PART1: Introduction
Welcome to Flywheel Publishing™, which is the niche site strategy I am using from this year forward. If you don’t know who I am, I started more than a decade ago. And only a few days before hanging my shingle for good, I tuned on ads on my site and never looked back since. Fast forward to today and I own a fleet of niche sites & a local business. I am also the creator of Fatstacks™ which is responsible for the success of hundred of Niche site owners.
But this report doesn’t have just me as an author. I wrote it with my partner Olivier. He’s an “behind the scenes” guy who started his site in a bedroom at his in-laws house. If you have been in the Niche site and SEO crowd, he’s probably sold you something. His list of collaborations include Matt Diggity, Kyle Roof, HVSEO, IMG, SEO Estonia, and more.
Long story short, after the absolute bloodbath that was the HCU (Helpful Content Update), where I and pretty much everyone I know got hit, I started
formulating a strategy with Oliver. He’s good at strategic thinking and we came up with a strategy that any blogger can use to future-proof their site, even if Google is giving them the cold shoulder. I named it Flywheel Publishing™.
Why are these secrets being shared?
If the strategy I’m about to lay out for you is so good, why share it? It’s simple: People are hurting. And niche site owners / bloggers need to band together. It breaks my heart to read threads on X of lost traffic, especially given that I came out of the whole ordeal even stronger than before.
The other part of why this strategy is being shared because, well, it’s a big world out there. Too many niches. I’d need 1000 lifetimes to even begin to go into them all. So yeah, Iʼm pretty sure thereʼs plenty to go around without us fighting like seagulls over a french fry.
What you are about to learn
Will this report really help you? Maybe. Does anything below sound familiar?
- You are worried that niche sites will become extinct
- You are worried blogging won’t be viable anymore
- You are unsure if AI will completely replace niche sites
- You are scrambling right and left to adapt and pivot
- Your traffic is down to zero and feel lost
- Unsure of the direction you should take with your site
If you answered yes to any of the above,you are in the right place.
This report will show you the strategy I’m using and why it’s powerful. No spoilers here, but trust me, thereʼs a TON of opportunity if you follow this path. I promise this report is packed with value, and youʼve probably never heard anything like this before. And hey, at the end, thereʼs a chance to buy something that might help you even more, but no pressure—itʼs totally optional.
Alright, letʼs dive in…
Summary: Things might seem dire right now, so much so that it seems impossible to make a living online. But there is a solution that has worked for more than 20 years and is only growing stronger.
PART2: How Platforms Killed Niche Sites & Blogs
Before we can figure out what to do, we need to figure out whatʼs wrong first. Let me paint you a picture.
A while back, Oliver hit me with this wild story:
“When I was a kid, my mom started complaining about some serious knee pain. She went to the doctor, and he was all like:
If your knee hurts, the problem must be in your knee! So, they went ahead and put a screw in her knee. Problem solved, right? Wrong. A few months later, the pain was back with a vengeance. Turns out the real issue was cancer in her lungs and brain—the knee had nothing to do with it.ˮ
Crazy, right? She did make it through, but it shows the dangers of not getting to the root cause. Not isolating the problem is like trying to fix a leak without knowing where the water is coming from. Weʼve got to dig deep and figure out the ROOT CAUSE of whatʼs really killing niche sites so we can find a real solution…and thrive.
Not isolating the root cause is like trying to fix a leak without knowing where the water is coming from!
Newsflash: Platforms are not your friend
Only a few short years ago, social media came to be a “thing”. Of yeah it still is, but there was a goldilocks period with
platforms like Facebook that made getting traffic easy. Those 4,000-page fans you had were actually worth something. When you posted a link, you’d get traffic. Most of them would see it, and they would click.
That’s how millions were made, like Scott DeLong’s Viral Nova or Buzzfeed. They would create a vital page and post it, get traffic, rake in the money. Rinse, repeat.
Then Mark Zuckerberg was like “Why are we sending traffic OUT of our site when we make money through ads when they are ON our site?” he clicked a few buttons and then the traffic faucet was turned off overnight.
As Scott DeLong. who made millions on the back of Facebook said, building your site on Facebook is like building it on top of an active volcano.
He’s right, you could be posting the best content in the world, but between you and all of those fans you’ve amassed is an algorithm who’s primary directive is to keep them on the platform. It’s not you that changed, they just changed the game because they control it. Facebook isn’t your friend.
In 2017, Logan Paul, a popular YouTuber, went to Japan’s suicide forest. He stumbled upon, and filmed an actual suicide victim in his video. Drama ensued and a new monetization rule was put in place: You needed 1000 subscribers, 4000 hours watch time in 12 months minimum to get monetized. Tons of smaller channels got killed instantly. Youtube is not your friend.
Twitter used to be one of the platforms with the highest reach (Amount of people that actually sees your posts). Hence it was a favorite of many to drive traffic.
But embattled with political stuff and with the need for making Twitter profitable, Elon as a entrepreneur quickly realized the same thing that Zuck did:
“Why would we send traffic OUT of the site when we make money when they are ON our site”. Hence it’s now
hard to figure out if something is a Screenshot from Cloudinary link or just a picture (See the image
on the side).
Click Through Rate is off a cliff.
Brilliant move for Twitter to keep people on their site, bad for you. Because X/Twitter is not your friend.
The root of why your site is struggling is because these platforms are NOT your friend. You might have amassed 100,000 fans, followers, and they can decide overnight to just let you actually reach 10% of them.
Why do you think most platforms only allow ONE link, like Instagram? Because they all understand one simple thing: It is in their best interest to keep them ON their platform instead of sending them on your site.
But even if you are fine being throttled by algorithms, the sad reality is: They do not need any reason for banning you. And you will lose everything. Every fan you’ve earned. You can lose 10 years of work overnight and nothing to show for
it if you trust these platforms.
You can lose 10 years overnight and have nothing to show for it!
Reddit and forums are full of these posts where Facebook and co arbitrarily destroyed thousand follower fan pages overnight. Even Amazon isn’t great as a platform. People lose $50,000+ routinely because of account closure.
I’m sure by now you are wondering, what about Google, isn’t its interests aligned with niche sites and blogs?
Let’s look into it…
The unreciprocated love
Thereʼs only ONE traffic channel whose goals actually align with yours: Google. Google is pretty much the only platform (if we can call it that) with a vested interest in pushing traffic OUT.
Sure, they plaster ads all over the results page before the organic stuff, but they mostly want YOU to get traffic. Why? Because if they do a good job, users will keep coming back to Google. Plus, they need folks like us to create sites so they can sell more ads.
Now THAT is an aligned success factor!
…In theory…
Google is like that ex we desperately wanted to be with, who just wasn’t as committed. Itʼs heaven when theyʼre “ONˮ and hell when theyʼre “OFF.ˮ Google is just as fickle. Their success hinges on having a lot of ad inventory to sell, yet instead of
helping us help them, theyʼre MORE unpredictable than platforms that donʼt even have the same alignment.
Helpful Content Update was nothing but a bloodbath for many publishers big and small. Years of blood, sweat and code evaporated overnight. I personally was getting the haircut of a lifetime, and there was nothing left. (← This is funny, you will get it eventually).
And it’s not just me or the publishers I know who felt this. Check out this compilation of traffic loss from well-known publishers:
Source: Lily Ray
I’m not happy that any of these sites are getting hit, but it sure is validating to know that it’s not just me. I poured a lot of money and time updating my content and site and started to recover… only to find out that it was a bounce and NOT a recovery. Just like if you let a soccer ball fall from a certain height, it will bounce but it will never hit the original height again.
Let me be clear: Google killed niche sites and blogs with the Helpful Content Update. They can spin it however they want, the result is the same:
Google is not your friend. At least the other platforms don’t pretend that they are. But we are NOT done. There’s another huge problem facing your site:
The Threat of AI
Not only are platforms NOT your friend, there is also the threat of AI hanging around publishers neck. If all you did was publish basic articles on your site, sorry to tell you but A.I. just came and got your lunch.
You can no longer survive on publishing information alone. Google just announced that you can stop their A.I., Gemini from using your site…but that’s just a diversion tactic to the most sinister part of it all…..
Yup, it’s stealing clicks in broad daylight. Imagine, you work hard researching, editing, producing your articles…and Google serves it up on their AI, and you get zero, zilch, nada!
Oh the audacity. But wait, it gets worse, way worse…
It’s stealing youryour clicksin broad daylight!
Everyone’s doing the same thing
If you think that’s bad, hold my beer. Everyone with an A.I. thinks they are entitled to scrape your content for free and not give you a cent. It’s not just Google.
Every tech company wants to do this…
- Microsoft is pushing AI at a OS level (Co-Pilot on Windows)
- Arc browser has done-for-you pages (Browses the web so you don’t have too)
- Perplexity AI has this too, and (get this) these pages are indexable
- And then you also have Google who’s dead set putting AI Overviews on top
Do you get how the game is rigged?
How these platforms are not your friend?
If you get one thing. Just one thing out of this report, let it be this:
Everyone wants to keep users from clicking to your site because your success is OPPOSED TO THEIRS
They want to serve ads on THEIR platform. So they want to keep users on THEIR site. And you on the other hand want the users on YOUR SITE so that you can make money. Do you get how your success is opposed to theirs?
The icing on the cake is that they want to scrape your content for free and then prevent the users from clicking to your site.
Do you feel that this is…
Unethical?
Outright heft?
Disgusting?
Insidiously evil?
Pick your adjective. And for the record, don’t count on the government to step in. It will be years before they ever do and the tech company’s defense will be something like “But it’s available for free online”. I don’t think it’s a game we can win.
It’s hard working for 10 years, only to have a tech-bro scrape your site in 10 minutes and not give you a dime.
But let me tell you something:
Go ahead and feel as pissed as you want. Get it out of your system, and then move on. Control on what you can control, not what you can’t. And what you can control is finding solutions, instead of complaining about how disgustingly unfair it is.
TLDR: “Pass through Traffic” isn’tastrategy
Relying on platforms did one thing: They made you rely on them. But just because your site is getting traffic doesn’t mean it’s a good strategy to rely on. Traffic is just ONE part of a successful site but not the only one.
Your reliance on platforms for traffic is, to put it bluntly, quite risky. If you can be wiped out the very next day, you will agree with me that this isn’t very sustainable.
If all you do is get paid per views, it’s just letting the users pass through and that is risky. See for yourself:
When platforms send you traffic, it’s all great, but when they don’t…it’s hell. Once you understand that THEY control the flow of traffic to YOUR site and that sending traffic to you is CONTRARY to THEIR self interest…you can see why “traffic” isn’t a strategy.
Imagine you are a farmer who solely relies on a single crop for your livelihood. You put all your efforts into cultivating this one crop, expecting it to provide you with a consistent source of income. However, if a pest outbreak or unfavorable weather conditions occur, your entire harvest is at risk, leaving you with no income.
Replace “Pest outbreak” and “Weather” with “Algorithm updates”, “Policy changes” and you’ll see what I mean that chasing traffic is not a strategy, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
…ButDon’tkickyourself
If you are feeling a bit upset because you relied on these platforms this far, don’t kick yourself. They rigged the game early on so that you could use it, and then by the time they changed the algorithms you were already trapped.
They went all “You should use our platform, it’s great” while secretly fostering dependence on them. They offered you the gateway drug of easy traffic and then started playing hardball.
Want an example of this? Look no further than Youtube shorts. When Google looked enviously at the rise of Tik Tok, someone somewhere said, WOW we already have a video platform, we should do a short video version!
And then one day, Youtube Shorts was born. But here’s what you probably don’t know: For a brief while, Google pushed some buttons so that whatever you post on Shorts would get tons of views.
You read that right, you would get boosted for doing shorts for no other reason other than Google wanted you to start doing them.
That is not the only time they did this. When they wanted to hype that community feature on Youtube, they would disproportionately boost polls and image
posts.
All because they wanted you to use it and get hooked on it.
When Zuck wanted you to use the fan page feature, he was generous with the traffic. And then arbitrarily stopped it. Remember: The platforms CONTROL the traffic. All of these examples are proof that if they wanted to, they could give you all the traffic you deserved. They just don’t because your success is,for a large part opposed to theirs.
This of course doesn’t account if you are a “creator” on their platform, but in that case, they completely own your ass. Pardon my French.
Plus, nobody could have predicted AI advances as we know it today. Nobody signed up to have their data scraped. So if you are feeling icky by the situation, turn your anger towards the platforms who hooked you, used you. There’s also
something to be said about Google. They told you what to do in their guidelines, you followed them to a T and then they still pulled the rug under you.
You got what it takes…
If you want the good news, it’s that by you even looking at their guidelines means that you are willing to learn. The fact that you used these platforms means that you have what it takes to succeed if only you are pointed in the right direction.
While it’s on them for rigging a game and hooking you. You still have the responsibility to change. Because unless you pivot, you will always be at their mercy. If you are into this Niche Site and blogging thing, it’s not just for financial freedom, it’s for freedom, period.
So unless you change something, you’ll be a slave of the algorithms forever. I don’t know about you but lifestyle comes first. Yes, I made millions up to this point but I’m done. All these platforms used to be fun and open until they got greedy. Throw in the fact that each one of them wants to create an AI and use your content for free and you’ll agree with me that it’s time to fight back.
Summary:
Platforms are not your friend. They initially appear friendly and accommodating and send you traffic, only to artificially turn off the faucet afterward, killing your traffic source in the process.
So “Getting traffic” is NOT a strategy, it’s just part of it.
PART3: Your turning point
Do you…
- Only have one 80-90% traffic from a single source (Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Whatever)
Only rely on ad revenue - Only rely on affiliate revenue
- Do not capture emails
- Can’t profitably pay for traffic if you need to
and more importantly….
Would you be out of income if traffic evaporated overnight?
Bad news, the more you answer YES to the above, the faster you need to change things, because changes, they’ve been coming for a LONG TIME.
Otherwise, it’s just a matter of time until you meet poor Arnaud’s fate:
Is publishing still viable? Are niche sites dead for real?
By now you are probably feeling a downcast about it all. Is there still hope for making money online as a blogger or publisher?
Honestly? Hell yeah!
But that’s not going to happen if you do things the old way. Just attracting Google traffic and earning with ads.
That ship has sailed. Anybody teaching this right now is simply teaching an outdated model and that can hurt you bad.
But the quicker you let go of things that no longer work, the faster you can start exploiting new opportunities. You need to adapt, and the sooner you adapt, the faster you can make it.
Thereʼs no such thing as failure unless you quit. Between me and my partner Oliver, weʼve got about 50-100 failed projects under our belts. Oh, and weʼve got 4 boys who all learned to ride a bike the same way: by failing hundreds of times, falling, getting bruises, and then finally nailing it.
Donʼt get me wrong—Iʼm not saying to keep doing something that clearly isnʼt working, because thatʼs just dumb. What I am saying is that thereʼs no failure IF you donʼt give up.
And hereʼs the kicker: the WORST thing that happens is often the best thing in hindsight. Oliver told me that one of the worst things that ever happened to him was having to raise a kid with no job. But guess what? It turned out to be the best thing because it pushed him to create a site.
As for me, I 10xed my income the last time I pivoted. I’m already about where I was before Google’s shenanigans and it’s about to go even higher.
The mindset you need
Not a fan of self help garbage, but we need to make sure your mindset is right because it is an important success trait for publishers. It’s really the one difference between the folks you see complain on X and the folks that make things happen.
I’m talking about the house vs boat mindset.
Most people adopt the house mindset of getting cozy and thinking things won’t change. A house has foundations and is tied to land.
This is all fine and dandy but what if the land dries up? Well,you are screwed because you built everything
thinking it was forever.
I mention this because there is a nasty belief instilled by gurus of yesteryear that you could make a site and retire
on it forever.
Yeah, sitting Pina Coladas by the beach is absolutely part of the deal but it’s not everyday.
A boat ALSO has foundations, but the main difference is that it can go wherever it wants. If there are no more fish in one area, it can always go somewhere else. In your personal life, you might want to settle down in a house, but when it comes to sites and business in general, oh baby you want a BOAT.
That’s because niches and markets are always in flux, they move.
You really don’t want to lay foundations down on something that is not fixed. All of the successful publishers I know of
have this mindset.
When many of them got hit by HCU, they all suckled for a bit (We are all human, after all) but then quickly took their boat to other directions in order to improvise.
I’ve also seen many lesser publishers simply quit because they weren’t happy that things changed. Life changes, everything changes, so should we.
I mean consider…
Blockbuster had the chance to purchase Netflix. Yahoo could have purchased Google. Kodak originally invented the digital camera.
All of these well known brands had all of the opportunity in the world to change but they didn’t act on it.
They all had the house mindset. They believed streaming was a fad. Film will be forever. All of them failed to see the coming waves and instead of setting sail, they stayed in place and are now case studies of failure.
You have what it takes
The good news is, if you are reading this, you probably already have the boat mindset. You reading this means that you can see the change coming and are ready to adapt and that means you already have what it takes.
But I’ve also seen it where people forget that they are on a boat and get complacent. So it’s also a mindset that can be lost. That’s why Jeff Bezos keeps saying that it’s always day 1 at Amazon, to keep everyone sharp.
With that being said…let’s get into the strategy
Summary:
You need to pivot. You need to have the boat mindset and NOT the fixed “house” mindset (aka things will always be the same)
Fatstacks Flywheel Publishing™
Let’s get into the actual strategy… by showing you what’s possible (for the record that is AFTER my Google traffic dried up like water in the desert):
Google used to make the bulk of my income. We are talking 50-100k by itself. Now it’s only a few % of my income.
See? Told ya you can still make money with niche sites and blogging. So let’s recap. We talked about how what’s keeping bloggers and niche site owners from success is:
- Platforms are not your friend
- Neither is Google
- AI is a threat to publishers
- You need to pivot or die
But pivot to what? And how? This is what we are about to get into. Enter the Flywheel Publishing™ strategy, which is my strategy for this year and beyond. The goal of the strategy are mostly to be as independent from anything as possible, and it’s just 3 steps:
- Diversify
your traffic - Build your
platform - Expand your empire
Repeat!
This is all about being INDEPENDENT from all of these platforms and their AI, the root cause of your site’s problems in the first place. Think about it, what would happen if you weren’t so reliant on these Platforms whims?
You would sleep better at night knowing that you would still have income flowing in even if you
lost traffic. You wouldn’t feel the need to turn your site upside-down when Google changes its algo.
We quit our jobs and replaced a fickle boss for a fickle platform!
Think of it this way. If we rely on these platforms too much, all we did is quit our jobs and replaced a fickle boss for a fickle platform. Both control our financial destiny. Only with independence can we truly have financial freedom.
That is why Flywheel Publishing™ is ALL about financial independence. It’s named flywheel because it feeds on itself, and the more you turn it around, the more independent you become. Here’s the 3 steps to make it a reality for you:
PART1: Diversity of Traffic
So, how do you bring traffic to your site with Flywheel Publishing™? Well,you use those platforms I talked about that aren’t your friend. WTF JON? Didn’t I just say they WEREN’T your friend?
Yup, but there are two crucial distinctions.
The first key difference here is to diversify the traffic, so that if one dries up, you still have others to use. Never rely on one source of traffic. If I didn’t diversify years earlier, my site would have been kaput.
USE, do not RELY on these platforms!
The second more important distinction is that you need to USE these platforms in order to build YOURS, and not to RELY on them again. You actually TAKE from them in this scenario. More about this in the next chapter.
The alternative to using platforms like Facebook, Pinterest and all is to simply print up flyers about your site and paste them everywhere that there’s actual foot traffic. It’s a good model if you are a brick and mortar business (especially if you put your flyer in adjacent businesses) BUT not so much if you want to drive traffic to a website.
The worst traffic source
Do you know what the worst traffic source is? Having just one. One is the single worse number in business. If you are a family physician and rely on a single patient to make up most of your money, you are screwed if they leave. If you just rely on one traffic source, if it dries up, you too are a goner.
That almost happened to me with HCU, but I had Facebook and Pinterest to keep me afloat.
So part of the Flywheel strategy is to have a diversification of traffic. Before Google’s antics it was number 1, but now it’s relegated to after. Here’s the sources of traffic I am now focused on:
Google is still very important for a few reasons. First of all, I cannot discount other search engines, and at the end of the day good interlinking and all is still good for users.
But again, a really Really important distinction is that I’m no longer just getting traffic, I’m using the traffic I get to build my
own platform.
Once again, I hate to sound like a broken record but: platforms are not your friend. There’s thousands and thousands of stories of Facebook pages being taken down for no reason whatsoever. Let me be clear: They can kick you out for any and NO reason at all.
I’m using Facebook daily and I am earning a TON from it. From Pinterest too. But that is why I have the two sided strategy of diversifying traffic + building my own platform. Use platforms, don’t rely on them.
If one goes down, there’s others you can use. Having one source of traffic is like having a table with a single leg. It can easily get knocked out. The more legs you can add, the more stable you are, even if a leg or two comes out.
Warning: Never ever click a link on your Facebook pages. There’s a lot of hacking FB pages that happen this way. Then they distribute skin stuff and FB will close your account. Good luck getting it back.
What about SEO?
SEO is not dead, far from it. Oliver has a leg in the SEO industry and he tells me they are quite cozy over there. He keeps showing me some of the success that SEOs are having post HCU so SEO is clearly thriving.
I’m just not into it anymore. It’s increasingly technical and taking the fun out of publishing for me, that’s why I basically outsource to Jared Bauman’s 201 creative. If you do not have a budget for SEO, you will have to do the basics yourself.
what platforms should you focus on?
TIP: Facebook and Pinterest go well with each other. Not always but often.
I personally focus on Facebook and Pinterest because I am in a visual niche. It’s important to not spread yourself too thin. Do not try to add all of them as a traffic source in one go. Focus one 1 or 2, dial it in and then move on.
I’ve outsourced my SEO and I am leveraging VAs to post on Pinterest and Facebook. I’ve also invested heavily in respective authorities in each site like Tony Hill for Pinterest. At the risk of repeating myself here, the strategy is not the RELY on these platforms but to USE them to build traffic on YOUR platform.
Sidenote: Google and AI content
Should you be creating a pure AI-based website? Totally if you want. Everyone I know has a site like that, but the important distinction is that they view it was a crash and burn experiment. They understand that it could take off to the moon and make a lot of money, but also simply crash at any time. Never make your main site an AI site.
Summary:
USE platforms, do not RELY on them. Diversify your sources but keep the main point in mind: Build your platform and own your audience
PART2: Build your platform
So far I’ve only touched on traffic diversification. But that is only one part of the strategy.
The heart, the core of it is simply owning your own platform.
At the end of one of my favorite movies ever, “There will be blood”, a young man offers a grumpy Daniel Lewis his prime oil land for sale. The scene starts with the young man looking all cocky and ends up with him being on the floor, in tears.
Daniel explains to him that his land was worthless. Why? Because he owned the adjacent land and he already siphoned all of the oil that was around.
He yells “I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!”
Since platforms are not your friend, but you need to make THEIR traffic YOURS… you need to DRINK THEIR milkshake. You no longer use platforms to generate traffic to your site, but you use them to generate traffic to primarily build your email list.
If you do not have your own platform (email list), you are wasting traffic daily.
Oliver told me of something that happens that illustrates this well.
Back then he was a rookie and he went viral on the biggest site in his niche, racking up 50,000+ clicks in one day. While this might sound nice, consider that he didn’t have a mechanism to convert that traffic into HIS traffic. He didn’t have an email opt-in box. So these 50,000+ clicks came and gone, and he has nothing to show for it the day after.
Having your own platform is the difference between platforms owning traffic vs you owning traffic.
In one scenario, the traffic is passing through to your site, and on the other you KEEP some of it for you.
In one scenario, you get nothing besides today’s bread, and the other you KEEP some for another day
In one scenario, you are completely dependent on the platform, and in the other, you are building your independence.
Here’s a graphic that illustrates the difference:
Before:”Pass through traffic”
Traffic comes and goes, nothing is kept. You are gone overnight if traffic dries up.
After:”KeepTraffic”
So with your own platform, no matter what happens, you have traffic that YOU control!
Your platform: The best asset in the word
Don’t let the words “Own platform” scare you. You don’t need to spend millions for design or anything.
It’s just EMAILS. Yup, owning your own platform, surviving for years while platforms are up to their shenanigans is as simple as an email
list.
Those who rely on platforms for traffic without building their own are building on sand!
Back in the day Obama broke the record for amassing $750 million in political donations.
Trump and Biden overtook him but how did they do it? Email.
Email is the only way you get to KEEP the traffic that you generate from the other platforms. Sure sure, technically you get to keep some traffic if you have a Facebook fan page but once they kick you out for no reason or throttle your reach because they got greedy, once again…platforms are not your friends.
On the other hand, people’s who’s emails you have are really YOURS to keep. Sure, you will be using a platform to host and email these contacts, but you can always export these contacts and reimport somewhere else.
Try that with Facebook! It’s only when you try to export your fans that you realize you don’t own any of it. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, THEY all own the audience YOU built over YEARS. Catch my drift?
Once again, I love Pinterest, Facebook and all (I make money from them, why should I hate them?) But I always have in the back of my mind that they are not my friend, so drinking their milkshake is my priority.
Why is an email list the best asset in the world for bloggers & niche site owners?
Platform independence
You can survive for years on an email list. In fact Oliver’s best year was when his traffic was taking a nosedive years ago.
It makes the holy grail of traffic possible
Once you make your money with ads or affiliate commission, you never see this person again. When you have an email list, you can send them to more pages and either get more pageviews, more commissions or sales. So it makes the holy grail of traffic possible: Paid traffic.
Since you make more from a user if you have their email, you can invest into ads, and get back that money after a few days.
It’s way safer
An email list, as far as making money online is concerned, is the safest asset to own. Nothing does quite as much for your state of mind than knowing that if all hell breaks loose, you can always send an email offering services or a special offer that will keep you afloat.
Push button profits
If you do this right, emails are the closest you will ever come to push button profits. Famous musicians somewhat have the same system. If they want a house or a pool, they write a song. Fans gobble it up, they get money to buy the house or pool. With emails, you can do promotions, launch a product and more.
Boost your selling price
If you ever want to sell your site, one of the sexiest parts of the deal for the buyer is the email list. This is not only a signal of interest to your site but it is also very attractive to them because it’s a safety mechanism.
Higher RPMs
I will spare you the technical aspect but emails tend to have higher RPMs. Because they are more valuable to advertisers. Hence any time they are served an ad, you make more than simple passthrough traffic.
Summary
Traffic you control = Peace of mind. You aren’t reliant on any platform that way. You use platforms to build yours but if something happens, you still have an asset that can keep you afloat for months, if not years.
Part3: Expand your empire
Once you start earning with display ads, it’s time to expand your empire. This is the beauty of owning your platform: You control what to do with the users. Instead of just relying on display ads for example, you can send users to affiliate articles or your own products.
Here’s what that looks like:
Once you have your platform, and traffic, the last piece of the puzzle is MONETIZATION.
- Drive traffic to your site for display ads
- Drive traffic to your affiliate articles (Roundups & reviews)
- Drive traffic to external affiliate pages
- Drive traffic to own product pages
- Look, I understand the dream is just making big bucks with something like display ads but whatever brings in the money, right? Plus those affiliate commissions and your own products require much less traffic than display ads.
And if you do this right…You have ALL the benefits:
Your own products and affiliate articles bring in short term revenue with little traffic. And when the traffic actually comes in, you get Display ads money added to it ON TOP of the increased commissions and sales…you get money in the short term and long term!
That’s not all, with diversity comes safety, so you end up with a site that has multiple SOURCES of traffic, and since you own your own platform, you also have diversity of MONETIZATION.
It’s a thing of beauty!
Summary
With your own platform, you can monetize multiple ways, affiliate sales, own products & more. So it’s possible to make money in the short and long term!
Conclusion: A quick recap of Flywheel Publishing™
Hereʼs what Iʼve told you throughout this report:
- Traditional blogging and niche sites are dead
- The problem is your reliance on passthrough traffic
- Especially given that the Platform’s self interest is opposed to yours
- They want to train on your site for free, and keep the users to themselves
- So you need to USE them, not RELY on them
- Focus on one traffic source and then diversity your sources
- You need to OWN your platform: Build your email list
- Expand your empire with multiple monetization strategies
If you do this right, your site is future-proof. How so? Well imagine if you got ZERO traffic overnight. You can send an email and still get display ads revenue. Then you can send in a special deal for affiliate offers. There’s so many ways you can survive with ZERO traffic.
Oliver told me that his biggest month ever was when he sent an offer to his list… all the while his traffic was taking a nosedive. Do you see how powerful this is? You get much more independence and increased income if you follow the Flywheel Publishing™ strategy.
Your site becomes quite resilient no matter what happens to it, from affiliate programs closing to platforms turning off the traffic faucet. This way, no matter what happens you have a money-making system that can keep you afloat for months, if not years. It’s a thing of beauty.
I hate that millions of lives were up-ended by the HCU updates, but my site is in a better shape than it was before. I mean…what doesn’t kill you, makes you
stronger, right? So go ahead and deploy the Flywheel Publishing™ strategy to your site to make it able to sustain you for years.
Thanks for reading!
Jon Dykstra & Olivier Duong
Fatstacksblog.com
Epilogue: doing what it takes
Pop quiz, hotshot: Who is the inventor of the telephone?
If you said Alexander Graham Bell, you’d be somewhat right. History is a bit more complicated. From Ericson:
“Both Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray submitted independent patent applications concerning telephones to the patent office in Washington on February 14, 1876. Bell, in Boston at the time, was represented by his lawyers and had no idea that the application had been submitted. Grayʼs application arrived at the patent office a few hours before Bellʼs, but Bellʼs lawyers insisted on paying the application fee immediately; as a result, the heavily burdened office registered Bellʼs application first.”
There’s two lessons here: That you not only need to take decisive action, but also that you should do what it takes. Gray’s application was submitted FIRST, but the lawyers just flaked out after so we now live in a timeline where nobody knows who Elisha Gray is, but everyone knows about Bell.
These lessons should ring (pun intended!) true to you today
Right now, you are in a make a break situation for your blog or niche site. You can continue relying on platforms, hoping the government will intervene from AI crawling your work, of you can do what it takes right now.
I’m not trying to scare you but look at an example from another industry: Youtube. The golden opportunity was around 2006-2017. Afterwards, virtually no new (non-corporate) channel has broken into the top.
All of this to illustrate that there’s opportunity but opportunity won’t wait for you if you don’t take it.
The opportunity for making a huge platform for your niche is RIGHT. NOW.
If you don’t do this, guess what? Someone else will do it instead.
And by the time you decide to act on the Flywheel Strategy™, it’s too late, your competitor’s email newsletter is so big there’s nothing left for you but to pack your bags out of the niche.
Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t be like Elisha Gray. Seize the opportunity right now, whether you have funds to start or not.