From Zero To 500k Monthly Pageviews

Sometimes, you know it when you see it.

I had finally discovered the holy grail of SEO.

🏆

It was one of those times.

I was binging YouTube videos when I discovered two dudes explaining how to assess sites before you flipped them.

It was like watching Property Brothers for marketers.

🤤

I had read massive textbooks on SEO, CRO, and online ads, but they knew something I didn’t.

They knew how to launch sites from scratch (on topics outside of their expertise might I add) and generate money.

I was hooked.

I watched ALL of their YouTube videos, bought their course, and had my own site set up two weeks later.

They had a few secrets that ran counter to the mainstream advice SEO advice.

Things like:

👉They didn’t use SEO tools.

👉 They didn’t go after backlinks.

👉 Their articles weren’t fancy.

And they learned how to write seriously good articles in a fraction of the time. Think 3500 words in under 5 hours.

Crazy… I know.

I started a blog about home video studios and vlogging.

I wrote a few articles a week at first… crickets.

Still, I trusted the process.

Six months later, rankings were coming, traffic went up and I realized it was working.

My ad network was starting to send me $100 a month.

It was a fantastic start.

Now I had ambitions for something bigger.

I worked at a small college where students were required to work in exchange for tuition (a pretty cool program actually, Google “work colleges” to learn more sometimes).

I pulled a small team of freshmen together that had decent spelling and grammar, bought a new domain name (justdisciple.com), and taught them what I had learned.

They had ZERO experience.

They didn’t know 1-4K word articles are not normally researched and written in a 4-hour session.

They just took my word for it and after a few weeks they were hitting their targets

A team of 5 students was writing 10-20 articles a week.

😱

And they ranked.

They often beat out much larger sites.

Months later. The traffic came rolling in with no backlinks or promotions. We didn’t even promote it in social for a year.

That was two years ago.

Today, justdisciple.com pulls in close to 500k page views a month and has become a major lead source for the college.

For the record, my own site has languished at about the same place from multiple topics and domain name pivots 🙄. If I would have stuck to the original topic, life would be much different now.

The two guys on YouTune were with a channel called Income School.

They are worth checking out.

For my B2B marketing friends, don’t be afraid to hunt for information in spaces outside of B2B. The solopreneur industry has some great stuff.

Every industry has its golden nuggets.

Have you ever discovered a source of information that you became obsessed with?

I feel like I live for deep dives like that.