Growth Case 04
Recently, Xiaowa paid attention to a great man named Jack Herrick. His entrepreneurial story touched me a lot and made me understand how a person who sticks to his original intention can reap huge rewards.
If you are engaged in foreign trade or cross-border business, you will find that most of the tutorials on the market now focus on the independent website + Facebook traffic method. Why is this more popular? Because its monetization process is extremely fast.
But Jack’s business model is very simple, which is to create high-quality tutorial articles and obtain natural traffic from search engines, referred to as SEO. There are two websites that
Jack handles, and you may have heard of them: eHow[1] and Wikihow[2].
Xiaowa learned a lot about his methods and mentality in building two companies, and I hope you can also get something valuable from it.
Let us take a look at his story~
The origin of eHow
In fact, Jack is not the founder of eHow.
eHow was founded in 1998, when and Google were just born, and many people born in the 90s were in primary school. The initial goal of
eHow was not to build a niche website, but like early Internet startups, it was favored by venture capital and had more than 200 employees in a short period of time.
venture capital firms invested $36 million in start-up capital, including Hummer Winblad, a top venture capital firm at the time (HW is a venture capital firm focused on software and networking, located in San Francisco). Why is
eHow popular?
The Internet was still young and not as crowded as it is now.
Nowadays, there are countless "how-to" websites, but it was different 20 years ago. Websites dedicated to sharing "how-to" were a very profitable idea.
In 1999-2000, eHow was ranked as one of the most popular websites. Due to the huge traffic and attention, eHow has received high-weight external links from a large number of websites.
made a big mistake. The founder of
website blocked Google from crawling their website. This approach seems stupid now, but you have to know that in 1998, when Google was just established, no one could know that Google would become the world's number one search engine in the future. engine. The team of
eHow felt that allowing Google to crawl the website would only cause more people to visit Google, thus causing the loss of visitors, so they blocked Google completely.
So if you are smart, you should be able to guess what will happen next in eHow. Although they have huge traffic and attention, they don't rank on Google.
The final disillusionment of the Internet bubble The result of
blocking Google was that they filed for bankruptcy in 2003. But a large part of the reason is that operating costs are too high.
With the bursting of the Internet bubble, the myth of CPM in the advertising industry also died (CPM refers to thousands of impressions of an ad).
’s CPM advertising, which once cost US$12, dropped to US$0.12, which means that eHow’s revenue plummeted 100 times. In order to obtain more revenue,
adopts a pay-per-view model. Visitors must pay before they can read the complete article content.
If the visitor does not pay, a registration pop-up window will pop up on the web page, and you can only continue after paying.
Just imagine, when you search for an article on how to cut potatoes on a website, and after clicking in, a pop-up window pops up telling you that you need to pay 10 yuan to view the full article. Most people's reaction is to immediately close the page and curse " Sand sculpture".
So, instead of retaining users, they are driving away visitors.
By 2004, eHow had only 40,000 visitors per month, compared with thousands of times before.
Jack bought eHow
Jack has been following eHow for several years. He likes the model of this website and particularly wants to build the same business model.
He tried calling the founder to ask if he could acquire eHow, but unexpectedly he quickly bought it for $100,000.
Today, we used the ahrefs.com tool to check the current status of eHow:
We can see that eHow’s monthly visits are around 1 million, and its revenue is more than 300,000 US dollars. When
saw eHow’s data today, it was a bit incredible to recall that it was acquired with $100,000.
But it was a very difficult decision for Jack at the time.
Because eHow was already in a dying state at that time, Jack's venture capital friends also advised him not to buy this website.
Moreover, $100,000 was not a small sum at the time. Jack originally planned to use the money to buy a house.
Using money from buying a house to buy a bankrupt website is a considerable risk.
But Jack was very confident in this website, so he made up his mind to acquire it.
Of course, the results are gratifying:
eHow traffic surges and profits are achieved. After
took over eHow, Jack did three things:
• Remove all codes that block Google • Close annoying registration and login • Choose a simpler profit strategy: Google Adsense
Within a few years, the website had grown to 5.5 million monthly visitors and was once again profitable.
Adsense was first released in 2003, and Jack seized the opportunity.
Remember, this was in 2003 and there weren't hundreds of ad networks like there are today. The use of
Adsense is also very simple. You only need to insert a piece of code into the website, and it will automatically display relevant ads on each page.
However, nothing is smooth sailing:
Difficulties encountered when running eHow
As traffic increased, Jack realized that eHow's operating model was deviating from his expectations, and he could no longer continue to operate in this model. eHow is becoming a content farm. The
content farm refers to the creation of many low-quality articles in order to obtain more advertising revenue for the website. Just like a farm, there are chickens, ducks, fish, geese, cattle, sheep, and pigs.
Jack's goal is to create the best "how-to" guides in the world. But with the publication of articles on the website, he is getting further and further away from his goal.
eHow outsources articles to many writers, and the price is generally not high. Because the writers are relatively complex and the quality of the articles is uneven, the website is quickly filled with empty and meaningless content.
Although eHow's traffic is very good, and it has also achieved profitability and made a lot of money, in the long run, the situation is not optimistic.
However, instead of trying to change the operating structure of eHow, Jack decided to start a new website.
The birth of WikiHow
In 2004, Jack created a new website - Wikihow.com, a "how-to" website with only high-quality content.
Jack believes that the purpose of this website is not only to make money, but also to persist in his dream, which is to create the best "how-to" guide website in the world. The Ending of
eHow - Sold Again
Jack was determined to sell eHow, and it happened that a listed company - Demand Media took a fancy to eHow.
Demand Media is one of the largest Adsense publishers in the world and a sponsor of many webmasters.
actually uses the content farm model to distribute advertisements. As early as when it was founded in 2006, they formulated their own business strategy:
uses algorithms to analyze Google search results to find the most popular content, and then outsources writing at low prices. topics to gain traffic.
then uses the high-authority domain name in hand to provide external links for new articles, which can quickly improve the article ranking. The
model seems very familiar now, which is what we know as Private Blog Network, or PBN for short. In order to build a PBN,
needs to acquire more high-weight websites. This is why they are interested in eHow.
Jack sold Ehow so that he could focus entirely on WikiHow. And the money from selling the website will give him financial security, allowing him to run WikiHow without having to worry about money.
Demand Media was aware of WikiHow when they purchased eHow, but they did not view WikiHow as a threat.
Because the models of WikiHow and eHow are different, they find WikiHow unattractive. The difference between
eHow and WikiHow:
content comes from different sources. The content of
eHow is purchased. They pay writers and freelancers a small fee to write articles for them.
WikiHow content is free. Anyone can add and edit articles on the site.Creators continue to contribute articles to WikiHow based on their passion for open source websites.
content quality is different.
WikiHow focuses on article quality and aims to become the most authoritative encyclopedia website.
WikiHow's editors and proofreaders frequently modify and upgrade articles. This is a feature that is difficult to imitate on content farms like eHow.
In addition, all pictures in WikiHow are hand-drawn and have a unified style, which is also an important reflection of the high-quality content of WikiHow.
Companies vary in size
Wikihow is a small company with only 24 employees, while some sites with similar Alexa rankings may have hundreds of employees.
Why do some people provide articles for free?
There is a question on the foreign quora platform "Why are some people willing to provide content for Wikipedia ?" The founder of Wikipedia answered as follows:
Because it is a great and cool thing thing.
Looking back on the Chinese Internet in the past, many people selflessly contributed articles on Tianya and Tieba. When you were looking for game guides or software tutorials, did you ever thank these free contributors?
sharing strategies and tutorials does not make money directly, but it can give you a full sense of accomplishment.
WikiHow has gathered a large number of free authors to participate in writing since the beginning. They are passionate about sharing. This is also their hobby and it is very interesting for them.
Therefore, if you want to create your own wiki, the biggest difficulty is attracting the right people to write articles and contribute to your site.
Business Model
For most people, WikiHow's business model is almost perfect.
They don’t need to outsource writers, nor do they need to manage hundreds or thousands of employees. They just need to stay at home and let others create high-quality content for them, and all they have to do is add Adsense code to these pages. .
However, things are not that easy. How to attract creators to provide free articles for an unfamiliar website became the biggest problem in the early days of WikiHow. In the first few years of
WikiHow, Jack could not find enough authors to provide articles, nor did he have enough manpower to proofread, so the website had a lot of shoddy content.
For a website like this that makes no money and faces a lot of junk content, it is not easy to persevere, but Jack persevered.
has no skills, only persistence. After a few years of persistence, more and more people joined the site, and they invited their friends and colleagues. The content of
WikiHow is like a snowball, growing more and more. It took a long time, but WikiHow finally took shape.
's biggest gain
Jack's biggest gain is seeing the value of WikiHow. It creates a community that continuously provides new content that cannot be purchased with money, which of course saves a lot of money. The business model of
is User Generated Content (UGC), that is, user-generated content. Domestic Zhihu, Baidu Zhizhi, Baidu Encyclopedia, and Xiaohongshu all have this model.
For example, WikiHow has an article called "How to Survive in Federal Prison[3]". This article invites ex-prisoners to participate in writing. Of course, it is impossible to create this kind of article by paying a writer. The difference between
WikiHow and other companies is that website profit is not its main purpose, but to create an influence. From the quality of their content, we can see that they are sincerely helping people in need.
Today's WikiHow
Today, WikiHow's rankings cover just about everything. No matter what kind of "how-to" content you search on Google, you can almost see WikiHow on the first page.
In other words, Jack's long-term efforts paid off.
According to SimilarWeb, WikiHow has 130 million monthly visitors, 90% of which come from organic searches!
In contrast, websites like BuzzFeed, although they have the same traffic, have to write articles constantly to ensure the normal operation of a company with 500 employees.
Due to the large number of pages on the site, quality maintenance work is ongoing, but WikiHow is heading in the right direction. The following screenshot is the data of the WikiHow website:
What WikiHow brings to us
We can learn a lot from the story of WikiHow:
Build a website with a long-term strategy
Many websites will be more or less affected by the adjustment of Google's ranking algorithm. Traffic decreases.
If your website provides high-quality content from the beginning and gets authoritative backlinks from real websites, there is nothing to worry about.
insists on high-quality content writing, so that segmented websites can become a continuously growing business.
Jack knew that eHow's model didn't fit the long-term strategy, so he created WikiHow.
Even if some businesses seem to be running well, think more about whether this is a long-term strategy or a short-term strategy.
Beat the competition on quality
Don't just think about building more links than your competitors, but beat them on content.
When analyzing competitors, we need to think about a question: What are our advantages if we want to get ranked on the Google homepage? Is the content deep enough, external links rich enough, or something else?
However, even if the content you create is better than your competitors, you cannot immediately get a higher ranking because SEO takes time, and Google’s crawlers cannot discover your good content in time, which has also caused misunderstandings for many people. , believing that providing high-quality content is ineffective.
High-quality content will affect the ranking and traffic of the website in the long term. It will become easier to get links, shares, and drive in more long-tail traffic.
So what we have to do, in addition to providing high-quality content, we also need to do more promotion work, and wait patiently.
Set a goal for the website
Most people who are engaged in Internet marketing will give up if the website still has no profit after running for one or two months or even half a year.
In fact, many websites do not convert that fast. You can consider the long-term goals:
What will your website ranking be like in one year? What are your annual goals for the site? What effect does a website achieve to be considered successful? What do you need to do to achieve this metric of success?
Before we build a website, if we want to make money through SEO, we should deeply consider formulating a long-term strategy.
In other words, the SEO field cannot see effects in the short term, which is why there are many independent station + Facebook advertising strategies on the market, because they can provide timely feedback.
Stick to the goal
In 2011, Google updated the Panda algorithm. The traffic of many spam sites was affected. Many webmasters chose to give up, but Jack redoubled his efforts and focused on improving content quality.
sounds very common now, but back then, when the traffic dropped to zero overnight, it was not easy to stick to the original intention.
However, Jack's goal is not to extract profits from content farms, but to create the best "how-to" guides possible. This is why the Panda Algorithm did not affect his mentality.
Make big plans
For us ordinary people, the goal should not be too small, we can aim at bigger goals. It doesn’t have to be as big as WikiHow. If you want to gain success, you also have to hope for success. You can aim at keywords with larger search volume.
Carefully sort out your keywords, market segments and website potential. Think about what you can get through the website?
If you are interested in basketball, don't just look for keywords like "how to jump higher". You can build a website around basketball training. If you find keywords around basketball training, you can make the website bigger.
And we must firmly believe that on the right path, all the efforts are worth it.
Build your own "how-to" website
If you want to compete with WikiHow and eHow, it's almost impossible.Because they have some insurmountable advantages:
• They started the Internet business very early • With decades of resource accumulation, their domain name weight is very high, and Google will give priority to recommendation • There is a huge team, if necessary, one day It can produce 1,000 articles • The website can cover any topic
However, we can use their structure to explore more segmented markets.
For example, using crowd segmentation, we create a "how-to" site for boys to buy underwear and beard knives, a "how-to" site for girls to choose their diet and daily life, and a "how-to" site for college students to learn about college life and study. ” site and so on.
If we think about it this way, we will find more market segments and we will find more room for growth, and we can do it by ourselves or by forming a small team.
Summary
After reading the story of Master Jack, Xiaowa feels that before making decisions, we might as well take a longer-term view.
To put it cliché, it means taking the long term to catch the big fish. Some things may seem like a lot of useless work has been done in the early stage, but in fact they are growing slowly, and when they reach a certain level, they will bloom into beautiful flowers.
Well, that’s it for today’s case! Xiaowa also needs to sort out whether his "thread" is long enough.
If you think the article is helpful to you, please click "Reading" and follow us. See you in the next issue!
(Source: Foreign Trade Growth Officer )
The above content is the personal opinion of the author and does not represent the position of Hugo.com! This article is reprinted with the permission of the original author. Reprinting requires the original author's authorization and consent.
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