An update on our latest media brand 18 months and $289,000 later.

This article is our continuation Initial story When you launch FinMasters and spend $477,924 to do so, be sure to read that first to get context. Here’s an overview of what I intend to discuss:

• An update on what we’ve done over the past 18 months
• Google and publishers
• What went wrong? If anything? #

But why am I writing this in the first place?

There’s a lot of misleading content out there about what it takes to build an online business, very little on this specific scale, and even less about bad bets.

Finn Masters Journey

The last report ended with these two scenarios:

• Cut back and keep loss to a minimum while hoping for some growth later.
• Keep doubling down on the good stuff and extending the timeline another year while allocating an additional $150,000 to the project.

The traffic looked like this:

It is not difficult to guess that we chose the second option. We continued what we were doing, working with the most established and experienced writers we could hire, both for the site and for our free software. Newsletter:We ended the year generating about $7,000 per month in affiliate revenue.

We were still struggling to get any traffic for general personal finance topics due to lack of authority, so we decided to continue building our content library, while introducing two new types of articles at the same time:

1. Write the best possible research posts, e.g https://finmasters.com/consumer-debt-statistics/The best data available and the best presentation to differentiate ourselves.
2. Fun, easier and cheaper to produce articles, such as: https://finmasters.com/weird-jobs-that-pay-well/Which will give us short and medium term gains until we build our authority. We decided to work with an agency on those and edit them at home.

We’ve continued to invest in marketing as well, and have started doing more PPC to promote our new research posts Here is our traffic as of November 2022:

Financially, at the end of 2022, we were losing about $15,000 a month, but traffic was growing. We continued the same strategy in 2023, but it was more about execution, without trying too many new things. Milica, who managed the project, has moved on to manage all our media projects.

We’ve also got a smaller site on We stand On a topic dear to me, Logical Fallacies: Fallacyinlogic.com, if you want to read more about fallacies: https://finmasters.com/logic-fallacy/.

Here’s what our costs look like for 2023:

While our traffic was growing, our revenue was not, to continue growing more sustainably, we decided to try display ads and join Raptiv.

Just before joining Raptive, we had our first “surprise”, Google HCU It came and we lost about 30% of traffic, two weeks later another update came and we lost another 30%, here’s the graph again:

I was honestly surprised by the October update, which affected almost all of our sites and was something I hadn’t seen happen in the last 13 years, as Google specifically hit sites that engage in affiliate marketing, regardless of their history and reputation. For example WPBeginnerIt is the oldest and largest WordPress site, based on Ahrefs Lost about 20+% of traffic as well.

Almost all of our affiliate income was gone, and what we thought would be about $6,000 a month in ad revenue, turned out to be $2,000. I had been on vacation for 3 months, and I think I was in shock, because I did not acknowledge or accept the new reality.

I think it took me maybe another 6 months to accept the new reality, for a while I was just thinking that this was a temporary thing and that things would change. As I look at it now, maybe two or three years ago it was extraordinary in terms of how well we were doing.

Before getting back to our story, let me share my answer to the question: Does Google hate small publishers?

No, Google is simply serving its users, employees, and shareholders as always; It also aims to maintain competitiveness in the search for other sources of information.

For a long time, Google had a lot of unique but incomplete content, where bloggers would share random thoughts on their sites, comments, and forums, and would encourage long, in-depth content that summarized that information. However, now they no longer need that. This is because they already have a lot of similar content, and AI can now effectively ingest and summarize thousands of unique perspectives. What Google really needs now is to return the Internet to what it was 15 years ago – forums, discussions and comments.

Now let’s get back to our story and what we decided to do further:

Focus on what you can control

Since we can only control our content and how users interact with it, we’ve worked to come up with multiple data points to see which articles need improvement. Along with bounce rate, we measure the number of users and how long users scrolled, if they clicked on any resources or if they hit the back button.

Moreover, we conduct various user tests such as: https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/content-quality/To get more qualitative data on how to improve user experience on websites.

As such, we asked the entire content team to make a round of quick updates, especially making sure the intros are more useful to users.

While our content engagement numbers have improved, traffic has not followed.

What should we do now?

Currently, as I write this, another important Google update is in progress. Looks like we’re experiencing another 25% drop in traffic. However, given how far we have deviated from our original plans, this decline does not have much impact on our current strategy.

Our immediate plan is to keep our content library to a minimum. Additionally, we are considering splitting the site into two parts, moving investment-focused content to a new site. This step would make it easier for us to create a more personalized brand, especially since we already own it optionsistics.com In this field.

Overall, we will need to completely review our publishing approach, and it is still too early to talk about the changes we will make.

What went wrong? If anything?

I believe that decisions made in hindsight should not be judged solely with bias. A good decision may lead to a bad outcome, but what matters most to me is the process behind it. It’s easy to call it a bad idea now, considering we lost about 90% of our investment. However, to evaluate it properly, I would like to reconsider my initial thesis.

“Heads I win, tails I don’t lose much.” This is the principle that guided my evaluation of this investment. I believed that by investing in high-quality content, even if we did not achieve the desired return, the downside would be limited, while there was little chance of significant upside.

In hindsight, we are far from facing minimal losses. Thinking about what I could have done differently, I realized that overconfidence was probably the biggest mistake. We have relied too heavily on the past success of our content business, without adequately adapting to current market conditions.

A question I’ve failed to ask for some time, especially when dealing with the personal finance space, where there’s a huge amount of written content: What are we offering that’s new and unique to what’s already out there? The answer is, frankly, very little.

Although I knew that market dynamics would change, I underestimated the urgency, assuming that the window of opportunity was wider than it was.

Confronting past mistakes is no fun, and in the past I often avoided them by not measuring our efforts in the first place. However, now that we’ve done that, there’s no reason not to take the opportunity to reflect.

For context, since I don’t want the post to sound like a complaint, we are still running a profitable business, and did not rely on outside funding for this venture. FinMasters represent a significant portion of our investments, but not the bulk, at about 20%.

We’re still looking to acquire online businesses, if you’re interested, here’s why we’re different:

We create a fair contract for both buyer and seller, without unnecessary restrictions, and we are transparent about the prices we typically pay, which can vary a lot, but for non-growing businesses are between 3-4 times annual revenue.

You won’t be dealing with a layer of assistants, you can email me directly (email protected) The answer will be in one day. We can usually close in about 2 weeks. We’re not asking for a million things that we can usually find ourselves.

Some products will grow, some will stay the same, and some will die, but in all cases, we will try to find the best solution for existing users and do our best not to damage the work you have done.

Many people have trusted us with their projects so far and we are happy to provide references. We got products like Boom, Multipage generator, Electives, imgbot.netand http://blog.cathy-moore.com. Usually, people who want to move on to other things.