Over 6 million people have read my articles online, which is pretty amazing.
The only problem?
This was all work I did for my clients to help them grow.
So even though I’m a professional marketer with over a decade of experience, and I literally just helped a client scale to one million customers, my own website gets less than 30 clicks per month right now…
I should probably fix that right?
So let’s do it.
In this article, I’m going to share my complete strategy to increase my website traffic and scale it to $10k in consistent sales per month, while only working on it one day per week….
Why one day and $10k?
Well a few reasons:
- First off I still have client commitments, so I need to get that work done first so my bills are paid
- Secondly, by imposing a time frame limit like this, it causes me to have to focus on tasks that have the biggest ROI for my efforts. Rather than marketing on 100 channels or doing things that don’t pay off, it’ll force me to build systems to make it work, and be happy with good enough
- Third, it’ll help you see that you can do this for yourself also
- And as for the revenue, we’ll come back to that in a second and why it’s a vital part of our tracking system
Speaking of systems, here’s my plan of attack.
Don’t want to read? Watch the video version below.
If you enjoyed that and want more videos like this, click here to subscribe to my YouTube channel so you don’t miss out.
Otherwise, let’s get on with the article and you can carry on reading…
Step #1. The blog content
Every week I’m going to write one article for my blog, based on the most relevant keyword from my research that my audience wants, while also having the highest volume and least difficulty to rank for. Easy wins for the win.
And I know what you’re thinking:
“But Dan, isn’t AI search killing organic traffic? Why bother?”
Well it is and it isn’t.
If you do this properly, it’s fairly easy to rank in AI search, and the steps in this system will help make that happen.
However, the issue isn’t really that traffic has dropped off as such, it’s the fact that it’s hard to accurately measure traffic anymore due to all the ad blockers stopping the tools from seeing who’s visiting. This means that around 40-60% of the traffic you’re actually getting, you’re just not seeing in your analytics.
This is why the goal for this is to scale to $10k a month and focus on outputs i.e did we do the tasks I’m about to share, as well as key metrics that we can measure.
In my case:
- What was the email list growth?
- And what was the revenue growth?
We may not be able to measure traffic accurately but we can definitely see if it’s having an impact on those 2 things, as the traffic creates leads and leads make sales.
Also?
People don’t realize but Google is still the biggest platform out there by a mile. Almost 86 billion people use it per month.
In fact, Google traffic is so huge that it’s bigger than the next 13 highest traffic platforms combined. I’m talking about YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram and more:
All of them combined are still less traffic than Google.
Crazy right?
So I would be mad to not take advantage of it, while also using a few other channels to grow. (More on these other channels in a second).
Especially because all of the other platforms can shut down your accounts overnight:
But a blog is yours for as long as you pay the hosting bill, so it’s an asset that you’ll always own.
YouTube etc is a smart move to add in, but don’t ignore having your own secure platform.
Make sense?
So before we talk about the other channels, let’s go back to the blog and writing content for it.
Now one thing you have to understand is that I’m good at building systems, often because of limitations or because I want to be lazy or do something else.
Almost all the client results I’ve gotten have usually been limited to either a super small marketing team, or just me alone.
So, I kind of thrive in this zone of finding what works and then making my life easier while still getting the results
For example
I write good content. We’re talking 5,000 word beasts on a topic, if it needs it.
Now, in the past it used to take me about 4 hours to write something like this, however because I like systems, I spent a few months last year learning how to use AI as a writing assistant, and built a process so that now it takes me around 90 minutes to write the same article, at the same high quality.
So not one click done for you garbage, but my usual high quality, just faster and easier.
Handy right?
The real benefit of this system is that not only will this make my ONE day of marketing for this challenge easier because I won’t spend half the day writing. But it also means I can get my client work done in 4 days instead of 5.
This gives me one full day for marketing for myself while still able to take weekends off.
More importantly though, because I can now write a lot faster and easier, it also means I have about 6 hours left of my 8 hour day, which I can now use for other marketing efforts.
So why not use that time eh?
However, I still want to make things easy, which is why everything else flows down from this initial blog post…
Step #2. Create long form YouTube video versions of the articles
Rather than trying to create something completely new, I simply make a video version of the same article that I just wrote:
It’s actually easier than you think to do this because of the way I structure an article, all I need to do is tweak a few things and it’s a perfect video script. (Thanks to my editing process while writing).
Better still, I can take all the images and resources that I use in the article and use them as b-roll in the video.
Handy right?
I also add in some basic edits where I have either:
- My head overlaid in the corner
- A 50:50 split with my head on one side and text on the other
- Or a simple text overlay
Like so…
Why use these?
Well, the key here with the edits is to be good enough that it looks professional but not so heavily edited that I have to spend 3 days on it or hire someone.
Sure I could definitely get more views if I did that, but for my type of work, OK video and good audio, with topical expertise is enough.
The goal isn’t to get a huge broad audience and become a celebrity. We just want to appeal to the right people, and not turn them off because it looks like I shot it on my iPhone.
Make sense?
Now, you might be thinking if I want to grow the blog, then why am I making videos and not even more articles?
Well 4 reasons:
- First off, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, so it’s super easy to get traffic and leads from here, and drive people to my website.
- It also has a very high domain rank, so you can rank videos for keywords almost immediately, which might take weeks on your blog…
- It’s also a discovery layer. What I mean by that is you can get in front of people with topics that they might never think to search for on their own. So you could target a keyword that only gets 300 searches, but get it in front of 10,000 people who would be interested.
- And finally, I can reuse lead magnets that I use on the blog alongside the videos, so that I can capture emails on there also.
This can work insanely well, because my offers are designed to be the next logical thing that they want after they finish reading or watching.
For example
I have a brand new video that’s got low traffic, but it’s converting at around 70% of people who click across to the lead magnet.
Not bad right?
So now I have a 2nd traffic generation channel without having to produce a whole different topic, and it’s also driving leads.
However, even with recording and editing the video, I still have a couple of hours spare. (Poor me right?).
Now we could in theory just end it here and do well, but I want to try out some simple additions. Which is why I added in 2 more discovery channels that are absolutely bonkers right now.
I’m talking about YouTube shorts and Instagram reels…
Step #3. YouTube shorts that tie into the long form video
So here’s the deal: Both YouTube and Instagram want more content, because the more content they have, the more ad space they can sell.
Why does this matter?
Well, both platforms have been trying to lower the bar on how easy it is to produce videos for them, by allowing people to create short 30 second to 3 minute clips.
Handy right?
And as an extra incentive for people to try this out, both platforms are promoting these short videos like crazy. This means that a single 30 second clip might see 1,000 views or more in an hour, even on really small channels:
For some brands, this is more views than they get in a month, so you would be mad to ignore these, which is why I’ve added them in.
However, I don’t want to make my life too difficult, so rather than come up with all new topics, I pull things from the long form video instead.
This way I can create a short that’s valuable and talks about a key thing from the longer video, which then makes the person watching want to click across to watch the full thing.
This then helps me get more eyeballs on the longer videos which have a much better chance of building trust with the audience. So long form the deeper trust and shorts to drive people to them.
Simple right?
To make things even easier again, I wrote an AI prompt that does a lot of this for me:
It:
- Scans the original longer video script
- Then highlights 3-6 ideas that stand out as a good hook or interesting
- And then helps write the basic outline of the 30 second short for each of them
To be clear, i’ll still edit and refine the prompt to sound more like me, but it helps me come up with ideas easier and write these faster than starting with a blank page.
(This is the trick with AI. Use it to speed up things, not offload the creative things fully though. Any ways, I digress…)
All I do then is record these shorts at the same time as I’m recording the long form video. Then, I post one short per day, on the days that I don’t release a long form video.
For example
- Release a long video on Monday
- Then shorts all scheduled to go out on Tuesday – Saturday
Simple!
But I can also leverage this even further…
Step #4. Share versions of the video shorts on Instagram also
Now, I could skip this, but because it’s such a simple add on, I’m testing it out right now.
Mainly because all I need to do is release the same short videos on Instagram as I do on YouTube, but slightly tweaked to fit their platform:
I also use a tool called Manychat to help automate replies to people, so I can help build my follower list on the channel, or deliver lead magnets:
It’s super handy, and gives me a way to convert the Instagram audience.
It also sets me up for being able to automate when we unlock the trial reels feature, which is something I’m really excited for…
What are trial reels?
This is a feature that’s only available when you have 1k followers on your account and it is ridiculously broken.
Basically it allows you to publish a reel that doesn’t get posted to your page, so you can test it out with a brand new audience and see what works.
We don’t really care about that part too much. What we really care about is the fact that it ONLY gets shown to people who don’t know you yet.
Why does this matter?
Because people soon realized that if you had a reel that already did well with your current audience, then you could upload a slight variation of it to the trial reels and get more free discovery traffic.
It doesn’t even need to be a big edit change.
You can adjust the colour tint so that the meta data is different, and it would be classified as a different video.
This means they could then upload the same reel 20 times per day, which then gets them around 3,000 new channel followers every single day.
Crazy right?
Especially because a percentage of these new fans will all join your email list and buy from you.
There are even tools that do this for you so you can simply upload the reels that work, and then let it run and do its thing:
Helping you grow all while not bombarding your audience with the same stuff.
Simple.
And there you have the entire strategy. 4 channels all done in a single day, with very little effort.
Before we end the video though, I thought it might be fun to follow along with this strategy each month, and see how its working.
This way you can see how we grow, what works, what failed, and more.
Sound good?
Alright, let’s get into the metrics…
So let’s get into the metrics of where I’m at now, so that in future videos, we can see what worked and what didn’t.
The current metrics in July (7 days into the experiment)
Spoiler alert but some of the metrics are awful, while others are kind of crazy.
Let’s start with the most embarrassing number first…
The blog performance in July
As you saw in the intro, currently my blog is at around 7,500 impressions a month and a god awful 21 clicks:
I told you this was going to be uncomfortable for me!
If you don’t know what that dashboard means, impressions are how many times my blog showed up in search results for terms. However, because the content doesn’t rank high enough for those keywords, it doesn’t get many clicks.
0.3% of 7k is around 21 clicks.
Make sense?
It used to have a lot more traffic and have a higher Domain Rank, but I’ve not been posting on here for years, and the traffic and links have dropped off as posts have been updated.
This should pick up slowly as we go, and I may even get to the point we’re doing 2 posts a week but I’ll see. I don’t want to get into 2 days of marketing if possible, simply because I want you to see what’s possible with just the one focused day using this system.
I should point out that I’m already seeing growth on this, but I’ll hold off on sharing that growth until next month’s update.
YouTube channel performance in July
Prior to recording this video I had around:
- 7500 views on the channel in total, over its entire time being live
- And about 290 subscribers
I’ve been making content on the channel for about a year, but I did spend about 4 months not recording or releasing anything.
So not great, but still better than the poor blog!
I do think part of the issue is just a lack of data for YouTube to understand my audience, so it doesn’t know who to show my content to.
My theory is that a more consistent posting schedule will help improve this.
I will say that adding in the shorts each day has impacted the long form views already, so let’s get into that…
YouTube shorts performance in July
So to be clear, I’ve only started adding in shorts as a discovery layer for a week now. However, here’s the results after just 8 days:
- Total channel views have gone from 72 the week before to 5,343 this week. That’s a 7,321% increase
- Subscriber rate has increased by 200%
- Long form video views have increased by 65%
Not bad right?
What’s even crazier is if I compare the past 8 days to the combined 3 months before that…
1 video and 7 shorts got me more traffic then 3 months combined!
(It says 8 but I had uploaded one short twice by accident).
What really blows my mind is that this is all just from one day’s effort per week.
I’m kind of amazed at the impact already. However, it gets even crazier if we start to map out what this could look like at a month, 3 months and a year out.
For example
If we maintain this current level of activity of just 1 long form video per week and then shorts on the other 6 days (approx. 660 views/day and 1.1 subs/day), here is what the next year could look like.
Estimated linear growth
This assumes performance stays exactly as it is right now, with the videos all getting similar traffic levels and not improving:
- 30 Days: ~19,800 total views | +33 Subscribers
- 90 Days: ~59,400 total views | +100 Subscribers
- 12 Months: ~240,000 total views | +400 Subscribers
Kind of meh, but the thing is, this is being conservative because YouTube doesn’t grow like this.
What actually happens is that content results compound on top of each other, as new videos bring in new audiences who then watch older videos and so on, causing those older videos to also be shown to new people.
Not only that but your subscribers grow each month, causing the impact on new videos to be even larger than before.
That’s why YouTube growth is more compounding than linear, so let’s take a look at that.
Estimated compound growth
If we estimate a conservative 15% month-over-month growth in my daily average, then we would be looking at:
- 30 Days: ~21,000 views
- 90 Days: ~75,000 views
- 12 Months: ~450,000+ views and potentially 800–1,000+ total subscribers.
Even then I think this is underestimating because in the time that I was writing this article, I got 4 new subscribers.
That may not seem like much but consider the fact we only had 2 new subscribers in the 3 months before this process.
I’m super excited to see how this works out, but let’s look at the next discovery channel.
Instagram performance in July
I didn’t want to spam my family and friends with business content, so I started up a brand new Instagram account for the business.
This means we don’t have the trial reels option until 1,000 subs, so it’s still very early days on here.
Consistent posting frequency is apparently key on Instagram, so some days I’ll post 2 or 3x per day right now to see if that works.
Mainly sharing image versions of different hook ideas of the same video reels to see if they pay off.
That being said, in 7 days we’re at:
- Just under 7,000 views on the account.
- 123 subscribers so far, averaging around 16 per day
- Most videos get around 200 views so far. This is to be expected starting at zero subs while it figures out who my audience is
- 1 click across from the channel link
- 25 clicks across from a video promoting the same product
- Around 60 clicks across to the YouTube channel
Which again, isn’t bad for just reposting the same shorts with a new CTA that I was already posting on YouTube!
It takes me literally 2 extra minutes per short, so for a new channel that can get me traffic but not really take much more of my time, I’ll take it.
(I may try boosting some posts for a short period, just to unlock that trial reel feature, but we’ll see).
Let’s talk about the last important metrics though – money and list growth
Sales performance
Right now I have a couple of low ticket offers on my website:
- I have a course that teaches how I get insane optin rates for myself and clients. This works so well that I get leads even with just 30 visits a month on the blog.
- I have another course on how to get into podcasts. Fun fact, but these send huge bursts of traffic and sales. When I first launched the blog, I did this for 3 months and ended up getting $100k of client work.
However, I’ve not done any promotions on these so we’ve had zero revenue from digital products in July.
We’ll check back in on this as we go.
My plan is to launch a more premium offer later on, where I can give direct support but at a higher ticket. This way I can make sure people get results, and it’s far easier to sell higher ticket to a few people.
Email list growth in July
My email list performance is actually pretty great, mainly because I send tips and things of what’s working every now and then, even when I don’t have articles to share.
I realized that some people have been getting advice from me like this for over 6 years, which is probably why my open rate is around 43% and my CTR is around 5.5% which is about double the industry standard.
As for actual list growth, my list size is at 2,088 people and I added 6 new leads in July:
I’m pretty sure we’re going to do a little better in August, when we do the new metrics…
What’s next?
So that’s the entire process so far, as well as the current results.
As you can see, the whole thing is quite simple thanks to the system in place.
- I write the article
- Then I record the video version using the article as the script, and edit it and upload
- I also record 12 short versions (6 but with 2 different endings so the CTA matches the platform)
- All done in one day!
Easy right?
I’m going to keep going at this for the next 30 days and see how it goes, and then report back with a brand new video.
So if you want to see what happens in the rest of this experiment, and maybe learn how to do this for yourself, click here to auto-subscribe to the YouTube channel. Just hit confirm once the page loads and you’ll sub to the channel. This way you’ll get a notification when the new videos go live.
Spoiler alert but these numbers are already all seriously up just in the time of writing this post, however, I don’t want to share until we hit 30 days and can fully compare!
If I can do this in one day per week, then you can too, so make sure you don’t miss out.