🍾 2024 Year In Review (continued)

Happy New Year!

If you missed part one of this, you can find it here.

Otherwise, let’s jump right in.

The Next 3 Things I Did….

Picking back up where things left off…

4. Cold Email

Mid-year, I started experimenting with cold email outreach.

I started doing this with the local newsletter to try to get some sponsors.

But then I found out a friend had hired not one, but several, terrible SEO agencies via cold email, so I decided to try testing it out with Growth Cupid as well.

At this point I was thinking I could either add this as a Growth Cupid service or spin up a new agency dedicated to this.

Had a couple of people who said they were ready to pay me if I did just that.

Y’all, cold email is hard as fuck. And people can be SOOOOOOO rude in the replies.

Gave me a whole new respect for the people who do cold email on the regular.

In the end, I decided that I would only do cold email for myself and not offer it as a service.

But I gained a whole new skill that I can likely use with other ventures or even fall back on if I want.

5. Growth Cupid

Growing my agency wasn’t something new for 2024, but it was also not what I expected.

I originally started it the previous year to fill the hole left by Niche Website Builders going bankrupt.

And with my reputation in the industry, that meant little to no marketing necessary. I really took that for granted.

By April of this year, when Google finished off niche sites, the growth I was seeing from 2023 was not looking good (lots of cancelled services).

Clients were still coming in, but not at the same pace.

I also tested out loads of different offers trying to appeal to what I THOUGHT my target audience was. If you kept an eye on the website, then you likely noticed that it was like Growth Cupid had multiple personality disorder 🤪

Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out the audience that I truly want to serve.

I’ve done work with ecommerce sites and local sites this year. More than any other year prior (even when I was selling SEO services via Skipblast Digital.)

In addition to cold email, I tested several different methods of acquiring clients. A surprising success was applying to local jobs to convince them hiring me via Growth Cupid was a better deal for them.

It’s funny to me when I see people with zero SEO background talking about how they’re gonna launch an agency like it’s easy peasy. This is popular in the local newsletter industry. 🤡 And among the people who like to acquire “easy” businesses.

Sure, you can outsource 100% of it, but you still gotta be able to recognize the good providers/freelancers. Plus, dealing with clients can be a real chore.

For the year, this ended up being my biggest revenue & profit stream as a result of the extra work I did to bring in clients. Which is a weird feeling cause I never intended to be an agency person like this. Honestly, it would have been niche sites based on the first few months of the year, but we all know what happened.

My goal for the year was have at least one $75K revenue month, which I did not achieve. The average monthly profit for the year was ~$7,000, which is my second best year ever of selling agency services.

6. The Travel Site JV…that was 🤬

In June, I mentioned that I was taking on a travel site that needed Pinterest and that it would be a Growth Cupid case study.

A popular influencer in niche sites had put the call out on Twitter asking if anyone wanted to JV on two of his sites. The pitch was essentially ‘help me grow it and we’ll split the profit cause I want to focus on other things.’

He’d mentioned more than once on Twitter how the site was written by real people who were experts, so I was expecting a piece of cake with this.

I’ve met this guy in person and I thought he seemed like a solid dude. I’ve seen people talk about how nice he is. So I reached out knowing that a travel site would do well on Pinterest.

We made a Twitter DM agreement (I should have known better) and he gave me access to the site’s Google Analytics. After seeing the traffic, I recommended that he try to get the site into Mediavine Journey and off of Ezoic so we could get an immediate revenue boost.

I immediately got to work creating a Pinterest account for the site, doing research on Pinterest Trends for topics I recommended we add to the site, and putting the Growth Cupid team to work on the first round of initial pins.

Almost 700 posts on the site, so it was a lot.

Didn’t take long of looking through the content to find those tell-tale signs of AI in this “expert” content.

Since I know that growing a brand new Pinterest account is a slow process, I had no real reason to look at Google Analytics for a few months. Imagine my surprise when I no longer had access to it. I could’ve asked about it, but had other things going on and based on the shitty content, thought it best to cut my ties with it.

I don’t know why he did this. And I don’t know if it was before or after I was on a podcast/livestream and he took something I said personally (though it wasn’t even about him).

Well, he apparently did end up getting the site into Mediavine Journey, boosted the revenue a decent amount, and offered it up for sale.

I haven’t heard from him since the beginning. And when I saw him offering the site for sale, yes, you best believe that I deleted that Pinterest account (which was driving traffic to the site).

Lessons: don’t do JVs without contracts and never under estimate how shitty someone is willing to be when their entire income stream was demolished a few months earlier.

I should also probably stop being so trusting. 🫠

And no, I won’t be revealing who this is because there’s literally zero productive reason to do so.

Needless to say, this venture was a loss in time and resources with zero gain other than the two lessons above and having another person to add to the industry list of “not the great guy everyone thinks he is.”

Coming up…

I’ll share the next set of online businesses/income streams that I tried in 2024.

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. If you’re looking for high level discussions or tips on things like local SEO and Rank & Rent, I highly recommend Jacky Chou’s Advise community. I’ve been in it for several months and there’s tons of value in it, including a SOP for local SEO.

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