Founder Mindset with Kevin Graham artwork

Episode 13 – Doug Cunnington – Applying Project Management to Niche Sites

Founder Mindset with Kevin Graham

English - September 05, 2019 12:59 - 40 minutes - 37 MB - ★★★★★ - 1 rating
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Previous Episode: Episode 12 – Dan Norris – Serial Entrepreneur

For the final episode of Season 1, I sat down with Doug Cunnington to discuss all things Amazon Affiliate and niche sites, as well as the case study that he’s running on his site at the moment, where he’s bought an aged site and all of the work on this site is being outsourced. Sites […]

For the final episode of Season 1, I sat down with Doug Cunnington to discuss all things Amazon Affiliate and niche sites, as well as the case study that he’s running on his site at the moment, where he’s bought an aged site and all of the work on this site is being outsourced.


Sites and Resources Mentioned:

Niche Site Project
Doug.Show Podcast
Doug’s YouTube Channel
Human Proof Designs
Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg




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Transcript


Kevin Graham: Hey guys, Kevin Graham here and today on the podcast I have with me Doug Cunnington. Doug is a blogger who writes about building and operating online businesses. I first discovered him and his blog back in 2013 when he got a link from Niche Pursuits, who I was following very closely at the time when I was learning how to get started with making money online myself. So I'm super excited to have him on the show today and have a chat with him. Please welcome Doug Cunnington.

Doug Cunnington: Hey Kevin, it is a pleasure to be here and I hope the coffee is going to be kicking in here pretty soon. It's a little early in the morning, but I'm pumped to talk to you.

Kevin Graham: Yeah. I mean it's almost 9:00 at night here on my side. I've just had a massively long day. I've got like a whiskey and Coke and a bunch of water here, so I'm excited to just push through, get this amazing interview recorded and share it with our listeners next week.

Doug Cunnington: Yeah, the whiskey and Coke sounds ... It's early enough where that doesn't even sound good to me right now.

Kevin Graham: So for the listeners who might not know about you and your history and background, can you give us a brief rundown on who you are and what you do?

Doug Cunnington: Sure. Right now, I have a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel all around, Amazon affiliate marketing and some SEO. It's called Niche Site Project, if people want to check it out. And I kind of stumbled my way into making money online and internet marketing and that sort of thing. It was smart passive income. It's like the gateway drug podcast for a lot of people.

Doug Cunnington: And I accidentally found smart passive income, listened to a bunch of episodes and within, I don't know, like a month I had like a couple of terrible sites launched that completely failed. But it was a good sort of like side hobby. I wasn't making any money at the time, but it was a good, interesting sort of technical thing for me to get into outside of my day job, which at the time was management consulting.

Doug Cunnington: I did IT project management and it was a fine job through all external views. It's successful, but I don't know. It was one of the soul sucking sort of jobs that you hear about typical worker be, long hours, under appreciated and that sort of thing.

Doug Cunnington: So this online marketing stuff was a great outlet. And then over time, I sort of figured out what worked, figured out what wasn't working so well. And in 2015, I got laid off from my job and at that point I was like, "This is a chance to really try, really put effort into this online marketing stuff. And that was four years ago. So I'm doing well now and really enjoy it.

Kevin Graham: Yeah. And I was getting started around that same time of following a bunch of the stuff that Pat Flynn was talking about. He had a couple of case studies on his site as well as the stuff that Spencer from Niche Pursuits was putting out as his case studies. I had some probably equally as horrible sites. Yeah, I remember that time quite fondly. So at what point do you think it started to break through and you started to make more cash? Was that after you were laid off and went full time?

Doug Cunnington: So I had, I guess, a typical story for a lot of Internet marketers back in the day. Kevin, you're probably in the same boat where in 2013, you could actually start a site and rank it pretty quickly within six weeks to three months or so and make a lot of money.

Doug Cunnington: So within six months, I had a site that went from zero to like 6,000 a month. I was like, "I'm going to quit my job." I thought I was the smartest person ever and I really cracked the code. And it's a rite of passage really. My site was penalized that following month by Google, so I was practicing like gray hat activities, getting links basically that Google doesn't like and I got caught up in the frenzy. I think Spencer at Niche Pursuits did as well.

Doug Cunnington: I mean back in the day, even Pat Flynn was doing essentially the same stuff. We're talking about a link pyramid and link wheels and going to Fiverr and getting content that spun and all this sort of nonsense that it doesn't work nowadays or at least in the way that we were doing it back then. But it was pretty much common practice. And these very prominent bloggers currently, that's what they were doing back in the day. That's just what was done. So I got caught up in that mess.

Doug Cunnington: So that was within six months, like pretty good income and then it dropped. And I tried to relaunch and I sort of had a couple of false starts for probably a year or so. And I would launch some more sites, get penalized again. And then finally at some point, I guess it was towards the end of 2014 or maybe early 2015 I was like, "All right, I need to take a different approach here because of what I was doing isn't working so well."

Doug Cunnington: So actually at the time that I got laid off, I had some online income but not nearly enough to replace like a six figure management consulting salary. However, I knew that I could do it. Like I knew all the moving pieces and I knew ... Like I had friends that were able to do it. So I was like, "If I just put the effort in and I make sure I don't screw up too bad, I should be okay."

Doug Cunnington: So in 2015 when I got laid off, it probably took me six months to run through various business ideas where I would actually test them. So I had some service-based businesses. Productized services were quite popular, so I tried to launch something in that area. I had some course ideas that I had dabbled with in the past and, of course, the straight up affiliate site.

Doug Cunnington: So I tried too many things at once. But eventually as I prune the things that weren't working as well or activities that I just didn't enjoy working on, that's when, I guess, I distilled down what was working well and that's sort of like what the business is now.

Kevin Graham: Right. And so what's the mix today look like between your affiliate stuff and your blogging and courses and all the rest of the stuff that you do through Niche Site Project?

Doug Cunnington: It's about 50-50. So funny enough, it just sort of worked out that way. When I first started back in 2013, I launched Niche Site Project with the intent of selling a product. I was like, "I'm going to sell a product and do the affiliate marketing." It seems wise when I look back. It made everything take a little bit longer because I couldn't focus on one or the other.

Doug Cunnington: And I have some friends that they only do affiliate marketing. They're completely behind the scenes. You never heard of them and they are doing so well. They're making so much money and they're very successful. They're happy with what they're doing. And then there's some other folks that mainly they're in the public view, but they're not practitioners. They don't practice what they preach and they're more marketers.

Doug Cunnington: So anyway, I wanted to be sort of like someone who is executing and then telling the story behind it. It really follows the people that we've already mentioned. So you do interesting work like Pat Flynn and then you tell people about it, you reverse engineer it, you provide helpful frameworks and guide for other people to do the same thing and then potentially there's some affiliate offers in there.

Doug Cunnington: Additionally, I have a course and like I said, it roughly ends up being 50-50, which is a good way to diversify all the revenue from courses or the affiliate marketing portion. Non-Amazon I'll call it, is basically off of my email list. So at that point, I don't have as much risk from Google traffic, which is nice because losing your Google traffic, that organic traffic from SEO, it's really scary and it could ... Things change all the time. Every day they change. So I like having the diversification for the traffic sources.

Kevin Graham: Yeah. And as much as people like to say, "Hey, you should just go out there, get some free organic Google search traffic." It actually costs quite a bunch in terms of the content and time and all this stuff that you put into trying to rank. And then even if you do rank, like as you mentioned before, there's always that risk of potentially getting de-indexed.

Kevin Graham: So having those multiple projects going at the one time and having the email lists and things like that where you can still reach out to people and connect with people even if you have the Google search faucet turned off, it's definitely a smart way of diversifying.

Doug Cunnington: Thanks. Yeah. Like I said, I seem pretty smart right now, but I'm not sure. Maybe it was just in my head or maybe it's some sort of survivor's bias where ... I mean we all learned from someone else and they were sharing their story and I thought, "Hey, I want to do that too."

Doug Cunnington: So I'm not sure how I ended up in that position because I never ... All through my professional career, I wasn't thinking, "Hey, I really want to teach people and write more." I hated writing and like any sort of public speaking or anything like that. So definitely an interesting left turn.

Kevin Graham: Yeah. So can you tell me about a point in the business, and let's describe it as the overall mix of your Amazon stuff plus your non-Amazon stuff. Can you tell me about a point in that business where you started to get initial traction and what would you attribute that success to?

Doug Cunnington: So I'll talk about the Amazon stuff for these examples, for the most part I think, but it was actually Niche Pursuits and the initial Niche Site Project, which Spencer allowed me to use that name for my blog. I did check with him in case anyone is wondering, and he said that was fine.

Doug Cunnington: So it was interesting because my sort of initial goal was to follow along with that case study that Spencer was doing and hopefully make like $200 to $300 per month on a consistent basis. Again, this was back in 2013 so nobody try this now. But basically, I bought a bunch of backlinks and created a bunch of domains with PBN, like a PBN basically, a private blog network and then just sent a bunch of links over there.

Doug Cunnington: And I guess it was within like two months, I had already hit like, I don't know, 300 bucks. And then after that, it just escalated really quickly. So it was something like $300 and then 1,200, and then 2,800, and then 6,000. And again, that's when I thought I was the smartest person in the world and I was going to quit my job because that's good money there. And the growth curve was alarming. That is the hockey stick kind of growth that people talk about.

Doug Cunnington: So that is when the traction hit and it was super fast. So I'll go back a little bit. I will mention that those initial sites that I started ... Again, I didn't know what I was doing, so I did keyword research completely wrong. I had no business creating as many sites as I did. Kevin, you probably bought a bunch of domain names when you first started. Right? You were like, "I better lock this down. It's such a good idea." Right?

Kevin Graham: In 2013, I was launching like maybe 5 to 10 sites every month because you could just throw up these little 10 page sites and there were backlink packages. I know you are buying on Fiverr. I was buying this one package off a guy on BlackHatWorld forums.

Kevin Graham: And yeah, my process was just do some keyword research, buy the domain, buy some cheap content, build it, buy this backlink package and then move on to the next. As I said, I was cranking out like 10 of these a month. So when you're talking about buying all these domains, I know exactly what you're talking about there.

Doug Cunnington: Yeah. Once you sort of figure it out earliest at the time, again, everyone exercise caution nowadays. But yeah, I was like, "This is going to work. This is really enjoyable."

Kevin Graham: Yeah. So that was the first of his projects, right? So that was the survival knife one.

Doug Cunnington: You got it. Yup.

Kevin Graham: Around that time I thought I was so smart by going after kitchen knives. I'm like, "Yeah, it's knives, but it's kitchen knives." Nothing happened with that site.

Doug Cunnington: That's pretty funny. Actually, that case study ... I mean he taught me a lot of the mechanics, of course, but it was not very long after Spencer was sharing income reports that there were so many copycats and then negative SEO hit as well.

Doug Cunnington: That's why currently, I don't share my sites and if I do a case study, it's always under the radar for ... I think I have a fairly modest blog by the way and a modest email list. And the case studies that I do, they contribute to my livelihood. I'm doing stuff, so I have an asset. I would like to have the cashflow from it where other folks ...

Doug Cunnington: I know Spencer probably makes good money from his sites and it helps his family as well. But he sells a lot of products and software basically. He sells software that he can sell through the case study, which he has a different, I guess a little different perspective and a different way, and a different reason why he's working on the case study.

Doug Cunnington: So he may not need the revenue or if it doesn't reach great income heights, it's still successful because he's able to mention and show the value of his products. I use these products by the way. They're great. So I'll just put that in, but I never share my sites because I don't want to get the negative SEO or copycats or anyone trying to interfere with what I'm doing.

Kevin Graham: Yeah. And I think the other big difference area is when that site is so much of your livelihood. It's different compared to when it's just a specific case study site that has been set up for the purposes of making a case study. And if it gets hit, then it's not such a big deal, but yeah.

Doug Cunnington: Exactly. Exactly. And as you're just mentioning that, I'm like, I always do this, I'm like, "Maybe I should do a public case study and if it gets hit, then that's just part of the story."

Kevin Graham: Yeah. 2019 SEO, there's so much more time and money that goes into building and ranking a site than there was for 2013, 2014 SEO. It's a lot harder to just throw those resources potentially in the bin when someone comes in negative SEO to the site.

Doug Cunnington: Exactly. Yup.

Kevin Graham: To continue down these terrible waters of doom and gloom and all the rest, can you tell me about an unexpected crisis that happened in your business and how you handled it?

Doug Cunnington: So luckily, we could just follow the same storyline here. I was thinking I'm so smart. And then the following month, and it was like January 2014, I logged in to Amazon Associates to see how the revenue was doing and it was like no sales yesterday. And I was like, "Oh man, this isn't good." Checked the analytics, they reflected the same thing. And then, yeah, I then got an email about the manual penalties for ... I think I had maybe six or seven sites going at that point all in the same account under Google Webmaster Tools at the time, now Search Console. And yeah, they were all penalized.

Doug Cunnington: And I don't know if they were de-indexed, but they were just not ranked anymore. So essentially, I think a lot of people got caught up around that time as well in early 2014 and then again in the fall. But I think one good thing with my corporate career, again, as project management and I manage big multimillion dollar projects for big tier one companies and it sort of ... I guess it puts a little ice in your veins there. A little ice water through your veins.

Doug Cunnington: You can't really panic on a big project with important people. You can't freak out, take drastic measures without thinking things through, and it's pretty important to remain calm and assess the situation, look at all the data that you have available. You won't have enough. You never have enough data by the way to make a perfect decision, but if you can hopefully make better than average decision, you're okay.

Doug Cunnington: So at that point, I was just like, "All right, I need to wait and see. I'm not going to do anything drastic." Where I have seen people take drastic measures in a very short amount of time before anyone knows what's going on, especially with these recent Google updates in the last year or so in 2018, 2019.

Doug Cunnington: They're so complex spanning different niches, going I guess across different product lines and stuff like that. So no one really knows what's going on. And if you take drastic measures, you could make a mistake that is actually worse than just letting it stand.

Doug Cunnington: So anyway, I remained calm and at some point I tried to recover the site. Now unfortunately, something like 90% of the links going to that site were terrible. So I really had nothing to stand on. And nowadays, if I would give someone advice, if they really want to experiment with gray hat backlinks, the kind of links that Google doesn't really like, keep it at a lower percentage, under 25%. Because at least at that point, you still have other links that are helping your site and you could recover.

Doug Cunnington: That amount may be different for folks with more risk tolerance or less, so just go with what you think you can handle. But at that point in time, I couldn't really recover it. So I moved on, started some other sites and just chalked it up as it's a sunk cost. I learned a lot along the way and now I have like a data point on what happens if you get a penalty.

Doug Cunnington: Sometimes, I hear from people that ... Actually sort of influencers, right? They are giving advice on, say, recovering from a penalty, yet they've never experienced one. So they're only talking like hypotheticals, things that they've heard from other people, repeating what other folks say. So it does at least give me the credibility to say like, "Hey, I did that and I didn't like it. I don't want to do it anymore. And by the way, here are some things that you can maybe try. And it didn't work for me, but maybe they could work for you." That sort of thing.

Kevin Graham: Yeah. Waking up to those penalty notices from Google, they suck. I had one in 2015 and it was a site that targeted a summer related niche and it was July, so middle of summer. Woke up one morning, that site did 10K in the June. Amazon tracked to do the same or a little bit more in July. I was like, "Yeah, this site is amazing."

Kevin Graham: Wake up one morning, manual penalty, boom, earnings down to a tiny fraction of what they were before. And yeah, I'm in that same boat as you. I've tried several things on that site and wasn't able to recover it. So yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about there.

Doug Cunnington: It's so rough. Yeah. I mean, like you said, you get the email and there's not much you can do. There's not customer service that you can call and get a clear explanation. The funny thing, I had a student of mine. He walked down to ... He told me he was going to do this. He was like, "There's a Google office up the street here. I'm going to go walk over there and see if they can help me out."

Doug Cunnington: And I was like, "Google is a pretty big company, man. I'm pretty sure it's not the people there and they don't know who you are. You're not a customer. You're just some dude that you got a penalty. They're just going to tell you probably to go away or they're calling security."

Doug Cunnington: So yeah, they didn't help him. I think he got to the front desk and they listened to his story, but obviously it's not the spam team sitting at the reception counter there.

Kevin Graham: Yeah. I mean it definitely hurts when you're in those moments because you've had this site, you've put a lot of work into it, you think it's a good site, but once you get that penalty, it's gone.

Doug Cunnington: We're painting a little doom and gloom, because I've alluded to that a few times now. Any business, I believe, has similar risks. It could be a different level and everything like that, but if you have a restaurant, your supplier could change, or another big restaurant could show up. Or the traffic pattern changes, so people don't see your restaurant anymore.

Doug Cunnington: Maybe you have a healthcare company, like regulations and government rules can change. So if you're going to run your own business, if you're an entrepreneur, there are many different ways you can get kicked in the balls. So you got to pick your poison and just deal with it, understand your risk, understand the risk tolerance and all that stuff.

Kevin Graham: Yeah, I think sometimes there's constantly these shifts in pretty much every business type as you mentioned. I don't know if you've read any articles about it, but in the actual restaurant industry at the moment there are huge changes with everyone doing the on-demand food stuff like Uber Eats or DoorDash or whatever you have from where you are.

Kevin Graham: Where a lot of restaurants aren't getting sit-in customers anymore and a larger and larger percentage of their orders are the takeaways that have been delivered through these apps. So there's always constant changing every sort of business. Moving on to something slightly more positive. So what's one thing about your business that makes you excited today?

Doug Cunnington: Right now, I am working on a pretty interesting case study and I didn't clear any of this with you, Kevin, earlier, so I won't mention any of the companies, but I think they're our buddies. Maybe at the end, I can give you notes so you can hook it up properly.

Doug Cunnington: But I'm doing this case study right now where I've purchased the premade site and I am outsourcing all of the activities. So it's pretty cool because, number one, I'm kind of a do it yourselfer. I started this as a side hobby and then basically I wanted to keep the expenses low.

Doug Cunnington: I wasn't throwing away a lot of money. I was married or I am married now, but when I started, I was married and I'm like, "Hi, I can't just spend all this money and have essentially nothing to show for it." And I didn't know if I was confident in the business model.

Doug Cunnington: However, as I've progressed through blogging and I have talked to more people, there's a lot of folks on YouTube who ... They're very active in comments and when I do live streams, they ask a lot of questions. People want to outsource. There's a lot of professionals out there or folks that are near retirement and they have money to spend but not so much time. A lot of IT directors, IT vice presidents, a lot of technical folks out there. So they have good salaries. They're very busy with their job and they want to outsource all this stuff.

Doug Cunnington: So I was thinking, "Hey, that would be a great case study." There's plenty of services that can do build the site, for example. There are services that can do keyword research. They can write the content for you. They could publish it on your blog. And, of course, there are link-building services that do guest posting, which is a little bit closer to what Google wants.

Doug Cunnington: So I'm pumped because number one, it's something I haven't tried before. In fact, for many years, I was sort of against these done for you sites because I felt like a lot of beginners would purchase a done for you site that wouldn't know what to do. And they ended up spending a lot of money. And they have a sour taste in their mouth from online marketing and people selling stuff online, which as you know, there's a lot of charlatans. There's a lot of scammers out there in the same market, like selling the same sort of similar things that I try to sell with courses or just ideas about making money online.

Doug Cunnington: So it's a weird area to be in. And I lost my train of thought there, but essentially, this case study is very cool because it addresses this piece of the audience, folks that want to get into it and they know the moving pieces, but they don't have enough time to execute and they just need to work with companies and have a framework and that's what the goal is. Right?

Doug Cunnington: So I want to give someone a blueprint. "Hey, if you work with these companies or similar ones, then you'll probably be in pretty good shape." And I'm sharing, not the site, but I'm sharing the process, the P&L sheets, all the details and why I'm doing them along the way.

Kevin Graham: Yeah. And I'm on your email list. I'm 100% quite comfortable with you saying the various providers in there. I know that the site you purchased there was from Human Proof Designs. Tom, the former owner, a good friend of the podcast, and from what I've seen, Brian, the new owner, is doing some really good stuff over there as well. So yeah, definitely a trusted name in this space. So how's that case study coming along?

Doug Cunnington: Great so far. So right now, we're recording in the middle, sort of late August in 2019 and I bought the site in the first week or so of June. So I've had it in my possession for a couple of months. Fingers crossed. I think it's going to hit $100 from Amazon this month and I could tell you that ...

Doug Cunnington: Well, since you're on the email list, Kevin, you already know, but for the other people that don't, I went on vacation for about a month. And while I was gone, 50 articles were published. My VA was sort of working with the content company that I selected to work with here. So all this stuff was going on in the background. And in my opinion, that's perfect.

Doug Cunnington: I mean, I went on vacation, but for a business person who has a family, they got a demanding job. They may not be able to babysit a site. And honestly, I haven't even read any of the content. That's how disconnected I am from it. I've just set up the services to have things going on in the background and eventually I will read the content and go in and probably tweak a couple things here and there.

Doug Cunnington: But one of my VA's, she is a writer. She has an English degree. So when the content was coming in, she's looking at it a lot more harshly than I would because she has that background. Whenever I was checking the content, I kind of read the first couple sentences and then just publish it. I'm not paying too much attention, but I hired someone better than me at the tasks that she needs to do. So yeah, it's going great. And I think there's a lot of traction as far as interest for this kind of a case study.

Kevin Graham: Yeah. So did you have a fixed budget for the project going in? And if so, what was it?

Doug Cunnington: So roughly around 10K to 15K is what I was sort of assuming in the first six months or so. And I blew through most of the budget before I even went on vacation. So within the first probably month, I bought the site. So I bought an aged site from Human Proof. Those are going to be more expensive, but essentially looked at how many keywords, the different sites were ranking for. I made my selection that way. And then it turned out that, that was one of the more expensive sites in the 5,000 range.

Doug Cunnington: And I ordered 50 articles and that was another ... I think it was like 4,400, something like that. So at that point, you're right around 10K. I bought a handful of links. I think at this point, I only have about four or five. Again, those are relatively expensive. I'm working with a couple of different companies, high end services.

Doug Cunnington: So part of this is ... Again, I'm assuming folks that want to do this have a budget and they don't want to get garbage back. So I'm not trying to get good deals. That sounds weird to say that. I'm trying to get the best quality that looks like it will have a good ROI. I'm not trying to save money, I'm trying to get a good ROI.

Kevin Graham: Yeah, and when you're in that situation, you've kind of ... 10K to 15K budget is probably slightly too low to go out and buy something that's earning a reasonable amount of money anyways, so your better investment would be to do what you're doing there.

Kevin Graham: And the fact that you've been able to go on holiday for a month and treat it like, "Yeah, I look at this for maybe two hours on a Sunday or something," which is exactly what someone working full-time probably have the time to do. It's been a great way for you to mimic that, so that's cool.

Doug Cunnington: Thanks. Yeah, I hope it's going to turn out well. The cool part, like behind the scenes is ... I mean, again, I hope, fingers crossed that it's going to work out okay. But if something goes wrong because I have a platform to talk about it, it's always a story.

Doug Cunnington: So even if something kind of explodes and things don't turn out like I hoped, people were interested in the story of the failure or how I dealt with the failure. And it's very interesting to, I guess, be a little more humble and I guess vulnerable, which I feel like now it's a therapy session. So I'll pull back up here basically.

Doug Cunnington: Yeah, like interesting stuff can happen and it's all part of the story and people enjoy that. I know I enjoy it and sometimes I don't pay attention to a couple of the emails that I get from the few email lists that I'm on. But if there's some sort of a negative subject line or something that sounds a little more interesting ... I mean I'm a person like anybody else. I want to go check out that story like what happened. Can I learn from their mistake? Like that sort of thing.

Kevin Graham: Yeah. And on the counter like, "Hey, if this goes really well, I can see exactly where you're going to put your next 150K is doing this process 10 times over again." So it's great from the outside, for me to just be able to sit there and say, "Hey, how are our aged sites doing and how are public guest posts services doing?" And yeah, it's super repeatable when all the providers are laid out the way that you are.

Kevin Graham: So moving on to the second and last segment here. What books do you think had the biggest impact on you in deciding to become an entrepreneur? Now, as well, I'm just going to put it in here. You're an Amazon Associates guy. This is my attempt to make some money off this podcast as an Amazon associate. So far, I've made a grand total of 42 cents, but I'm hoping soon it's going to crack through further.

Doug Cunnington: All right. Well, my first answer was going to be basically none, because it was smart passive income. And then I listened to 50, 60 episodes, however many I can get my hands on. And then I went branching off and listened to a bunch of other folks.

Doug Cunnington: But after I got rolling, I'll tell you a couple of books that I really enjoy just so Kevin can make a little money here. Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg and The Power of Habit also by Charles Duhigg. Excellent books. He is a journalist. And the way he covers these sort of dryer topics of habits and productivity, super interesting.

Doug Cunnington: So he'll get a storyline, something that you would see in sort of a personal interest, human interest story in a newspaper, and he will talk about that story. Then he'll apply these scientific journal studies and different research to explain what was happening. And then, of course, you get some conclusion.

Doug Cunnington: I really like those types of books versus a softer book. So anyway, Charles Duhigg, Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better. And then I also like Tim Ferriss' books. So I got into those a little bit later, but I have all of his books now.

Kevin Graham: Yeah. And of authors that get mentioned during the segment, Tim Ferriss constantly comes up. Like every two, three weeks, there's someone recommending 4-Hour Workweek. So if you haven't read or listen to 4-Hour Workweek, go give it a read. Every one always says that it's 10, 12 whatever years on now, some of the stuff is a bit out of date in terms of the tactics or specific tools but the overall thought patterns and tactics can work. So yeah.

Kevin Graham: Before we wrap up here, are there any parting shots, things that I should have asked you that I didn't or things you'd like to share with our listeners?

Doug Cunnington: If people haven't gotten started yet, I definitely recommend just do anything. Whatever you have, like maybe a little bit of interest in, there's tons of different business models. I do Amazon Associates. Some other people like drop shipping. Or maybe you want to do Amazon FBA and private label something.

Doug Cunnington: It doesn't really matter. You could do Kindle Publishing, pick something. All of them can work and you probably can do each of them. You can't do all of them at the same time though. You need to pick something and stick with it long enough.

Doug Cunnington: What definitely does not work is if you try Amazon associate marketing for a little while, say six weeks, it doesn't work. Then you hop over to a drop shipping and you try this business model. And then you hop over to the Kindle Publishing and then everything fails.

Doug Cunnington: Number one, you're wasting a lot of time and money, but you also feel bad because you're failing and you see all these success stories over and over again. So it's really important that you spend the time to learn from those mistakes so that you're not a beginner in everything that you try.

Doug Cunnington: Sure, there's a couple things to transfer here and there, but there's really something to sticking with I guess a path for long enough so that you can learn from the mistakes. You can iterate and get better at what you're trying to do.

Doug Cunnington: I've stuck with Amazon Associates and I think that I'm getting better and better and refining the whole process again and again through the iteration. And then I've taught a lot of people and I think that reinforced it even more. So in order to teach, you have to really understand and dissect the process. And if you could teach someone and then they can do it, you probably know it pretty well.

Doug Cunnington: And then through that, I can really appreciate the distilling down and refining the process, sticking with something. So all tied in a bow here, pick something, stick with it for long enough. Don't switch around too much. Unsubscribed from some of those email lists. Everyone is trying to sell you something. I'm going to try and sell you something. You can get value, but don't get distracted. Don't feel like you're going to miss out. You could try everything, but you can't try it all at once.

Kevin Graham: Right. So for people who do want to be sold to by you, or maybe just learn some really cool stuff, where can they connect with you, get on your email list and follow you on all the various platforms?

Doug Cunnington: You can go to nichesiteproject.com. You can click the green button, enter your name and email. I'll send you a lot of cool templates and then I'll send you some valuable stuff and eventually I'll try and sell you a course, which I hope you check it out. It's called Five Figure Niche Site.

Doug Cunnington: And I do have a podcast called The Doug Show. It's just a Doug.Show. It's available on the other, like all the directories out there and I do a lot of shows on this aged site case study that's sort of getting a lot of attention and traction and stuff like that.

Doug Cunnington: And if you dig that stuff then you should check out the YouTube channel where I also publish other content. It's not always the same exact content, so you got to follow me in different places. So nichesiteproject.com, that's sort of the home and you can get to everything else from there.

Kevin Graham: Awesome. Well, I'll include the link to nichesiteproject.com as well as direct links into your podcast and YouTube and all the other spots that you mentioned there in the show notes.

Kevin Graham: Doug, it's been great having you on the show. Thanks so much for getting up super early where you are and to be able to chat with me super late where I am here. It's been great fun.

Doug Cunnington: Thanks Kevin. I really appreciate it.

Kevin Graham: Bye now.





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"text": "Kevin Graham: Hey guys, Kevin Graham here and today on the podcast I have with me Doug Cunnington. Doug is a blogger who writes about building and operating online businesses. I first discovered him and his blog back in 2013 when he got a link from Niche Pursuits, who I was following very closely at the time when I was learning how to get started with making money online myself. So I'm super excited to have him on the show today and have a chat with him. Please welcome Doug Cunnington.
Doug Cunnington: Hey Kevin, it is a pleasure to be here and I hope the coffee is going to be kicking in here pretty soon. It's a little early in the morning, but I'm pumped to talk to you.
Kevin Graham: Yeah. I mean it's almost 9:00 at night here on my side. I've just had a massively long day. I've got like a whiskey and Coke and a bunch of water here, so I'm excited to just push through, get this amazing interview recorded and share it with our listeners next week.
Doug Cunnington: Yeah, the whiskey and Coke sounds ... It's early enough where that doesn't even sound good to me right now.
Kevin Graham: So for the listeners who might not know about you and your history and background, can you give us a brief rundown on who you are and what you do?
Doug Cunnington: Sure. Right now, I have a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel all around, Amazon affiliate marketing and some SEO. It's called Niche Site Project, if people want to check it out. And I kind of stumbled my way into making money online and internet marketing and that sort of thing. It was smart passive income. It's like the gateway drug podcast for a lot of people.
Doug Cunnington: And I accidentally found smart passive income, listened to a bunch of episodes and within, I don't know, like a month I had like a couple of terrible sites launched that completely failed. But it was a good sort of like side hobby. I wasn't making any money at the time, but it was a good, interesting sort of technical thing for me to get into outside of my day job, which at the time was management consulting.
Doug Cunnington: I did IT project management and it was a fine job through all external views. It's successful, but I don't know. It was one of the soul sucking sort of jobs that you hear about typical worker be, long hours, under appreciated and that sort of thing.
Doug Cunnington: So this online marketing stuff was a great outlet. And then over time, I sort of figured out what worked, figured out what wasn't working so well. And in 2015, I got laid off from my job and at that point I was like, "This is a chance to really try, really put effort into this online marketing stuff. And that was four years ago. So I'm doing well now and really enjoy it.
Kevin Graham: Yeah. And I was getting started around that same time of following a bunch of the stuff that Pat Flynn was talking about. He had a couple of case studies on his site as well as the stuff that Spencer from Niche Pursuits was putting out as his case studies. I had some probably equally as horrible sites. Yeah, I remember that time quite fondly. So at what point do you think it started to break through and you started to make more cash? Was that after you were laid off and went full time?
Doug Cunnington: So I had, I guess, a typical story for a lot of Internet marketers back in the day. Kevin, you're probably in the same boat where in 2013, you could actually start a site and rank it pretty quickly within six weeks to three months or so and make a lot of money.
Doug Cunnington: So within six months, I had a site that went from zero to like 6,000 a month. I was like, "I'm going to quit my job." I thought I was the smartest person ever and I really cracked the code. And it's a rite of passage really. My site was penalized that following month by Google, so I was practicing like gray hat activities, getting links basically that Google doesn't like and I got caught up in the frenzy. I think Spencer at Niche Pursuits did as well.
Doug Cunnington: I mean back in the day, even Pat Flynn was doing essentially the same stuff. We're talking about a link pyramid and link wheels and going to Fiverr and getting content that spun and all this sort of nonsense that it doesn't work nowadays or at least in the way that we were doing it back then. But it was pretty much common practice. And these very prominent bloggers currently, that's what they were doing back in the day. That's just what was done. So I got caught up in that mess.
Doug Cunnington: So that was within six months, like pretty good income and then it dropped. And I tried to relaunch and I sort of had a couple of false starts for probably a year or so. And I would launch some more sites, get penalized again. And then finally at some point, I guess it was towards the end of 2014 or maybe early 2015 I was like, "All right, I need to take a different approach here because of what I was doing isn't working so well."
Doug Cunnington: So actually at the time that I got laid off, I had some online income but not nearly enough to replace like a six figure management consulting salary. However, I knew that I could do it. Like I knew all the moving pieces and I knew ... Like I had friends that were able to do it. So I was like, "If I just put the effort in and I make sure I don't screw up too bad, I should be okay."
Doug Cunnington: So in 2015 when I got laid off, it probably took me six months to run through various business ideas where I would actually test them. So I had some service-based businesses. Productized services were quite popular, so I tried to launch something in that area. I had some course ideas that I had dabbled with in the past and, of course, the straight up affiliate site.
Doug Cunnington: So I tried too many things at once. But eventually as I prune the things that weren't working as well or activities that I just didn't enjoy working on, that's when, I guess, I distilled down what was working well and that's sort of like what the business is now.
Kevin Graham: Right. And so what's the mix today look like between your affiliate stuff and your blogging and courses and all the rest of the stuff that you do through Niche Site Project?
Doug Cunnington: It's about 50-50. So funny enough, it just sort of worked out that way. When I first started back in 2013, I launched Niche Site Project with the intent of selling a product. I was like, "I'm going to sell a product and do the affiliate marketing." It seems wise when I look back. It made everything take a little bit longer because I couldn't focus on one or the other.
Doug Cunnington: And I have some friends that they only do affiliate marketing. They're completely behind the scenes. You never heard of them and they are doing so well. They're making so much money and they're very successful. They're happy with what they're doing. And then there's some other folks that mainly they're in the public view, but they're not practitioners. They don't practice what they preach and they're more marketers.
Doug Cunnington: So anyway, I wanted to be sort of like someone who is executing and then telling the story behind it. It really follows the people that we've already mentioned. So you do interesting work like Pat Flynn and then you tell people about it, you reverse engineer it, you provide helpful frameworks and guide for other people to do the same thing and then potentially there's some affiliate offers in there.
Doug Cunnington: Additionally, I have a course and like I said, it roughly ends up being 50-50, which is a good way to diversify all the revenue from courses or the affiliate marketing portion. Non-Amazon I'll call it, is basically off of my email list. So at that point, I don't have as much risk from Google traffic, which is nice because losing your Google traffic, that organic traffic from SEO, it's really scary and it could ... Things change all the time. Every day they change. So I like having the diversification for the traffic sources.
Kevin Graham: Yeah. And as much as people like to say, "Hey, you should just go out there, get some free organic Google search traffic." It actually costs quite a bunch in terms of the content and time and all this stuff that you put into trying to rank. And then even if you do rank, like as you mentioned before, there's always that risk of potentially getting de-indexed.
Kevin Graham: So having those multiple projects going at the one time and having the email lists and things like that where you can still reach out to people and connect with people even if you have the Google search faucet turned off, it's definitely a smart way of diversifying.
Doug Cunnington: Thanks. Yeah. Like I said, I seem pretty smart right now, but I'm not sure. Maybe it was just in my head or maybe it's some sort of survivor's bias where ... I mean we all learned from someone else and they were sharing their story and I thought, "Hey, I want to do that too."
Doug Cunnington: So I'm not sure how I ended up in that position because I never ... All through my professional career, I wasn't thinking, "Hey, I really want to teach people and write more." I hated writing and like any sort of public speaking or anything like that. So definitely an interesting left turn.
Kevin Graham: Yeah. So can you tell me about a point in the business, and let's describe it as the overall mix of your Amazon stuff plus your non-Amazon stuff. Can you tell me about a point in that business where you started to get initial traction and what would you attribute that success to?
Doug Cunnington: So I'll talk about the Amazon stuff for these examples, for the most part I think, but it was actually Niche Pursuits and the initial Niche Site Project, which Spencer allowed me to use that name for my blog. I did check with him in case anyone is wondering, and he said that was fine.
Doug Cunnington: So it was interesting because my sort of initial goal was to follow along with that case study that Spencer was doing and hopefully make like $200 to $300 per month on a consistent basis. Again, this was back in 2013 so nobody try this now. But basically, I bought a bunch of backlinks and created a bunch of domains with PBN, like a PBN basically, a private blog network and then just sent a bunch of links over there.
Doug Cunnington: And I guess it was within like two months, I had already hit like, I don't know, 300 bucks. And then after that, it just escalated really quickly. So it was something like $300 and then 1,200, and then 2,800, and then 6,000. And again, that's when I thought I was the smartest person in the world and I was going to quit my job because that's good money there. And the growth curve was alarming. That is the hockey stick kind of growth that people talk about.
Doug Cunnington: So that is when the traction hit and it was super fast. So I'll go back a little bit. I will mention that those initial sites that I started ... Again, I didn't know what I was doing, so I did keyword research completely wrong. I had no business creating as many sites as I did. Kevin, you probably bought a bunch of domain names when you first started. Right? You were like, "I better lock this down. It's such a good idea." Right?
Kevin Graham: In 2013, I was launching like maybe 5 to 10 sites every month because you could just throw up these little 10 page sites and there were backlink packages. I know you are buying on Fiverr. I was buying this one package off a guy on BlackHatWorld forums.
Kevin Graham: And yeah, my process was just do some keyword research, buy the domain, buy some cheap content, build it, buy this backlink package and then move on to the next. As I said, I was cranking out like 10 of these a month. So when you're talking about buying all these domains, I know exactly what you're talking about there.
Doug Cunnington: Yeah. Once you sort of figure it out earliest at the time, again, everyone exercise caution nowadays. But yeah, I was like, "This is going to work. This is really enjoyable."
Kevin Graham: Yeah. So that was the first of his projects, right? So that was the survival knife one.
Doug Cunnington: You got it. Yup.
Kevin Graham: Around that time I thought I was so smart by going after kitchen knives. I'm like, "Yeah, it's knives, but it's kitchen knives." Nothing happened with that site.
Doug Cunnington: That's pretty funny. Actually, that case study ... I mean he taught me a lot of the mechanics, of course, but it was not very long after Spencer was sharing income reports that there were so many copycats and then negative SEO hit as well.
Doug Cunnington: That's why currently, I don't share my sites and if I do a case study, it's always under the radar for ... I think I have a fairly modest blog by the way and a modest email list. And the case studies that I do, they contribute to my livelihood. I'm doing stuff, so I have an asset. I would like to have the cashflow from it where other folks ...
Doug Cunnington: I know Spencer probably makes good money from his sites and it helps his family as well. But he sells a lot of products and software basically. He sells software that he can sell through the case study, which he has a different, I guess a little different perspective and a different way, and a different reason why he's working on the case study.
Doug Cunnington: So he may not need the revenue or if it doesn't reach great income heights, it's still successful because he's able to mention and show the value of his products. I use these products by the way. They're great. So I'll just put that in, but I never share my sites because I don't want to get the negative SEO or copycats or anyone trying to interfere with what I'm doing.
Kevin Graham: Yeah. And I think the other big difference area is when that site is so much of your livelihood. It's different compared to when it's just a specific case study site that has been set up for the purposes of making a case study. And if it gets hit, then it's not such a big deal, but yeah.
Doug Cunnington: Exactly. Exactly. And as you're just mentioning that, I'm like, I always do this, I'm like, "Maybe I should do a public case study and if it gets hit, then that's just part of the story."
Kevin Graham: Yeah. 2019 SEO, there's so much more time and money that goes into building and ranking a site than there was for 2013, 2014 SEO. It's a lot harder to just throw those resources potentially in the bin when someone comes in negative SEO to the site.
Doug Cunnington: Exactly. Yup.
Kevin Graham: To continue down these terrible waters of doom and gloom and all the rest, can you tell me about an unexpected crisis that happened in your business and how you handled it?
Doug Cunnington: So luckily, we could just follow the same storyline here. I was thinking I'm so smart. And then the following month, and it was like January 2014, I logged in to Amazon Associates to see how the revenue was doing and it was like no sales yesterday. And I was like, "Oh man, this isn't good." Checked the analytics, they reflected the same thing. And then, yeah, I then got an email about the manual penalties for ... I think I had maybe six or seven sites going at that point all in the same account under Google Webmaster Tools at the time, now Search Console. And yeah, they were all penalized.
Doug Cunnington: And I don't know if they were de-indexed, but they were just not ranked anymore. So essentially, I think a lot of people got caught up around that time as well in early 2014 and then again in the fall. But I think one good thing with my corporate career, again, as project management and I manage big multimillion dollar projects for big tier one companies and it sort of ... I guess it puts a little ice in your veins there. A little ice water through your veins.
Doug Cunnington: You can't really panic on a big project with important people. You can't freak out, take drastic measures without thinking things through, and it's pretty important to remain calm and assess the situation, look at all the data that you have available. You won't have enough. You never have enough data by the way to make a perfect decision, but if you can hopefully make better than average decision, you're okay.
Doug Cunnington: So at that point, I was just like, "All right, I need to wait and see. I'm not going to do anything drastic." Where I have seen people take drastic measures in a very short amount of time before anyone knows what's going on, especially with these recent Google updates in the last year or so in 2018, 2019.
Doug Cunnington: They're so complex spanning different niches, going I guess across different product lines and stuff like that. So no one really knows what's going on. And if you take drastic measures, you could make a mistake that is actually worse than just letting it stand.
Doug Cunnington: So anyway, I remained calm and at some point I tried to recover the site. Now unfortunately, something like 90% of the links going to that site were terrible. So I really had nothing to stand on. And nowadays, if I would give someone advice, if they really want to experiment with gray hat backlinks, the kind of links that Google doesn't really like, keep it at a lower percentage, under 25%. Because at least at that point, you still have other links that are helping your site and you could recover.
Doug Cunnington: That amount may be different for folks with more risk tolerance or less, so just go with what you think you can handle. But at that point in time, I couldn't really recover it. So I moved on, started some other sites and just chalked it up as it's a sunk cost. I learned a lot along the way and now I have like a data point on what happens if you get a penalty.
Doug Cunnington: Sometimes, I hear from people that ... Actually sort of influencers, right? They are giving advice on, say, recovering from a penalty, yet they've never experienced one. So they're only talking like hypotheticals, things that they've heard from other people, repeating what other folks say. So it does at least give me the credibility to say like, "Hey, I did that and I didn't like it. I don't want to do it anymore. And by the way, here are some things that you can maybe try. And it didn't work for me, but maybe they could work for you." That sort of thing.
Kevin Graham: Yeah. Waking up to those penalty notices from Google, they suck. I had one in 2015 and it was a site that targeted a summer related niche and it was July, so middle of summer. Woke up one morning, that site did 10K in the June. Amazon tracked to do the same or a little bit more in July. I was like, "Yeah, this site is amazing."
Kevin Graham: Wake up one morning, manual penalty, boom, earnings down to a tiny fraction of what they were before. And yeah, I'm in that same boat as you. I've tried several things on that site and wasn't able to recover it. So yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about there.
Doug Cunnington: It's so rough. Yeah. I mean, like you said, you get the email and there's not much you can do. There's not customer service that you can call and get a clear explanation. The funny thing, I had a student of mine. He walked down to ... He told me he was going to do this. He was like, "There's a Google office up the street here. I'm going to go walk over there and see if they can help me out."
Doug Cunnington: And I was like, "Google is a pretty big company, man. I'm pretty sure it's not the people there and they don't know who you are. You're not a customer. You're just some dude that you got a penalty. They're just going to tell you probably to go away or they're calling security."
Doug Cunnington: So yeah, they didn't help him. I think he got to the front desk and they listened to his story, but obviously it's not the spam team sitting at the reception counter there.
Kevin Graham: Yeah. I mean it definitely hurts when you're in those moments because you've had this site, you've put a lot of work into it, you think it's a good site, but once you get that penalty, it's gone.
Doug Cunnington: We're painting a little doom and gloom, because I've alluded to that a few times now. Any business, I believe, has similar risks. It could be a different level and everything like that, but if you have a restaurant, your supplier could change, or another big restaurant could show up. Or the traffic pattern changes, so people don't see your restaurant anymore.
Doug Cunnington: Maybe you have a healthcare company, like regulations and government rules can change. So if you're going to run your own business, if you're an entrepreneur, there are many different ways you can get kicked in the balls. So you got to pick your poison and just deal with it, understand your risk, understand the risk tolerance and all that stuff.
Kevin Graham: Yeah, I think sometimes there's constantly these shifts in pretty much every business type as you mentioned. I don't know if you've read any articles about it, but in the actual restaurant industry at the moment there are huge changes with everyone doing the on-demand food stuff like Uber Eats or DoorDash or whatever you have from where you are.
Kevin Graham: Where a lot of restaurants aren't getting sit-in customers anymore and a larger and larger percentage of their orders are the takeaways that have been delivered through these apps. So there's always constant changing every sort of business. Moving on to something slightly more positive. So what's one thing about your business that makes you excited today?
Doug Cunnington: Right now, I am working on a pretty interesting case study and I didn't clear any of this with you, Kevin, earlier, so I won't mention any of the companies, but I think they're our buddies. Maybe at the end, I can give you notes so you can hook it up properly.
Doug Cunnington: But I'm doing this case study right now where I've purchased the premade site and I am outsourcing all of the activities. So it's pretty cool because, number one, I'm kind of a do it yourselfer. I started this as a side hobby and then basically I wanted to keep the expenses low.
Doug Cunnington: I wasn't throwing away a lot of money. I was married or I am married now, but when I started, I was married and I'm like, "Hi, I can't just spend all this money and have essentially nothing to show for it." And I didn't know if I was confident in the business model.
Doug Cunnington: However, as I've progressed through blogging and I have talked to more people, there's a lot of folks on YouTube who ... They're very active in comments and when I do live streams, they ask a lot of questions. People want to outsource. There's a lot of professionals out there or folks that are near retirement and they have money to spend but not so much time. A lot of IT directors, IT vice presidents, a lot of technical folks out there. So they have good salaries. They're very busy with their job and they want to outsource all this stuff.
Doug Cunnington: So I was thinking, "Hey, that would be a great case study." There's plenty of services that can do build the site, for example. There are services that can do keyword research. They can write the content for you. They could publish it on your blog. And, of course, there are link-building services that do guest posting, which is a little bit closer to what Google wants.
Doug Cunnington: So I'm pumped because number one, it's something I haven't tried before. In fact, for many years, I was sort of against these done for you sites because I felt like a lot of beginners would purchase a done for you site that wouldn't know what to do. And they ended up spending a lot of money. And they have a sour taste in their mouth from online marketing and people selling stuff online, which as you know, there's a lot of charlatans. There's a lot of scammers out there in the same market, like selling the same sort of similar things that I try to sell with courses or just ideas about making money online.
Doug Cunnington: So it's a weird area to be in. And I lost my train of thought there, but essentially, this case study is very cool because it addresses this piece of the audience, folks that want to get into it and they know the moving pieces, but they don't have enough time to execute and they just need to work with companies and have a framework and that's what the goal is. Right?
Doug Cunnington: So I want to give someone a blueprint. "Hey, if you work with these companies or similar ones, then you'll probably be in pretty good shape." And I'm sharing, not the site, but I'm sharing the process, the P&L sheets, all the details and why I'm doing them along the way.
Kevin Graham: Yeah. And I'm on your email list. I'm 100% quite comfortable with you saying the various providers in there. I know that the site you purchased there was from Human Proof Designs. Tom, the former owner, a good friend of the podcast, and from what I've seen, Brian, the new owner, is doing some really good stuff over there as well. So yeah, definitely a trusted name in this space. So how's that case study coming along?
Doug Cunnington: Great so far. So right now, we're recording in the middle, sort of late August in 2019 and I bought the site in the first week or so of June. So I've had it in my possession for a couple of months. Fingers crossed. I think it's going to hit $100 from Amazon this month and I could tell you that ...
Doug Cunnington: Well, since you're on the email list, Kevin, you already know, but for the other people that don't, I went on vacation for about a month. And while I was gone, 50 articles were published. My VA was sort of working with the content company that I selected to work with here. So all this stuff was going on in the background. And in my opinion, that's perfect.
Doug Cunnington: I mean, I went on vacation, but for a business person who has a family, they got a demanding job. They may not be able to babysit a site. And honestly, I haven't even read any of the content. That's how disconnected I am from it. I've just set up the services to have things going on in the background and eventually I will read the content and go in and probably tweak a couple things here and there.
Doug Cunnington: But one of my VA's, she is a writer. She has an English degree. So when the content was coming in, she's looking at it a lot more harshly than I would because she has that background. Whenever I was checking the content, I kind of read the first couple sentences and then just publish it. I'm not paying too much attention, but I hired someone better than me at the tasks that she needs to do. So yeah, it's going great. And I think there's a lot of traction as far as interest for this kind of a case study.
Kevin Graham: Yeah. So did you have a fixed budget for the project going in? And if so, what was it?
Doug Cunnington: So roughly around 10K to 15K is what I was sort of assuming in the first six months or so. And I blew through most of the budget before I even went on vacation. So within the first probably month, I bought the site. So I bought an aged site from Human Proof. Those are going to be more expensive, but essentially looked at how many keywords, the different sites were ranking for. I made my selection that way. And then it turned out that, that was one of the more expensive sites in the 5,000 range.
Doug Cunnington: And I ordered 50 articles and that was another ... I think it was like 4,400, something like that. So at that point, you're right around 10K. I bought a handful of links. I think at this point, I only have about four or five. Again, those are relatively expensive. I'm working with a couple of different companies, high end services.
Doug Cunnington: So part of this is ... Again, I'm assuming folks that want to do this have a budget and they don't want to get garbage back. So I'm not trying to get good deals. That sounds weird to say that. I'm trying to get the best quality that looks like it will have a good ROI. I'm not trying to save money, I'm trying to get a good ROI.
Kevin Graham: Yeah, and when you're in that situation, you've kind of ... 10K to 15K budget is probably slightly too low to go out and buy something that's earning a reasonable amount of money anyways, so your better investment would be to do what you're doing there.
Kevin Graham: And the fact that you've been able to go on holiday for a month and treat it like, "Yeah, I look at this for maybe two hours on a Sunday or something," which is exactly what someone working full-time probably have the time to do. It's been a great way for you to mimic that, so that's cool.
Doug Cunnington: Thanks. Yeah, I hope it's going to turn out well. The cool part, like behind the scenes is ... I mean, again, I hope, fingers crossed that it's going to work out okay. But if something goes wrong because I have a platform to talk about it, it's always a story.
Doug Cunnington: So even if something kind of explodes and things don't turn out like I hoped, people were interested in the story of the failure or how I dealt with the failure. And it's very interesting to, I guess, be a little more humble and I guess vulnerable, which I feel like now it's a therapy session. So I'll pull back up here basically.
Doug Cunnington: Yeah, like interesting stuff can happen and it's all part of the story and people enjoy that. I know I enjoy it and sometimes I don't pay attention to a couple of the emails that I get from the few email lists that I'm on. But if there's some sort of a negative subject line or something that sounds a little more interesting ... I mean I'm a person like anybody else. I want to go check out that story like what happened. Can I learn from their mistake? Like that sort of thing.
Kevin Graham: Yeah. And on the counter like, "Hey, if this goes really well, I can see exactly where you're going to put your next 150K is doing this process 10 times over again." So it's great from the outside, for me to just be able to sit there and say, "Hey, how are our aged sites doing and how are public guest posts services doing?" And yeah, it's super repeatable when all the providers are laid out the way that you are.
Kevin Graham: So moving on to the second and last segment here. What books do you think had the biggest impact on you in deciding to become an entrepreneur? Now, as well, I'm just going to put it in here. You're an Amazon Associates guy. This is my attempt to make some money off this podcast as an Amazon associate. So far, I've made a grand total of 42 cents, but I'm hoping soon it's going to crack through further.
Doug Cunnington: All right. Well, my first answer was going to be basically none, because it was smart passive income. And then I listened to 50, 60 episodes, however many I can get my hands on. And then I went branching off and listened to a bunch of other folks.
Doug Cunnington: But after I got rolling, I'll tell you a couple of books that I really enjoy just so Kevin can make a little money here. Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg and The Power of Habit also by Charles Duhigg. Excellent books. He is a journalist. And the way he covers these sort of dryer topics of habits and productivity, super interesting.
Doug Cunnington: So he'll get a storyline, something that you would see in sort of a personal interest, human interest story in a newspaper, and he will talk about that story. Then he'll apply these scientific journal studies and different research to explain what was happening. And then, of course, you get some conclusion.
Doug Cunnington: I really like those types of books versus a softer book. So anyway, Charles Duhigg, Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better. And then I also like Tim Ferriss' books. So I got into those a little bit later, but I have all of his books now.
Kevin Graham: Yeah. And of authors that get mentioned during the segment, Tim Ferriss constantly comes up. Like every two, three weeks, there's someone recommending 4-Hour Workweek. So if you haven't read or listen to 4-Hour Workweek, go give it a read. Every one always says that it's 10, 12 whatever years on now, some of the stuff is a bit out of date in terms of the tactics or specific tools but the overall thought patterns and tactics can work. So yeah.
Kevin Graham: Before we wrap up here, are there any parting shots, things that I should have asked you that I didn't or things you'd like to share with our listeners?
Doug Cunnington: If people haven't gotten started yet, I definitely recommend just do anything. Whatever you have, like maybe a little bit of interest in, there's tons of different business models. I do Amazon Associates. Some other people like drop shipping. Or maybe you want to do Amazon FBA and private label something.
Doug Cunnington: It doesn't really matter. You could do Kindle Publishing, pick something. All of them can work and you probably can do each of them. You can't do all of them at the same time though. You need to pick something and stick with it long enough.
Doug Cunnington: What definitely does not work is if you try Amazon associate marketing for a little while, say six weeks, it doesn't work. Then you hop over to a drop shipping and you try this business model. And then you hop over to the Kindle Publishing and then everything fails.
Doug Cunnington: Number one, you're wasting a lot of time and money, but you also feel bad because you're failing and you see all these success stories over and over again. So it's really important that you spend the time to learn from those mistakes so that you're not a beginner in everything that you try.
Doug Cunnington: Sure, there's a couple things to transfer here and there, but there's really something to sticking with I guess a path for long enough so that you can learn from the mistakes. You can iterate and get better at what you're trying to do.
Doug Cunnington: I've stuck with Amazon Associates and I think that I'm getting better and better and refining the whole process again and again through the iteration. And then I've taught a lot of people and I think that reinforced it even more. So in order to teach, you have to really understand and dissect the process. And if you could teach someone and then they can do it, you probably know it pretty well.
Doug Cunnington: And then through that, I can really appreciate the distilling down and refining the process, sticking with something. So all tied in a bow here, pick something, stick with it for long enough. Don't switch around too much. Unsubscribed from some of those email lists. Everyone is trying to sell you something. I'm going to try and sell you something. You can get value, but don't get distracted. Don't feel like you're going to miss out. You could try everything, but you can't try it all at once.
Kevin Graham: Right. So for people who do want to be sold to by you, or maybe just learn some really cool stuff, where can they connect with you, get on your email list and follow you on all the various platforms?
Doug Cunnington: You can go to nichesiteproject.com. You can click the green button, enter your name and email. I'll send you a lot of cool templates and then I'll send you some valuable stuff and eventually I'll try and sell you a course, which I hope you check it out. It's called Five Figure Niche Site.
Doug Cunnington: And I do have a podcast called The Doug Show. It's just a Doug.Show. It's available on the other, like all the directories out there and I do a lot of shows on this aged site case study that's sort of getting a lot of attention and traction and stuff like that.
Doug Cunnington: And if you dig that stuff then you should check out the YouTube channel where I also publish other content. It's not always the same exact content, so you got to follow me in different places. So nichesiteproject.com, that's sort of the home and you can get to everything else from there.
Kevin Graham: Awesome. Well, I'll include the link to nichesiteproject.com as well as direct links into your podcast and YouTube and all the other spots that you mentioned there in the show notes.
Kevin Graham: Doug, it's been great having you on the show. Thanks so much for getting up super early where you are and to be able to chat with me super late where I am here. It's been great fun.
Doug Cunnington: Thanks Kevin. I really appreciate it.
Kevin Graham: Bye now."
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