
So how do you get customers to return to your site so you can earn their trust?...
13. Build an email list
Getting visitors' email addresses is the best way to keep visitors coming back.
"Typically, you will generate more returning visitors by sending out an email blast every time you write a new blog post. And to collect those emails, you have to leverage pop-ups and opt-ins."
As you can see, Neil is a big fan of including pop-ups and opt-ins on your website to collect email addresses. Depending on the type of business, this may or may not be wise. Neil's own homepage, for example, is a gigantic call to action (CTA). It's hard to miss - and therefore more likely to get people signing up - but it can look a bit spammy, increasing your bounce rate.
In the case of Nutrition Secrets though, it's definitely worthwhile. It's also wise to A/B test pop ups, CTAs, etc. to maximise ROI from them.
To further grow your contacts, check out these four ways to grow your email list.
January
With just 3 months to go, Neil is getting closer to achieving his $100,000 monthly revenue target.
January is typically a popular month in the nutrition industry with people making new years resolutions, etc., so Neil was keen to capitalise on this.
14. Plan ahead with your content
Knowing January was going to be a key month for Nutrition Secrets, content creator Mike built up a backlog of content in advance. This allowed him to post seven articles a week.
As Neil admits, the quality of the content was basic. This meant it didn't go over so well on social, but it did have a strong positive impact on organic traffic: 117,070 visits came from search engines.
In total, there were 159,945 visits to the site. Revenue from the fish oil product was $76,326.90.
If Neil and Mike hadn't planned ahead with regards to content, it's unlikely they would have been able to achieve such impressive revenue and visitor metrics in this critical month for the nutrition industry.
February
Despite predictions, February actually saw traffic to the Nutrition Secrets blog increase:
As you can see, a whopping 152,751 visits came from search engines. Overall, there were 200,709 visits to the site.
Despite an increase in traffic, revenue went down to $54,285.30. This wasn't the fault of the content marketing though, they ran out of fish oil stock.
March (the final month)
Success! Neil and Mike smashed the $100k target, generating a total of $121,492.65 in revenue for the month.
This was off the back of 218,811 total visits to the blog and 171,943 visits from search engines. The pair also introduced a second method of monetising the blog: affiliate advertising.
15. SEO is becoming increasingly difficult
Despite meeting - and exceeding - his target, Neil was surprised by how difficult it was to rank highly on Google in today's SEO environment:
"One thing I realized is how much harder it is to rank on Google today compared to 5 years ago. Almost all of my sites are old, so it is much easier for them to rank. And although NutritionSecrets.com generated good traffic, if it were 5 years ago, the blog would have been at a million visitors a month with the same amount of effort."
Conclusion
So there you have it, it is possible to generate $100,000 (approx £69,100 at today's exchange rate) in monthly revenue from a blog within 12 months. It takes a lot of work, and Neil has a wealth of experience, but it's possible.
The challenge provides tons of useful tips for content marketers which can be applied to any business - not just fish oil!
There are a lot of subtle tricks Neil uses, but it can essentially be boiled down to:
- Create great content
- Build plenty of high quality links to your site
Of course, it's easier said than done, but the Neil Patel 100k challenge provided fantastic insights into how this can be achieved.
Further reading
If you'd like to read the $100k challenge in full, here are links to the individual posts: