Jim Weber 28, formally with ESPN the Magazine, was one of the people who just completed the Mentor Program with me. His website LostLettermen.com is a an interesting Case Study for how to get great web traffic.
During the six-week program we implemented a marketing strategy that brought in so many visitors, he is now the #1 College Sports Alumni Website. I wanted to share with you how he's done it.
Google Analytics:
His Google Analytics shows he currently receives 98,050 Unique Visitors viewing some 392,433 pages on his site per month and growing. What is most impressive to me is the wide diversity of where he is receiving that traffic from, as well as how he's been able to do it.
He received organic traffic(free) from more than 2,580 different, highly targeted keywords from Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. Part of the reason why the search engines love him so much is because he writes compelling articles every month and submits them to some of the big sports websites like Sports Illustrated, Rivals and ESPN.
For example, last month he wrote an article titled Gatorade Players of the Year and How They Turned Out. He submitted it to the big sites by emailing them and Sports Illustrated actually picked it up and linked to it. He received more then 61,907 Views on this page alone last month.
This is at the heart of Web Marketing. Gain the trust and links from the big sites and not only do you get the traffic from them, but the search engines love you because they now trust you.
How He Makes Money:
He's now making money with it by offering advertising on his site. He just signed a deal for $2CPM (meaning they pay him $2.00 for each 1,000 Ads he displays) through a bulk Ad provider. But he can make $10CPM if he sells his own. He's just begun to do this using his own Media Kit.
So the math looks like this: At 392,433 Page Views a month and 2 Ads per page, equals 784,866 Ad displays at $2 per 1,000 Ads views, equals $1,569/mo. Once he's selling his own advertising at $10CPM, that is $7,848/mo and if he puts 4 Ads per page, that is $15,697/mo.
Focusing on high-quality articles is much better than quantity. Maybe sports writing isn't your thing, but I'm sure something else is. When I do this for my own site, I think about the most compelling article I could write and whom I could submit it to, to be picked up.
As a side note, Jim is looking for one or two people to open additional sports sites, i.e Hocky, Golf etc. either here in the U.S. or abroad. You would own the site completely and he would provide all the knowledge he's learned to make the current site so successful. He is selling the sites for $5-$10,000. Contact Jim here. (Just for clarity, I have no stake in this business.)
Notes: LostLettermen.com was started in March 2009 and built on a customized WordPress template. The database runs the site and is written in standard PHP coding.
