A lot of bloggers earn primarily from ads and affiliate income. However, only a few of us consider lead generation, which Kasra shows, can be hugely profitable. So profitable, that Kasra’s site earned $30,000 from a mere 16K clicks. We’ll explore his publishing process, how he built backlinks, and how he started generating leads as quickly as 33 days.
Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links.
About the site
Quick snapshot:
- Lead generation website
- Finance niche
- Fresh domain registered June 2022
What kind of site?
This is a lead generation site. It’s similar to being an affiliate, but instead of getting paid per sale, I get paid per lead generated. This is typically done when the lead fills out a form on the business website.
How old is the site?
The site is 18 months old, registered in June of 2022
Was the site built on a fresh or expired domain?
Brand new domain
What’s the niche and why did you pick it?
The niche is finance. I chose this niche because I co-own the business for which I was generating leads.
Do you have a process for picking niches?
Ranking the website is the easy part for me. I look to partner with business owners who are looking to grow their businesses. Some business owners want to retire in a few years and don’t want to grow staff, get a bigger office, etc.
How is the site monetized?
The site is only monetized with the lead generation model. Since I co-own the company I was generating leads for, I’m able to cut the middle man out, bypassing any lead-gen networks, and making the most ROI on marketing and SEO spend.
Keyword Research
Quick snapshot:
- Used the wildcard feature inside Keyword Chef
- Spied on competitors to find new articles to write about
Did you use Keyword Chef to find keywords or did you import them?
Since I already knew the types of keywords I wanted to target, I used the wildcard feature inside Keyword Chef to do the alphabet soup method.
How did you finally decide on which keywords to target as articles?
I would check to see if my seed competitors had an article, and if they did, I would write an article on it as well.
Do you do any competition analysis?
Yes, but only to check what articles I am lacking on my website.
Publishing Process
Quick snapshot:
- Used Keyword Cupid to group keywords into agglomerative clusters
- Published initial articles on day 1, then waited until they were indexed to publish more
- Hired VA to help with internal linking or used LinkWhisper
Once you have a list of keywords, what’s your next step? Do you do any grouping or category mapping?
I used Keyword Cupid to group my keywords using agglomerative clusters & Autoblogging.ai to generate my articles with the custom prompts feature in Godlike Mode.
Walk me through your publishing process step-by-step.
So for my publishing process, I published 30 articles on day 1. I then waited until at least 25 of them had been indexed, after which I published another 30 articles.
Once all my articles had been indexed, I then published 1 article a day for the next 100 days. So in total, the website has 160 articles live.
For the content, I used my own tool, autoblogging.ai, in Godlike Mode, which means I always got the most accurate SERP when mass-creating the articles.
I also used unique images that I created using Canva. I set up a template, and once the template was created, it would take 1 minute to create a featured image for every article.
How do you do internal linking?
For internal linking, I hire a VA or I would use Link Whisper.
SEO
Quick snapshot:
- Built links to other pages and brand mentions on other websites
- Did guest posts and niche edits
- Unique images can help rankings massively
Did you incorporate EEAT into your articles? If yes, how so?
Yes, I made sure that the author on my website had backlinks and other websites mentioning him. I used Searcharoo to build links to my author pages and mentioned my brand on other relevant finance-related websites. This helped build up the authorship and brand.
Are you doing any outreach, guestposting, or link building?
Yes, I built guest posts, niche edits & tier 2 backlinks to my guest posts. This meant my guest posts had as much page rank flowing back to my website.
How do you go about building links? Do you have a special process?
My team at Searcharoo does it. They use warm-up emails and outreach to niche-relevant websites. They use Pitchbox for the outreach process and use LRT to spam check the websites for toxicity, making sure that we get safe links that won’t cause harm to our website and won’t flag any alarm bells in Google’s eyes.
Any other SEO efforts you did that were impactful?
Unique images & unique videos; making certain that your images are unique and that they rank helps massively. If your image can rank in Google images, then your page gets a boost in the organic listing. So, you should do everything you can to create unique images for every blog article.
Tracking the Results
Quick snapshot:
- The first lead was generated in 33 days
- Long tail and zero search volume keywords ranked the fastest
- Wasn’t impacted by Google’s Helpful Content Update
- Generated ~$30,000 from 16,000 clicks
How quickly did you start to see results?
Within 33 days I started getting leads via the website.
Did you notice certain keywords ranked better than others?
At first, long-tail and zero-search-volume keywords began ranking better once Google trusted my site to rank for 2/3 of the super long-tail keywords. That’s when I experienced an increase in traffic and saw improvements in the rankings of all my other articles.
Were you impacted by any Google updates?
We weren’t affected at all by the Helpful Content Update. The HCU may have even helped us, as we started to see an increase in traffic.
How much did the site earn?
So far, the site earned about $30,000 from 16,000 clicks. In December, I’m projected to earn $4201 or £3365
Do you have any screenshots traffic or earning screenshots to share?
Final Advice
With SEO constantly changing and the emergence of AI tools, where should people be focusing their efforts to be successful in 2024?
Automation and creating the best prompts possible. We live in an attention-based economy, so the more eyes you can get on your business, saas, ecom store, the more you will be able to generate more cash.
Whenever I speak about scale, people think of scaling averageness. That’s not the case. When you go to a boxing class, you learn first of all how to throw a quality punch, and then your coach will say, “faster”. You need to continue throwing quality punches and not sloppy punches.
About Kasra Dash
Kasra is an SEO consultant and co-owner of Searcharoo, a link-building agency, and also co-owns over 650 rank & rent websites.