🧠 A Writing Service with Monthly Recurring Revenue
🧠 A Writing Service with Monthly Recurring Revenue
And a special guest post from Joe D'Eramo, creator of My Home Office Hacks.
Today’s estimated read time: 5 minutes and 31 seconds
1. Business idea of the Week: Blog Writing Subscription Service ✍️
93% of online sessions start with search
Think about it… Every time you pull up your browser, you’re probably greeted with the Google search bar.
We don’t even have to memorize websites, or make sure they’re spelled correctly. We just type in “youtbse” → press search → and just like that, the link for Youtube.com is front and center.
This is the power of Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short.
SEO is the process of improving your website so it ranks higher on search engines like Google or Bing. Search engines crawl your website to find relevant keywords and data, that help them decide which website to show when you search something.
For example, when you search “how to tie a show lace”, Google has already crawled the web to find the article to show you. In this case a WikiHow article titled “4 Ways to Tie Your Shoes” is shown as the first result.
Search engines drive 300% more traffic to sites than social media.
So if SEO is so important, and drives the majority of traffic to sites, why doesn’t every business focus on SEO?
Because it’s time consuming and often takes longer to see results (vs paid marketing).
The Idea: Create an SEO Blog writing service with a monthly plan.
For example, an e-commerce brand selling surfboards would benefit from weekly articles related to surfing. You can charge them $1,500/month for weekly SEO articles that target their ideal customer. ($1,500 x 6 clients = $9k/month or $108k/year)
Examples of articles: “How to Choose the Right Size Surfboard”, “What is the best Surfboard Material”, etc.
When someone searches one of those terms, they’re likely looking for a surfboard, and you’ve brought them to the right place!
How to get started: First you’ll need to learn at-least the basics of SEO. Here’s a free course to get you started → Click Here.
Like most businesses, you can get your website up and running ASAP. I recommend Wordpress since its the golden standard for blogs and SEO marketers. (WordPress powers 37% of all websites on the internet - 🤯)
Now you’re ready to find customers. You can start with marketplaces like Fiverr & Upwork, or cold outreach to your ideal customers. When building your portfolio, you can offer 1-time free articles, in order to build trust and prove your work.
Once you have some practice and a portfolio of work, you can pitch your current clients on a monthly service, or use your clients names as social proof on your website.
This is a highly relationship driven service since there are no shortage of SEO services. You need to make sure your customers are happy, and the work you produce is killer.
Here’s an example of a company offering this service → Verblio.io
They just broker the articles and allow writers in their marketplace to take the job. It’s efficient, but quality control become a big issue.
and their pricing structure 👇
Reasons I like this business:
Free to start (besides website costs). 👍
Provides a ton of value to businesses, and generates direct ROI. 💸
That beautiful monthly recurring revenue (MRR). 🤑
Easy to scale by outsourcing the writing to SEO specialist. 📈
Let me know what you think!
Sources: https://www.smamarketing.net/blog/80-seo-statistics#:~:text=93%25%20of%20online%20experiences%20begin,than%20any%20other%20marketing%20initiative.
2. A Hack for Non-Designers Who Want to Design 👨🎨 - Guest Post By: Joe D'Eramo
This Hack is brought to you by Joe D'Eramo creator of My Home Office Hacks.
Check out Joe’s Substack → Click Here
You’ve got to love platforms like Canva. It gives people who want to design their own graphics an alternative to hiring a professional for what would amount to about 10 minutes work for the designer. For designers and non-designers alike, there’s a great tool to use with Canva and other template driven sites and it’s called Eye Dropper.
I first heard of Eye Dropper when designing an eBook using Designrr. I had selected a template but wanted the color scheme to match that of my website. The Eye Dropper Chrome extension enables you to cursor over any color on your website, select it, and then get the palette number. With this info, you can input the number into whatever software you’re using and apply that color.
Check out the video below where I use it with Canva.
Eye Dropper can be used with most programs that let you select a color for background or text. Even in something like Microsoft Word. Just click on the arrow next to the text color button. If you want a specific color for your text, select “More Colors.”
From the next screen choose Custom.
Follow that up by inputting the palette number using the method in the video above.
Boom! You have the colors you want for your text, border, background of whatever you want colored.
This may not seem like a huge thing. When you’re a non-designer trying to design something without annoying your designer friends by asking for help, it does come in very handy.
As always, thank you, Al Gore, for inventing the internet!
Sources:
Joe D’Eramo, My Home Office Hacks 👇
Eye Dropper: https://eyedropper.org/
Designrr: https://5633--page1.thrivecart.com/designrr-offer-one-time-payment/
3. $102 Million in Funding, 500 Employees, and $600k revenue. The Fast.co Disaster 🤮
Amazon’s patent on the “one-click-checkout” expired five years ago, resulting in a flood of new one-click-checkout startups.
Bolt.com, Acquire.app, & Fast.co to name a few.
The idea is to provide a one-click checkout experience across the internet, similar to the shopping experience on Amazon.
So what went wrong with Fast.co?
Here’s a quick Breakdown:
Domm Holland, co-founder of Fast.co, gets his first big payday when he buys the domain name of a major airline, threatens to give it to their competitor, and sells it to them for $1.3M.
He then creates Australia’s “Uber for towing”, which fails and is left with $100k+ debts to multiple towing companies, legal battles, and Domm threatens to the sell drivers license info he collected (highly illegal).
Domm then comes to Silicon Valley, where he hires a Nigerian software dev team to build the first version of Fast.co.
He raises $100M from Venture Capitalists, abruptly fires the Nigerian team, and takes credit for their work.
Employees mention Domm went on a spending spree with this $100M including sponsoring Jet Ski’s, Race cars, and booking the Chainsmokers for $1 million.
Fast.co burns through ~$10M/month to generate ~$50k/month in revenue.
On April 5th, Fast.co announced they will be closing their doors.
This leaves us with a lot of questions like:
Is Domm’s shady past related to the failure of Fast.co?
Is this just another failed startup? (90% of startups fail)
What will Domm do next? And will he be able to raise money again?
Domm reminds me of Michael Patryn, a convicted money launderer that keeps finding his way into new crypto projects. But more on that in next weeks post…