How you need to measure growth

I hope you had a great Black Friday / Cyber Monday weekend extravaganza. If not, don't be discouraged. I've had many disappointing Black Friday weekends in the past. Most of them are. Actually, all of them were until I lowered my expectations. It often boils down to niche. Your ad rev was probably up. That's good. Mine was up, but again, not as high as I'd hoped. If you promote mostly Amazon, it's hard to really clean up with only 24 hour cookies unless you do ridiculous volume. My Amazon revenue wasn't much better than normal. My Skimlinks affiliate revenue enjoyed an okay bump but I'll still be a working man. I did manage to get some good deals for myself. I [saved 50% on Kyle Roof's On-Site SEO course](). I bought 100,000 Keyword Chef credits for the price of 50,000. [The deal is double credits](). I think those credits will get me through to next Black Friday. The rest of the courses/software that I've listed in my emails I have already. I'll recap those deals for you. --------------------------------------------------------------- Today is the LAST day for most of the Black Friday / Cyber Monday discounts including the $300 off my course. THANK YOU: You've no doubt fielded dozens of emails from folks promoting all kinds of deals over the last 4 days. If you chose to click and buy via my affiliate links, thank you very much. The same to everyone who bought my course. I do appreciate it. It makes this email newsletter possible. I just hope you get far more value out of every purchase than what it cost. Here's my curated listed (for the last time): ​[Stephen Hockman's SEO Course](=) (50% OFF - use coupon BF2021): Stephen's course taught me an absolute ton about using Search Console for keyword research (among many other on-site SEO techniques). Search Console is free to all of us and provides the best keyword data for your sites. This was enlightening. You can put it into action in minutes. ​[Kyle Roof's On-Page SEO Course]() (50% OFF): My favorite course about on-site and on-page SEO. This is a must-have course for all content publishers. ​[My Course Bundle]( ($300 OFF): Arguably the best course on keyword research and volume content publishing ever offered... anywhere. I'm biased of course, but plenty of members are getting great results with it if all the case studies and growth results reported on the Fat Stacks private forum are true. Yes, the course includes access to the forum. ​[Authority Hacker's Core Web Vitals Course]( (75% OFF): Great course on how to improve your Core Web Vitals (CWV) scores. Very thorough. Now that CWV is an SEO ranking factor, you should know this stuff (unless you don't like free traffic). ​[EasyWins](=) ($100 OFF): This course is a series of detailed tips for quickly increasing website traffic and revenue. Whether your own site or a site you buy to flip... it's all about getting a great ROI with "Easy Wins". Handpicked Black Friday SOFTWARE Deals ​[Keyword Chef]() (double credits): As soon as I tried Keyword Chef, it instantly entrenched itself as one of my favorite keyword tools due to its wildcard capabilities. You can insert * at the beginning or in the middle of a phrase and it will produce keyword phrases filling that blank. I've found a ridiculous amount of great keyword phrases with this tool. ​[Astra Pro Theme]() (Save up to 63%): Arguably the greatest content WordPress theme available today... if you want post-level infinite scroll. Infinite scroll is built into it which makes it very powerful. This is one lean, nicely designed, feature-rich, Gutenberg centric WordPress theme. It's my go-to theme for niche sites. ​[Deposit Photos](=) (AppSumo Deal): If you're not ready for a beefy stock photo subscription, this is the deal for you. You can get 100 to 1,000 stock photos for $.39 each. You can download these any time you want (no deadline). This is ideal when starting out so that you have a pile of stock photos available in your hip pocket without having to pony up money every month. If you use 3 stock photos per article, you're good for hundreds of posts (with the 390 images purchase). Please check Deposit Photos photo inventory before buying to ensure it offers the images that work for you. ​[Affiliatable]( (20% OFF): I use this affiliate plugin in articles that have some buyer intent. I like the product tables. You can use it for Amazon or any merchant. Very versatile. -END OF BLACK FRIDAY SOFTWARE DEALS- --------------------------------------------------------------- Do you know what I prefer over a high earning Black Friday week? I prefer steadily growing traffic and revenue throughout the year. As I mentioned in an email last week, I don't get all that excited about Black Friday. I play along. It's worth it but I don't pin my year's hopes on it. I much prefer seeing steady growth all year... year-over-year. Year-over-year is how I measure growth I don't focus on the month to month too much. I measure year-over-year because like most sites, I have periods of growth, plateau AND drops. By year-over-year I compare this past November (2021) to last November (2020). This past October to October last year and so on. As long as my year-over-year is improved, that's a good sign for the site. My 2021 year-over-year was higher across the board compared to 2020. 2020 was higher than 2019. It's a good trajectory. That's what I prefer. That's what I work toward. For my content business, it merely requires publishing a good amount of decent content targeting low competition topics and keywords. That's it. Every year I add more content to the portfolio. Every year I add more sites to my portfolio. Some years I sell some sites. Everything is building blocks. Each article on a site is a building block for the site. Each site is a building block in the portfolio. From now to the end of year it's mostly downhill for me I've had readers ask if I've noticed traffic dropping recently. I have. It happens this time of year every year (that's why I compare year-over-year... as in this November to last November). Part of the reason is some of my content is seasonal so it does better leading into summer. I think also part of the reason is during holidays folks are doing other things than surfing. Of different niches behave differently. If you're in a Christmas niche, this is your time. So if you're seeing traffic drop and you've had your site for a couple or few years, compare your traffic to the same time last year. In most cases, if you've been working on your site, it should be up unless it suffered a loss from a Google update. I admit it's hard to keep at it when traffic is falling Had I stopped publishing throughout the years when traffic was falling, I'd probably have half the published content I do. It is hard to remain motivated when metrics are going in the wrong direction. But I keep at it. I do so because I've rebounded from falling traffic patterns enough to know that it'll rebound again. It won't rebound if I do nothing. Well it might rebound but if I stop, growth will eventually stop. A year goes by fast in this business. 2017 seems like yesterday. That was when Google deindexed my biggest site for many weeks due to some malware attack. In the midst of it I thought that site was toast. For a long time I had no idea what was wrong with it or how to fix it. I somehow got it cleaned it up and it was reindexed. Traffic restored too. That surprised me. It was like Google slotted most of the rankings where they were. I'm glad I didn't write that site off. It's still my biggest site. 4 years went by fast. No doubt the next 4 will go by fast. Growth since then has been more or less exponential. Not entirely but definitely a nice upward trend. I'm gunning for the same for the next four years with new sites in the works. I talk about this business in terms of years because unfortunately in this business you need to think in terms of years. It's a slow moving business. On the flip side, I've found that year-over-year growth happens by focusing on getting important tasks done daily. The most important thing I can do today is publish more content across my sites. That was the most important task 5 years ago. It's the same today. As long as I keep publishing and stick to my strategy, my overall portfolio will grow. Avoid becoming stretched too thin It becomes a balancing act when you add more sites to the mix. If your new sites take away from your existing, higher earning sites, that's not good. Only add new sites if you can simultaneously maintain or increase production on existing sites. For years I was largely a one site show but that site does really well. Had I expanded too early, that one site may be only a fraction of what it is today. Even today I have more sites I want to launch. I have two in particular I'm keen to start but I'll probably hold off at least 6 months and perhaps up to a year. I added several sites to my portfolio last year (after selling 7 sites at the end of the prior year) so I need to get those new sites self-financing. Self-financing is an important milestone for any website Self-financing is when a site earns enough to finance growth. New sites suck up cash when outsourcing most of the content. That's why I work hard toward to One exception: Cooker sites The one exception for gunning hard to get new sites to self-financing is the long-term strategy of having launching some cooker sites. Cooker sites (coined by a successful Fat Stacks forum member) are sites you launch with some content and then let sit to age for a year or more. That way when ready to grow them, they're primed for growth. I don't intricately plan but I do have a big picture goal Some folks like to set out intricate monthly and annual business plans. Not me. I'm a fly by the seat of my pants person. But I do have an overarching goal and that is to grow a portfolio of high-earning sites. That's it. That's my planning. It works for me. I'm not saying planning every step for me is bad; it's probably good but that's just not my style. My style is to push out content as fast as possible focusing on replicating what's working. I toss in a few experiments here and there just to find out if I can improve my strategy. That serves the tinkerer in me. There is no ceiling The no ceiling aspect of this business appeals to me a great deal. There's no limit to traffic or growth. It's both challenging and fun to see what can be done. Jon Fatstacksblog.com ​ Affiliate Disclaimer: There are many affiliate links in this newsletter. Those are links to courses and software and products I have and use. The list of links is my curated list of my favorites that are offering some great Cyber Monday deals. I know you're receiving lots of emails from other folks with similar affiliate promotions so if you choose to click and buy from me, thank you. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ [Unsubscribe]( | [Update your profile]( | 2016 Hill Drive, North Vancouver, British Columbia V7H 2N5