How do I scale faster?

[DunderMannen]

I've been pushing on for the last 12 months really and managed to write about 200 articles myself.

Didn't pan out very good, but still I'm now sitting at a monthly income of ~600€ as of last month.

I have about 5k saved up from the year that's gone, all income from my sites.

Now the problem is just how do I scale faster? I'm very tired of writing myself so I got a writer now that writes ~25k words/month for €1k. Very good price for such a great writer.

How do I scale faster though? Should I spend as much money as possible now and be frugal later on, or should I keep a steady pace all along?

 

[MinstrelJunkie]

First off, consistently pumping out around 16 articles a month, solo, is a huge effort. Great job on that! Getting the ball rolling on a first project is one of the hardest parts, so take a minute to congratulate yourself. Also, if this is all on a new site, you likely still have plenty of growth coming your way.

On scaling - if you believe in your method then absolutely spend as much money as possible. Two examples to give here:

1. Leverage. When you write an article yourself, you're putting out 1 unit of effort to create one post. With a good writing team, you can turn 1 unit of effort + money into 10, 100, or even 1,000 posts. Think of it like pushing down on a lever. With the right system, that lever can move mountains.
2. Empire Growth. If you've ever played a game like Age of Empires, it's very similar to content sites. You want to expand as fast as possible, and so you should aim to spend any available resources as soon as they come in. There's no point in preserving capital when you could be expanding your empire. This is only untrue when you start wanting/needing to take profits for yourself.

One other aspect you'll need to learn is actually managing writers. This is a skill upon itself, and it takes a long time of getting used to. You need to learn how to create briefs, implement systems, and check quality. You should learn this as soon as possible, so that you're ready to scale quickly once your budget allows.

That said, there are people out there making $30k+ per month by just writing content themselves. If you enjoy it, then you can always just hold on to the profits. But these examples are extremely rare.

 

[DunderMannen]

You're right about spending your resources right away. I still have about €2k yet to be paid out by aff network, so I can push full throttle this month.

My writer that I have on payroll every month, I plan on keeping, and he can push 25k words aka €1k/month. I will hire another for this month and double the content.

I just feel I have a long way to go, even though I'm very proud of the 200 I managed to write myself ofc. The answer is just money I guess hehe

 

[Sweely]

Have you ever considered building backlinks to your properties? Sounds like that's what could be missing.

By the way, nice to see you here as well. We've had a couple of discussions on BHW over the years.

 

[breedingsuccess]

Empire Growth. If you've ever played a game like Age of Empires, it's very similar to content sites. You want to expand as fast as possible, and so you should aim to spend any available resources as soon as they come in. There's no point in preserving capital when you could be expanding your empire. This is only untrue when you start wanting/needing to take profits for yourself.

Man, as one of my favorite games of all time, I have to say that's a great way to explain it. Holding on to resources, simply slows down your expansion! So, often in business we hold resources when they could easily be used to expand exponentially, if only we would invest them.

 

[OlliK]

Didn't pan out very good, but still I'm now sitting at a monthly income of ~600€ as of last month.

I read another concern in your question.

Scaling in business is about increasing revenue and PROFITS. Reinvesting helps to produce more revenue. However, looking at profit per effort will help you to scale profits.

You can look at 600 Euro / 200 pages, as 3 euro per month / page. Now let's say the lifetime of a page is 24 months. So your revenue from writing a page is 72 euro. That limits your costs you can invest to create the page. (in reality you want to only count pages that are aged into the search engine and measure your life time of a page, rather than estimating it)

What I'm hinting at is to think about how to make your pages more profitable in order to scale your profit rather than your revenue.