It started in 2018 when I was looking for a side project. Our agency was pretty much running on its own and making solid money with little work. My goal was to diversify income streams and ensure that we multiple sources of income in case we ever run into hard times.

I never really had a goal to build something massive, and was mostly interested in creating a supplemental income stream.

I browsed websites such as Flippa, Empire Flippers, and others, looking for websites to potentially purchase so that I could increase the SEO, get more traffic and increase the revenue.

Eventually I came upon a website in the pet niche that had no traffic, no products or revenue. What it did have, however, was a solid domain with a lot of high quality backlinks. I ended up purchasing the website for $2,000 because I felt like it could help jump start the process and make the SEO journey faster.

Finding Products to Sell

So the first thing I had to do was ensure we had suppliers. The website already had content on it related to things like dog crates, pet strollers (yes they exist), pet carriers, and other items. I ended up finding a supplier for drop shipping that was 100% hands off and where we could take home a decent margin.

The setup was incredibly simple, as we were able to do it through a WordPress plugin to automate the order process. This vendor was willing to handle all of the customer support so it was 100% hands off. We started with selling pet strollers, pet crates, and eventually expanded to other items as well.

We also set up Amazon and Pet Store affiliate links so that if people did not buy our products they could still see other alternatives on those websites.

Optimizing the Website

I improved the website by optimizing for Page Speed, user experience, and the usual things you look for. I worked hard personally to ensure that every single thing that could be done for on page optimization was done. I wanted it to be the simplest, best looking, and fastest loading website when compared to the competition.

We used popular tools such as AHREFs, Page Optimizer Pro, and others to optimize each page for specific keywords. I also used LSI Graph to include related keywords that Google would recognize as relevant to the topic. We hired top-tier content writers to write longer content that went more in depth than similar articles that were ranking high.

Page Structure

The page structure was relevantly simple. It consisted of money pages (the pages that target high-value keywords), as well as supporting content with an in-depth internal linking strategy. In short, the end result looked someting like this:

Link Building Strategy

I always favored when doing SEO to have a diverse link building strategy. This includes low hanging fruit, such as directory listings or press releases, as well as more labor-intensive blogger outreach. Of course when it comes down to it, creating the most valuable content on the topic is one of the most surefire ways to get ahead.

Outreach Methods

The outreach efforts were simple. When it came to creating content, I favored quality over quantity. Creating longer, more engaging, and better-sourced content than the competitors.

Broken Links

This one is one of my favorite go-to sources of links. Broken link building is when a site somebody is linking to goes down. It involves scanning the websites of similar niche-relevant blogs and looking for broken links. You then create content around the articles that no longer exist, and create an outreach campaign.

Infographics

We also created infographics that were engaging and submitted them to dozens of sources. This helped us gain traction as well with links to our site.

The Results

The results were fantastic, and rapidly got better. Soon the traffic exceeded 60,000 organic visitors (unique) per month, generating 6 figures in sales monthly. I had multiple fulfillment partners to handle the demand and had a nice stream of semi-passive income.

What Came Next?

After growing the business I eventually got bored. I started preparing the business to sell and it didn't take long before..