447: $0 – $1M In A Year: How To Sell Products For Doodles With Garrett Yamasaki

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife, Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today I have a very special guest on the show, Garrett Yamazaki. And Garrett is someone who started out blogging and making money as an affiliate and then decided to sell his own private label brands and going the e-commerce route with his pet site, welovedoodles.com, allowed him to make seven figures in just a single year. So in this episode, we’ll learn how he did it. But before we begin,

00:29
I want to let you know that tickets for the 2023 Seller Summit are on sale over at SellersSummit.com. It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And you all know me well enough by now to know that my event has zero fluff. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business and not high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people and it’s a very intimate event.

00:56
Everyone eats together and everyone parties together every night. And I personally love smaller events and tickets always sell out far in advance. If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year, we also offer a special mastermind experience where we break up into small groups, lock ourselves into a room and help each other with our businesses. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 23rd to May 25th. And if you want to know what some of the talks are about, they are all posted on the sellersummit.com website.

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That’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T.com. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I focus a lot of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS, or text message marketing, is already a top five revenue source for my e-commerce store, and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce stores, and e-commerce is their primary focus.

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02:26
the Profitable Audience Podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience Podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:47
Welcome to the My Wife, Could Her Job podcast. Today I’m really happy to have Garrett Yamasaki on the show. Now, Garrett is a member of my mastermind group that I’m in and he is killing it online. He runs welovedoodles.com, which is a site that sells pet products for doodles. But here’s what’s amazing about Garrett. He started out with content and making money with ads and as an affiliate marketer on Amazon. But instead of just getting a measly 4 % cut from Amazon, he decided to private label his own products

03:17
and pretty much started making seven figures within a year. Now, incidentally, this is actually one of the best ways to start an e-commerce business. Have an audience beforehand, understand what sells, and then create a product that is guaranteed to sell. Now, in this episode, we’re gonna learn how Garrett created this content machine to sell his product. And this man literally generates over 400,000 words per month and gets over 1 million page views per month. And with that, welcome to the show, Garrett. How you doing today?

03:46
Thanks Steve, thanks for having me. Doing good. So those numbers sound unbelievable. Did I get them correct? Yeah, we’re definitely on track to do probably, yeah, north of 7- the word count. 400,000 words, 1 million visitors per month. Yeah, that’s correct. Some months we can fluctuate between over 500,000, but 400,000 has probably been the average per month. That’s nuts.

04:11
So I gotta ask this upfront, Garrett, do you truly love doodles or was this kind of like a niche you went into just for the opportunity? Yeah, so this whole thing started as a side project back in 2018 when I was actually looking to purchase a dog. And specifically my wife wanted a golden doodle. So that was something that I spent days researching and there was no really authority site and there was no way to really tell whether a breeder was reputable.

04:40
not and so This is what spurred me to make the website as more of a hobby and aside project back then and yeah We have a one golden doodle now. He’s three and a half. So you started this With the without the intention of selling physical products. Is that correct? Yeah, so I’ve always been a web guy. I consider myself an expert in search engine optimization. Okay but that yeah just for fun hobby website that

05:09
to help other people find dogs and then what do know it takes off? Well, so let me ask you this. So when you started it, you said as a hobby, was the intention to make money? The intention was to hopefully make my money back from buying a domain name and paying for hosting, but that was about it. Okay. All right. And then what was your traffic source, not traffic source, what was your income sources before the physical products part?

05:39
Yeah, so the physical products part we just started this year. My primary income has always been through ads and then other private affiliates. And then of course like some marketing and advertising. But majority of the money has always come through ads on AdThrive. Okay. Are you willing to reveal just like for a 1 million visit site, how much would you make on ads like through AdThrive? Yeah, so it definitely depends on what niche you’re in.

06:09
I’m in the dog niche, which is probably middle of the pack. think like finance or other niches will make a lot more. But generally speaking, Ad Drive pays me around $40 for every 1000 page views. Oh, that’s actually pretty high. Yeah, it’s not low, but it’s definitely not high on the higher end. know like some finance guys are making close to 200 per thousand. Yeah, if you’re in the business space, then certainly that’s what you’ll get.

06:38
And then in terms of Amazon affiliate, was that like a large portion of your revenue or was that kind of in the noise? Amazon affiliate was five digits of revenue on the lower end. But yeah, was nothing. It was maybe around 20 % of my revenue. 20 % of your revenue. So when did you decide to make the shift? And how did you know you wanted to make that shift? Because it’s a big jump.

07:07
Yeah, so basically every month when I consolidate my income, you would download the Amazon affiliate report and it would kind of tell you, look, here’s the ASIN in the product that you’re selling. And I noticed that one specific product in particular was generating like 20 % of the sales. So that’s when I kind of had this thing where, oh, Amazon is only paying me 3 % affiliate commission on this product. Why don’t I…

07:37
see if I can source it from Alibaba and then sell, you know, make your margins are gonna be a lot higher. So I think my margins are around 60 % now. So walk me through that process. So you started out with Alibaba and you just did a search for that product. I’m curious as someone who just did this for the first time, how many suppliers did you contact? What was your experience like? Yeah, so I contacted every supplier that was on Alibaba.

08:04
I think anyone who’s used Alibaba probably knows that majority of the people aren’t a manufacturer. only two or three of the companies that I contacted were actually manufacturers and I probably contacted around 10 or 12. And so the ones that I kind of trusted and started messaging back and forth and I ordered samples from and yeah, I kind of just took it from there. But I just wanted to private label a product.

08:33
An existing one or did you make changes to it? So we did make changes to it. In case there was a patent or anything, we did a patent research check but I just wanted to make changes to the handle to the physical molding of the product and that doesn’t cost too much. I think it was like maybe $1,500 so we did make a couple changes before launching the How big was your initial order?

09:01
My initial order, I think was 500 units. Oh, that’s it. Okay. Yeah. And these were like $4 a piece. Cause I’m trying to just think like you’re doing five figures in Amazon affiliate and that translates probably to a ton of units. Certainly more than 500, right? Yeah, certainly more than 500. yeah, I was, yeah. But you only decided to get 500 just to kind of play it safe or? Play it safe. I’ve never done any physical products before. Okay.

09:29
And so I didn’t know what my capability was from selling, but as you can guess, that 500 quickly sold out and then, you know, it says out of stock on Amazon for, it probably said that for like two, three months. Yeah. can get my next shipment in. So how big was your next shipment? It was for 22,500. And of course, after I sold through that, it had the out of stock box again. And then ever since then, my minimum order has always been 5,000. And then

09:59
Now it’s minimum 10,000. 10,000, okay. All right. And then did you ever, I know your experience with Amazon has been pretty smooth thus far, but in terms of just getting reviews, complaints, customer service, has it been pretty smooth for you? FBA, all that stuff? It’s been pretty smooth. Anyone who complains, I just give them a full refund. Yeah. Just because like one negative review will hurt you a lot more than any. Yeah.

10:28
Absolutely. So I just give everybody a refund if they have anything and I’ll ship them a extra product and I’m trying to make them happy. And then right now, right now at least most of your sales come from Amazon, right? Not from your own site and or any other platform. Correct. Yeah. So we had this really big website. It was getting over a million page views. And then in these affiliate articles, like let’s just say like the

10:58
affiliate articles like best dog brush. I would put myself number one in the article and then just have an Amazon link. So people will click the link and buy my product on Amazon. Right. And then you’re still getting the affiliate cut at the same time, right? We are still getting the affiliate cut. Nice. So this is all additive revenue. Yes, correct. Essentially. Nice. Okay. All right. Let’s talk about the interesting stuff now, which is the content machine that you’ve created. Let’s start.

11:25
At the very beginning, I know now you have like a team of writers and editors and that sort of thing. But were you writing all your own content in the beginning? Yeah, for the first six months, I was writing all my own content. So I think back when I started in 2018, I would write in the morning and then I would hit publish by the nighttime after my job was done. So I would try to pump out at least one article per day. And this was like around 1,500 words.

11:51
That’s nuts. You were writing 1,500 articles per day. Can you walk me through like what I know a lot of people who probably have pet blogs don’t get any traffic from Google. What is your keyword research guidelines and process? Yeah, I think my competitive advantage here is that I feel like I’m very good at keyword research. Okay. I target very low competition and relatively low volume.

12:22
Now that my domain is very big, I can target high volume keywords, but in the beginning, we were targeting very low volume keywords and what’s the volume? Low volume was probably anything less than 100 or 200 search. Oh, really? Wow. Okay. You use Ahrefs, right? I use both Ahrefs and Semrush. I probably use more nowadays. Oh, interesting. Can you just real quick, can you comment on I’m an Ahrefs lover, so I’m just curious what advantages SEMrush has over Ahrefs.

12:51
I don’t think it has any particular advantages. I think recently in the last like five months, Ahrefs like up the price and then now it’s like every time you search and yes, you run out of credits like really really quickly. So yes, that’s correct. I’m just doing a basic search. SEMrush is free on everything after you pay the monthly fee, right? Got it. Got it. Okay. So in terms of like the difficulty scores, do you actually even use that number or?

13:20
Difficulty score is just a reference. So of course, like if you see something like in the green, like for Ahrefs, I think it’s like less than 10 and then SEMrush it’s less than 20. It’s going to show up like green where it’s easy to target. That’s more of just a point of reference. I always will Google search the website and see the website results and see who is ranking there. And like you can quickly tell.

13:47
If you use like Moz, DABar, any other apps that you have on your Google searches, it’ll tell you kind of if it’s an authority site or not. What are you looking for in particular? You’re looking at their domain authority or the URL authority when you’re judging whether it’s easy to rank against? I guess it’s a lot of things nowadays, but if you kind of break it down, you search for it. The first thing that you will always check is like domain authority. Like if it’s New York Times and you’re just starting a blog, you’re not going to…

14:16
you’re not going to outrank them regardless of how long the article is. I also look at content length. If it’s a forum like Reddit and it’s like 100 word post, you can easily outrank them. So domain authority doesn’t mean anything in that case. It’s more like comprehensive. And then I also check relevancy because I’m a huge believer in semantic SEO or topical authority.

14:43
you have like a golden doodle blog but you’re talking about like microphones, there’s no relevancy and there’s no topical authority so if I can see like more of a general blog in there it’s very easy to outrank them regardless of how well written their content is. So even if it’s like the New York Times and it’s not topically relevant to the query you’ll still go after it? Sorry for the New York Times I won’t but if it’s like a lower DA blog targeting something that

15:12
Like is not in their domain name or really their authority then I’ll target them but New York Times like There’s a lot of that. Yeah, you can’t outrank them Well, do you still go for even if it’s like just one big like what’s your threshold? Like how many big sites on the front page before you say hey I’m just not gonna go for this if I can’t rank in the top three. I won’t do it. Oh really kind of my okay That was my strategy in the beginning. Yeah nowadays. Okay, I can target a lot

15:39
higher volume keywords just because I have the domain authority. it’s like nowadays I can outrank the New York Times if they’re trying to get in my niche per se. Sure. Okay, well, let’s just talk about the beginning. So you’re going for stuff that’s like in the hundreds in terms of monthly search volume. And then you always do a search and you determine whether the comprehensiveness as well as domain authority of your competition and topical relevancy. Correct. Those are kind of the main criteria.

16:10
And word count, okay. So in terms of word count, it’s not really the words that you’re looking for, right? Are you looking at the comprehensiveness? Yeah, so there’s like a plug. just a byproduct, right? Yeah, word count is kind of just a byproduct, right? Like if we’re talking about, like, let’s say how big is a golden doodle going to get, and then like you can quickly see there’s plugins that you can download and they’ll show you the word count of an article. And if the article is only 500 words,

16:39
then they’re probably not answering the query to the fullest extent. And so that article should probably be closer to 1,500 words. So if you write something longer, more comprehensive, and more thorough, then Google will rank you higher. So that particular example that you just gave sounds like it’d be like a snippet entry, right? Where you just write something kind of short and you go for the snippet. Would you write 1,500 words on that topic that you use as an example? Yeah, I think minimum nowadays, I…

17:09
only do around 1500 words. I guess, it’s probably not the best example because that would be more of a snippet, you know, like longer form research articles. Okay. And in the beginning, were you doing any link building or were you just trying to pump out the content? In the beginning, you don’t need, you honestly don’t need to do any link building if you are doing your keyword research correctly. Okay.

17:37
In beginning I wasn’t, nowadays, yeah, it’s a significant portion, yeah. At least 10 % of what I’m doing nowadays. So in terms of keyword research, so you start out writing stuff, targeting like the simpler stuff, like how do you know when to start increasing the volume and the difficulty of the keywords? Like what are your gradations, know, when you can think you can go for more? So I’m always constantly experimenting. In the beginning you’re always gonna be

18:07
going after low competition keywords but let’s say like after a year of blogging and you’re getting regular traffic you know you’re getting some natural links built to your website you should be always constantly testing difficulty in seeing who you can outrank so like I would always be targeting like a really really hard keyword that’s maybe like a thousand plus just informational article and then still like a medium maybe it’s like five hundred searches and then majority is still always going to be the low volume

18:37
keywords even today but it’s the low volume keyword threshold probably changed to like 300 minimum per month. Really? It’s still that low for you today? Yeah, it’s low because majority of the searches like if you look and do the research everybody is going to click on the number one position I think it’s like top three positions are 93 % right?

19:04
and I always want to be number one. And so that’s kind of what I target, But I would still say 15 % of my articles are really, hard. And then 30 % are medium. But a majority are still these low competition keywords that not many people are writing.

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21:36
And this is for the listeners. How do you avoid getting discouraged? let’s say you’re targeting these simple keywords and you’re still not ranking for them. Like, can you give like some sort of guidelines in the timeframe so that you kind of know whether you’re not doing things correctly? Like when did you start seeing traffic? It’s hard to say because I also started on an expired domain name. I didn’t really have much authority, but you know, if you buy brand new, if you buy a brand new domain name and you start publishing,

22:06
this what people believe is the sandbox and you’re basically stuck in a regardless uh… for probably like three to six months and so i would say that you know if you start blogging and you don’t see any traffic after four months five months you’re probably doing something wrong uh… whether you’re targeting it difficulty score too high air you know but you should definitely see your rankings increase maybe you’ll be like just out of the first page of google right on but you should definitely see changes

22:35
whether it’s a positive or a negative way. So expired domains still work, huh? Yes, and I kind of unintentionally had bought my domain name and I didn’t know it was expired at the time. It was just somebody had previously used it. Interesting. Well, let me ask you this question since we going off on this tangent. Would you recommend, like if you bought an expired domain, looking through the way back machine, finding out which articles they were wrecking for and then recreating that on the new

23:04
Yeah, that’s a good question. I would, if you have the funds to purchase an expired domain name, I would a hundred percent start with an expired domain name today just because I’m not going to be waiting that six months to three to six months to start ranking. So I would a hundred percent start on an expired domain name. There’s pros and cons to both. Well, what are the cons? Yeah. So cons is Google picks it up, right? It wasn’t the original website. It wasn’t the original content. And then, you know, you’re probably,

23:34
at a higher risk of being penalized. Okay. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of that happening to anyone, but I guess it’d be like a silent penalty, right? You wouldn’t even know. Yeah, it’s more of a silent penalty. I have a few websites that I’ve built and then yeah, they’ve gotten penalties and then there’s ways to mitigate it. Like you can 301 redirect on a new domain name. There’s different things you can do, but you are definitely at a higher risk of

24:04
likely being penalized versus starting by penalty you mean like not a penalty in Search Console, right? Oh like it wasn’t getting any traction. Sorry, not a penalty in Search Console but a penalty in the algorithm updates. Got it. usually does two per year this year they’ve done so many algorithm updates. I know, it’s like every month now I feel. Okay, you still recommend doing it that way though? If you have the funds I would definitely start on an expired domain. With an expired domain, okay.

24:34
So you’re pumping out these articles one per day, which in my opinion is kind of unsustainable. So at what point did you start getting help? So everything, my motto has always been everything that I make, I’ll put back into a blog, put back into the blog because it’s kind of, it was just a side project at this time. I didn’t need the funds. I was kind of working in tech. So everything that I made, I put back in and I noticed that I started making a decent amount of money virtually like five to six months after. Then I was like, okay.

25:03
What’s a good amount of money, like early on? I think it was making like $100 a month. I mean that’s not that much, like to a lot of people just starting a blog and you know you’re monetizing with like Ezoic or some really bottom of the barrel ad agency. Yeah. Like $100 per month was pretty good. Okay. So then I would just, I just invested all that money back and a lot of my own money too just because I saw the potential and started hiring writers. And so I originally started hiring writers off Upwork and

25:33
pro blogger. But a hundred bucks is not enough to fund that right? So we’re talking just like maybe supplementing like one article a week you mean? Yeah definitely. So I was still writing my own. Yeah I was writing for several months and then this would supplement my publishing schedule so maybe we can get instead of one article per day just me writing you know we can get like 1.5 articles or like every other day I can publish one from a writer too. And then you were publishing your own meaning like you were writing and editing it right?

26:03
I was writing and editing it. editing, wow. Okay, and then do you use images in your posts? Do you think it matters? Yeah, images matter, yeah. Okay. I use images as just like placeholders to keep the flow going. Do you actually, do you have like a special image strategy for your publication? I wouldn’t say it’s a special strategy, but we have a featured image. I think it has to be over 1,250 pixels wide in order to be shown in the image thing.

26:32
But then we have images throughout the article with where we can kind of plug keywords in as well, like the alt text and things like that for SEO purposes. Here’s a question for you. I’ve I always do that as a best practice, but the traffic from images never seemed to be substantial for me. Is that like a significant traffic source for you? It’s not a significant traffic source for me. Probably like 2%.

26:59
2%, 1%, 2 % and that’s basically people looking, you know, they type in a query like maybe they want to see like black golden doodle, right? And then they’ll go to images first. Maybe they’ll click on my images, but that’s the only traffic, but it’s not more of a traffic source as it is to help your article rank. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. I know for your stuff, it’s much more graphical. For my stuff, business doesn’t really have imagery associated with it. Yeah.

27:28
as much. okay, so you’re moving along, every money, every like scent that you make, you kind of reinvest back in your business. What was your so your first hire was probably like a writer? Definitely a writer. Yeah. So your first several are going to be a writer. And then when did you start getting an editor? So I got an editor when I realized that I couldn’t publish the articles myself, like it needed more

27:57
additional. So I would say that I probably didn’t hire an editor as the next hire. So you’re going to hire a set of writers first. And then think the next thing that makes logical sense is you’re going to hire a virtual assistant just because they are very low cost and you can tell them what to do, like upload images, like internal link. And then maybe the next step is you hire an editor after you realize that you can’t start publishing articles or you have a backlog of articles.

28:26
and then the editor will kind of proofread, add text where needed and kind of optimize the article using… You mentioned backlog, I’m just curious what your publishing frequency is. Do you publish more than once a day? Yeah, for the portfolio of my websites, we’re definitely publishing more than once per day. Per website, you’re publishing more than once per day? Yeah, we’re definitely publishing more than once per day. think we’re probably publishing 150 articles per month throughout my whole portfolio of websites.

28:56
Wow, It’s probably about five per day. least five per day. Okay. I mean, amount technically doesn’t matter, right? I mean, there’s no penalty for publishing like 100 a day if you could. Is that what you’re Yeah, there’s no penalty for publishing more. Yeah, but they have been cracking down on like AI content, which I don’t use. Well, that’s another rabbit hole. Do you use any AI content? I don’t believe that I use any AI content, but I mean, we have like 30 writers and we go through a lot of agencies, you know, and we’re testing.

29:26
Mainly the easy check is plagiarism check, but AI is a lot harder to check nowadays. So we definitely read it over and then my editor will flag anything that kind of looks suspicious. But AI content isn’t super complex right now. Here’s a question for you. How do you calculate like the ROI on a writer? Because I know a lot of people listening to this. They’re like, huh, I don’t know if I can afford to write a writer. How do I know whether it’s worth the money? Yeah, that’s a tough question. So

29:53
I kind of just do the back of the hand math here and you know if one, it honestly depends how much you’re paying the writers too. I’d say like in the beginning I would search out writers who were lower pay and then I would just train them and work with them a lot and a lot of times they’re overseas but nowadays like a lot of my writers are stay at home moms in the Midwest so those are like my top writers and kind of less training but we pay them a little bit more but in terms of like inter-

30:22
return on investment, you kind have to look at how much you’re paying the writers and then how much you’re going to get in ad money or different affiliate articles. So like if we go back to the thousand page views and I’m kind of getting roughly $40 for it through ad drive, then you kind of just backtrack and say like, okay well if I can get to the top three search results in SEMrush traffic, usually if it’s like $200 a month we’re targeting, it’s usually almost double or triple so you’ll see $400 to $600 searches per month.

30:52
And then of course, there’s going to be these other like long tail keywords that you’re to rank for us, not just that one keyword. Sure. Yeah. If you end up targeting something like 200 search volume keyword on Semrash, you’re probably going to be getting closer to like 500 or a thousand per month. And then, you know, we plan to stay there for multiple months, usually like six months before we have to go get an editor to edit the article. So I know like six times 40 is like 240 bucks and we’re paying

31:22
a lot less than $204 per article. Right. Maybe it’s closer to $200. Are you willing to provide a range of what you pay per word? Yeah, it varies to be completely honest. I when we first started, it was pretty low, but these people were overseas, like this was probably above their minimum wage. I think I was paying .02 per word, so about $20 per thousand words for overseas writer. And we got a ton of applicants, so.

31:50
I knew we weren’t super lowballing, but nowadays, this was like three, four years ago, but nowadays we’re paying about .045 to .05 per word. These are easy to edit. I shouldn’t have to spend any time editing the articles. We can get the virtual assistant and then the editor can basically hit publish. But before, a lot of the lower cost writers

32:19
I would be spending like at least an hour on the article before I could publish it. it took, you’re just trading off kind of time for money. Sure. Yeah. Actually that’s amazing. Even today, I still can’t hit publish right away without reading it. Well, maybe it’s cause I guess I massage it to my own voice also, but yeah. In terms of, so you’re not running ads on your affiliate articles, right? Or do you selectively turn those on and off?

32:47
I am not, but I have also heard from several people that it doesn’t affect the conversion rate at all on the affiliate articles. I personally do not. then, AdDriving has told me, like, if you turn it on, you can be making a few thousand more per month. But I also don’t want to sabotage my conversion rate on the Amazon side since it’s already more than the few thousand that AdDriving is going to pay me. So how do you make sure you get to the top three spots? So you write your article and let’s say like,

33:16
I don’t know, six months goes by and maybe you’re on the front page, right? Is there anything that you do to get it to those top three spots? Yeah, so that’s mainly link building and it’s kind of more of a grey hat or a black hat. Yes, let’s talk about grey hat and black hat. That’s the fun stuff. Do you have a methodology or do you hire that stuff out? So I hire that stuff out just because in the beginning I used to do it myself and then you you’re sending a hundred emails per day and you get

33:45
Response rate of like one or two percent. It’s kind of disheartening Yeah, so nowadays I outsource it and I know that people have a lot more tools that scrape and Send and then they can make new emails over and over again that are more like with a higher open rate and a less like mark spam So now how important is it? Do you think to do the link building part? So oftentimes like I’ll write a post and I can get to the front page but to get it to like the top there’s a little bit of luck and

34:15
I can never tell what actually made it happen. Do you have a strategy for that to getting the top three spots? Yeah, so think first and foremost, you have to have good content. So if your content is like AI or it’s written by a not so great writer, it’s probably never going to rank, like regardless of how many links you send to it. So just make sure the content is good. And then second is link building.

34:40
So you should always check on who’s ahead of you still. So if you’re on the first page of Google and let’s say you’re position five or six, if there’s a big player in the space, like New York Times, it’s probably pointless to spend a lot of money on backlinks because you likely won’t outrank them. But if it’s another one with a similar domain authority, good topical relevancy, then the links are what make the difference.

35:07
And in terms of choosing what to generate backlinks for, you just literally go through article by article and say, hey, do I even have a chance to overtake the next person in line? If so, then build links to it. Kind of. I know that I explained it to you and some of the other people in the mastermind group on SEO testing, where it will tell you trend and where that link ranks and for what keywords. And so

35:32
you know if something is in like the it’s just off the first page of google or maybe it’s like position eight or nine then all still links to it uh… and i’ll just google that keywords usually like ten or twenty keywords and see who’s like ahead of me on the list and if i can outrank

35:52
Do you think that you can get by today without link building? do think you can definitely get by. There’s several people that I’ve talked to, even on Ad Drive, that basically don’t do any link building and kind of get more natural links. But I think I am a strong believer that backlinks make a huge difference. If you’re building the correct

36:17
Can you just give the listeners an idea of how much a link costs? I know it varies depending on who they’re coming from, but just a range would be great. Yeah, sure. think it depends on a lot of things, domain authority, but the primary source is traffic. So I don’t care about domain authority when I’m building links. I care more about if the website is getting traffic and if it’s relevant to my niche. So if I’m in the dog space, I only want links that are in the pet space.

36:45
And you know, they have to be getting minimum a thousand traffic. I think on the low end… thousand as in the article pointing to you or the domain? That domain has to be getting a minimum one thousand traffic. Okay. Right. Yeah, and so… Yeah, I would say if you’re building links yourself and you’re doing manual outreach, probably a thousand traffic website is probably going to be like a hundred bucks. But if you’re going through a link building agency, it’s going to be a lot more.

37:14
I think it’s like one probably like 150. You can expect to pay less than 150 for a thousand traffic website. Here’s a question that I’ve had for a while because I don’t do this but do you monitor the links to make sure they stay there? Yeah, I do. And then I definitely have a whole spreadsheet of all the links that I’ve built and then you know I have a virtual assistant go through it. Oh and verify that they’re still there? like three times a year to make sure that the backlink is still there.

37:43
I’d say like in the majority it’s 95 % of the time the backlink is still there. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s good to know. you do anything else besides SEO? Do you do social media or YouTube or anything? Is it just pure SEO? We have a YouTube nowadays, but that’s kind of just a passive $500 a month. It’s not very big and we just outsource the videos. We have an Instagram, we have a TikTok, but

38:12
and we have a Facebook, but I’ve never really spent a significant amount of time monetizing any of those channels. Okay. And then, uh, I mean, just, you mentioned 500,000 words a month. That’s like insane to me. How much of your time are you writing anymore yourself or no? Nowadays, since I’m so focused on e-commerce, I don’t write at all, but for certain articles I used to try to write.

38:39
at least like maybe like one per week and it’s probably less than that but uh-huh yeah i don’t write any did you feel like you had to write every day in the beginning just to like jump start the thing yeah because it’s i know your work ethic is pretty insane if anything you’ll outwork everybody right yeah but for most normal people like what would you say the minimum frequency would be i would say that you should try to at least publish

39:09
Like my sister just started a blog and she’s actually gotten so much traffic to it but I told her like, look, you have to publish at least like two times per week. And I think that’s kind of like the minimum cadence and then if you don’t want your, if you just want your blog to stay stable and not go down, you have to publish at least like once per month. yeah, I would say minimum two times per week if you’re like in the growth phase. Okay. And doing all the analysis and everything. What is your, okay, so you have your physical products going.

39:39
And how are you going to grow that? Are you going to launch additional products or are you going to expand to additional marketplaces? What is the future of your e-commerce journey like? Yeah, so we’re just going to be launching a lot more products. So I think we only have four products today and like three of them have just been launched in the last three months. So the plan is to launch at least 10 products next year.

40:08
and expand internationally and expand to different marketplaces outside of Amazon. And also we’re building, we have a Shopify site, it’s not a WooCommerce website, but it’s not that good. So we’re switching over to Shopify and we’re going to be pointing the links instead of Amazon to hopefully our Shopify store and check the conversion rate from our Shopify store on Amazon. And to find these new products, are you using the same method of looking at your affiliates or

40:38
Are you going to be more deliberate about the types of articles that you write to figure out what sells? Yeah, I would say that when you download your Amazon affiliate report and it tells you exactly the number of units that you’re selling per month, that list I’ve pretty much exhausted. I still reference it a lot. And so the next six products that we’re launching is coming from that list because I know that if I put myself number one, it’s going to sell regardless.

41:05
next products after that, like the next five products after that, we’re going to be targeting things that we don’t necessarily have traffic to today. But that’s why I have my content team writing the articles. So by the time I release those products next year, I will already be ranking and I can put myself in the articles or right. All let me ask you some philosophical questions now. So if you were to start all over from the beginning, kind of knowing what you know about how powerful Amazon is and whatnot.

41:33
Would you start with content first no matter what? I think that’s the only way I know because that’s the way that I’ve done it. And I would say that if you have a huge website and you’re getting a lot of traffic and you launch a product and it’s going to sell a lot on Amazon, you get maybe not the best sellers box, but the Amazon choice box, I think it is. It automatically pops up for even the new products that I launch, it was like number one best seller.

42:01
in the number one new release tag, just because the people buy it from your website, has a really high conversion rate. So I think that traffic is really important to get before you launch a product, but you can definitely be profitable without getting I’m just wondering, time frame-wise, how much traffic did you have before you launched your Amazon product? It was over a million page views. Over a million, okay.

42:30
Like something that has always been in the back of my mind and I think I probably started it when my blog was getting 600,000 page views per month. But then obviously like sourcing from China, getting a sample, making like even the slightest revisions, it’s gonna take like a year to launch. So by the time that year passed and I launched the product, my blog was over a million page views per month. Well, let me ask you this, like for the people listening, let’s say they want to start with content, what’s the threshold when you…

42:59
might consider going the physical product route. What’s your threshold? You can probably do both in parallel. So like if you just start a website, and this is of course if you have the funds, think FBA costs a lot more money to start. Actually, what was your initial investment for those 500 units? All in. Maybe like 2500. Not too like for shipping and everything. It really wasn’t that expensive. It was maybe 2500 but…

43:26
I’m just kind of thinking through, like, you’re going to have to run PPC, like, you’re not going to get traffic immediately. So it’s going to be a lot. You’re going to have to pay for the traffic somehow. So PPC, Google Ads, and whatnot. So it’s definitely going ask you that. Since you have, like, this funnel of traffic going to your listings, do you run PPC? I do run PPC, correct. Yeah, and I actually run a lot of PPC because I have the same kind of business model where

43:54
everything I make from Amazon, I’m happy to put back in and that hasn’t been the case since it exploded so much. But yeah, I run a lot of PPC and maybe that’s 30 % of my sales now. Right. And so the way you operate is you just pay yourself a salary and then just put everything else back in. I just started paying. I just quit my job less than a year ago. So December 31st, 2021. So it’s not even been a year yet. Okay. And

44:24
Yeah, since I quit my job, I do pay myself a salary now, equivalent to what I was making previously. And then every other dime tries to go back in the business. So is the end game then to sell it or is this like a passion project that you plan on maintaining indefinitely? This is something that I’ve always talked to myself too about and it’s basically like whenever I feel like I can’t grow anymore, that’s probably when I will sell.

44:53
I feel like I can still grow to 3x. Oh definitely. Yeah, from where you are for sure. Yeah. Yeah, so it’s probably like a three to five year time. And in terms of content, are you trying to pump out more than 500,000? Like are you still hiring writers and… Yeah, we’re always hiring writers and editors and probably like one more virtual assistant. Yeah, just because like I know SEO so well that…

45:23
And that’s always been my fundamental strategy here for all my portfolio websites now. So we always try to publish a large amount of content and get traffic that way. see. So, I mean, it’s at one million now, but I mean, you’re going to try to double, triple traffic by just continuing to scale, the number of writers you have, editors and that sort of thing. Yeah, we’re still trying to go traffic on my main site, but I would say that potential wise, probably a lot of my other

45:53
pet websites or even I have a lot of other niches like Baby and Lucid Dreaming that have a lot more potential too so we publish throughout like this whole portfolio of websites but the idea is yeah you should be growing traffic.

46:10
Do you repurpose any content or is it just written? So I’m not, we have criteria for our writers and obviously we don’t want them to just like rewrite an article and needs to be like original and we kind of give them a template and outline with the headings with the frequently asked questions and so they can kind of just fill it in. We try not to have them just like rewrite articles but I’m sure it happens every once in a while. I meant repurpose on like Twitter or you know other short form like TikToks.

46:40
that sort of thing. think we repurpose like social media stuff like for pictures being reposted and stuff like that. it sounds like that’s not like a major part of your strategy. Most of it’s from Google. Yeah, it’s all organic traffic has been the strategy from the start. Pinterest has been pretty good. Yeah. But that’s only still like a small portion. Yeah, small portion of traffic. Garrett, this has been an amazing conversation. It’s actually rare that I get to talk like SEO with someone who

47:08
who does it so well on that scale. I can’t imagine managing 30 writers, editors, and actually the stress of Google updates, if most of my traffic is coming from there, would kind of stress me out a little bit. But you’ve managed it really well. That’s why you have multiple websites. So like if one gets penalized, then hopefully your others go up or, you know, it’s not like all eggs in one basket. Yeah. So if people want to check out your Doodle site,

47:38
or if they have any questions about SEO, because I know you do little bit of consulting also, where can people find you? Yeah, you can just message me through, the website is welovedoodles.com and then yeah, you can probably just find the email on there or email me. Cool. think it’s like info at welovedoodles.com. Nice. Well, Garrett, appreciate your time, Yeah, thanks, Steve. Appreciate it and I’ll see you in the next Mastermind.

48:07
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Garrett’s story just goes to show that SEO is not dead and that pure SEO is a viable strategy even in an extremely saturated niche like dogs. For more information about this episode, go to mywivecoderjob.com slash episode 447. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free.

48:36
over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to hang out with you in person this year in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. So grab a ticket to Seller Summit and let’s meet up. Go to sellersummit.com. That’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T dot com. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com.

49:04
and sign up for my free 6 day mini course. Just type in your email and they’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.