How to build a media company that generates an additional $3.6M in year one 😯

In this next session, my friend Eric Rivera is going to be talking about how to build a media company. He owns a holding company of pet businesses and he has recently opened up a handful of websites and made them into media companies. And he's gonna talk about his entire process here. This comes from the Leveling Up Founders Event in Beverly Hills. You can learn more at live.levelingup.com. And without further ado, enjoy the session.

The big thing is, is that in our space, there's like pretty much endless opportunities. 90.5 million families that have pets. It's about a $123.6 billion TAM, and then there's about 400 million searches a month. And even despite all these opportunities, what we saw was kind of this world of rising CAC. And so, you know, we saw rising CPMs, we were seeing the loss of third-party cookies, we were seeing that, you know, one of the big issues we had was that we were renting versus owning an audience. But at the core of our business, we use something, we use SEO to kind of grow customer acquisition. The biggest issue we saw was just that we were getting a lot of headwinds because when we would reach out to other companies to get backlinks or do anything like that, people would basically just pass us up. And the reason was because we were kind of asking these people to do 2 things. We were asking them to give us, you know, a link to quality content, but the other part was we were asking them to give us a vote of confidence in our company. And a lot of the editorial guidelines for these companies wouldn't allow them to do that, so we decided like let's go ahead and let's build a media business. So our solution was we decided 12 months ago that we were going to break up our business, break up the consumer part of the company and the consumer brand part of the company, and actually build out a media business. And then, you know, the benefits of this at first were, you know, we could acquire customers, but it started to become really clear where there was a lot more benefits. First, we were getting first-party data in all categories, which meant that we now had access to not just data for our brands and our customers, but we had data around our competitors' brands and our competitors' customers. We also now were acquiring the pet owner versus acquiring just the brand customer. And then the last part was it just became a lot easier for us to build partnerships with other media companies, which accelerated our growth. These are the exact 3 frameworks that we use to basically build an authority media site in less than 12 months, and I'll share the results at the end. So first off, When you're looking at search, there's 3 parts that we use, but one of them is the topical authority framework. What you see here is that in Google itself, you want to take a core topic. In our example, we have pets, we break that up into subcategories, dogs, cats, and then within those we build subcategory topical authority clusters, which are around dog anxiety, dog food, cat anxiety. When you do that, what actually happens is Google views you as an authority And what it allows you to do is rank a lot faster. And so to actually make this happen, basically what you want to do is this, it's pretty simple. You go to Ahrefs or any of your keyword tools, you're going to go into the Keyword Explorer, you'll put in say a core term, like in the example that I'm going to give here is around like say dog anxiety. You'll put in your core term of like dogs and what it's going to do is it's going to give you all the matching terms that are in Google that are indexed in whatever tool you're using and then what you'll do is you'll go ahead and say, How does that interact with say whatever the topic that I want to build authority around? So in this case, it's dog anxiety. So you're also then going to filter of all those keywords which ones contain anxiety, and now you get this large list of keywords, and that's like the corpus of keywords that are related to this topic. Meaning if you were to basically exhaust and create content about all this different stuff, like you would be looked at as an authority, but also too you would actually you have a higher likelihood of ranking. Next, what you're going to want to do is take those keywords, you're going to bring them over to a tool called Keyword Insights, and what it does is something pretty simple. It goes through and it looks at all the keywords and sorts them into different documents or pages or articles, so that now let's just say you had like 22,000 or 23,000 keywords that you were targeting, it'll sort them into say 20, 30, 40 articles, And now you have kind of the baseline of what it takes to be a topical authority within that specific topic. Next, you're gonna wanna go over to something like Clearscope. There's other companies like Surfer SEO, but we use Clearscope. And you literally are gonna take the top of that, the main keyword that it put into that document, put it into Clearscope, and it's gonna tell you exactly what you need to write. And so now you'll take that, you'll kind of list out all the subtopics within it, and then from there you now have kind of your roadmap for being a topical authority within that sub-area of whatever you're mastering. Or topic is, and then you're gonna go turn that over to your writing team and you're gonna publish. The real key thing here is that, you know, I put a pro tip up here, is that when you're actually creating this content, you actually wanna publish it all at the same time, and this is actually a really big deal, and it has to do with what's called Google's initial ranking. So whenever you create content and you actually publish it, if you publish it in a series of articles, What happens is, as every article comes out, it looks for associated articles within that topical authority and says, well, you don't have enough, so it ranks you a little bit lower. What we do, say we had 60 articles within a topical cluster, we'll go ahead, we'll create all those articles, and we do what's called pulse publishing. We hit publish, they all hit, and then you end up ranking significantly faster, and you index a lot higher than you would have ranked because in the other way, you actually have to re-rank yourself up to the top. That's kind of the topical authority model. The next model is the digital PR framework. So as we were trying to do link building for a lot of our brands, and as we were trying to basically get backlinks from other companies, we started to think about, we tried to think of this through like the jobs to be done framework. At the end of the day, there's a lot of journalists and there's a lot of writers out there, and what they're really trying to do is create content that gets them page views. So we kind of shifted the way that we thought about content, and we said that we needed to shift away from being like, we created content linked to us, to looking for the type of content that they already create and the type of things that do well and figure out how to make their job easier. And what's funny about this is this is literally what public relations companies do, so we built out a digital PR team and we have this digital PR framework. We go to something like Google Trends or BuzzSumo.com. All of these are giving you trending topics, so it could be about anything that's happening like in current events, right, 'cause news, media, They wanna talk about current events. We'll take that, we'll intersect it with whatever topic we have. We're lucky 'cause we have dogs and there's always something about dogs. We'll then go ahead and we'll run a survey on Pollfish.com. So when we run the survey on Pollfish.com, you're able to select like your target market and you ask them a series of questions to build basically a data-driven survey. After that, you go to Muckrack.com. It's a digital PR tool. It's kind of a newer version of Cision.com. And what we'll do is we'll go in there and we'll find journalists that write about this same thing, and then basically do personalized outreach via Lemlist or any type of outreach software that exists. The pro tip here is actually pretty simple. Local journalists love topics about their local hometown, and your close rate tends to be, you know, in the 40s to 50%. So as you're doing this, and like one of the articles that we did, I think it was like the top 10 most dog-friendly cities. Obviously the top 10 and the least 10 most dog-friendly cities, all of those pick this up. You'll end up getting .gov websites sometimes, you'll get local Better Business Bureau links sometimes, but overall going local is an easy way to get started and then you can move your way up to national, so where now we get Huffington Post, Forbes, whatever, major news media publications because we've built a lot more authority on our site. And the last one is the expert profile framework. This is basically the concept that I am not a veterinarian and nobody on my team is a veterinarian that started the company, but we wanted to leverage the expertise of veterinarians to grow the business. So what we basically did was we paid experts for quotes. So just like, kinda like IP or paying for content, we went out to tons of veterinarians and we reached out to them via LinkedIn, we did job postings, and we asked them for quotes about some of the most commonly asked questions. That journalists typically ask, and we built up a quote bank. And now when we had this quote bank, we then took their name and we created an expert profile on our website. And then after that, we just sat and waited for HARO requests. And so HARO is a website called Help a Reporter Out where reporters basically put out requests for basically expert quotes. And then every time there's a veterinarian one, we respond. We've got a quote bank and they cite the profile. So we're able to build backlinks from tons of authority sites This one before, there's a great example, you know, Susie Gray, which is veterinarian, you know, she's a guest contributor and it links to the profile on our core websites. Those 2 core backlink strategies were pretty critical in helping us build our offsite SEO, and then the topical authority framework in terms of building exhaustive content about subtopics and then kind of moving your way up to master topics allows us to basically rank faster. The results were that about a year ago we bought this website veterinarians.org, it had zero traffic, zero links, nothing, and with a small team of people we've been able to grow it up to about half a million unique visitors a month, and it's continuing to grow and we're continuing to publish. Then these are just some hacks, so if you want to accelerate it, one is you can go to Odyssius Global, so this is basically a website that picks up what are called dropped domains. I think Neil talked about it earlier where, you know, are there domains out in the space that already had authority that got dropped? These guys do it as a service. They pick them up, they rebuild them so they have kind of core authority on them, and then you apply the Topical Authority Framework and you're able to basically kind of accelerate that initial year that it takes to index. The other one is if you don't want to pay for a premium domain because they're pretty expensive, you can go to venture.com. This is kind of a unique concept, but Venture.com allows you to lease domains and have a lifetime lease on those domains. So we've done this with a couple companies. You're able to get access to premium domains for a couple hundred bucks a month. It is a lifetime lease, but you can always buy out the lease if you want to, and that allows you not to have to pay $100,000, $200,000, which is what most premium domains go for. And then the last one is, is buy a site on Flippa or any other kind of site that helps you sell domains, and basically you can take that, and if it's not an authority site, It doesn't have like kind of a premium name, but it's got good content. You can go ahead and buy that and then you can merge it with an existing site and that accelerates time moving forward too.

All right. So that's it for this session. Hope you enjoyed it. If you are interested in learning more about the Leveling Up Founders private event, it's basically an annual thing where we gather the top founders and also the top speakers and ultimately just help each other grow our businesses faster. The last event was rated a 9.8 out of 10, and everyone said it was more so about the people. The speakers were amazing, but the people are even more amazing. So you can go to live.levelingup.com to learn more if you are interested, and we will, we'll catch you later.