Making Almost Millions: Starting A New Niche Content Site
Hello there. My name is Neal Ungerleider, and I’m the editor-in-chief (read: primary writer, business development chief, advertiser liaison, traffic analyst, etc.) of Almost Millions, a personal finance site for freelancers and the self-employed. And, it seems, I’m an expert on the weirdness of making content for the web in 2017.
This article is something I’ve wanted to do for quite some time: A look behind the scenes at what it’s like starting a new, profit-generating content site with limited resources and limited time.
Before starting Almost Millions — which I operate as a part-time side project — I’ve worked in the digital media trenches for quite some time. My articles can be read in Fast Company and I have a steady career working as a content strategist and copywriter with clients. The skillsets of writing for a website and running a website overlap, but they don’t quite overlap 100%. That lesson impacted Almost Millions’ launch greatly.
Onto the case study.
Almost Millions: Why Do A Part-Time Side Project?
When it comes to content sites and brands, here’s the thing… Not every website is launched by a company with a full staff, and the web offers something a lot of other platforms don’t: Business asymmetry.
With $100 in my pocket, I can’t open a restaurant or a retail store. With $100 in my pocket and a laptop, I can create a website that can attract a decent amount of traffic and a dedicated user base.
These economics played a big role in Almost Millions’ birth. Almost Millions’ genesis was my desire to start a side project for business reasons. My content strategist work is primarily project-based — I’m the sort of consultant who parachutes into organizations for a few weeks, works on a particular task, and parachutes back out. This sort of work is highly dependent on my clients’ budgets; during one particular quarter when marketing/advertising budgets were slashed across the board in the tech sector, things kind of sucked moneywise.
And as for journalism… Well, we all know that the journalism world has had problems as of late. I’m lucky in that I have a good working relationship with a publication I’ve written with for over six years, which compensates me well and encourages me to dig up good stories. Nonetheless, budgets are tight in the journalism world. While I might make a good salary for the journalism world, journalism pay scales lag comparably behind many other occupations.
So, basically, I wanted an additional income source in order to buy more fancy things and have extra cash money for slow periods. Simple enough.
Almost Millions: Launching A Content Site
Launching Almost Millions as a content site came out of some simple calculations. I needed extra income to compensate for slow periods in my consulting and copywriting business. After considering a few options like driving for Lyft (Which would have made for a great stunt article, looking back) or retail arbitrage (High potential returns, but massive time commitment), I settled on starting a website.
Almost Millions was designed to build on something I discovered as a freelance journalist and as a consultant: There’s a lot of stuff to know about being self-employed that self-employed people don’t know. Most of the best advice I received about taxes, business development, and work-life balance came from conversations with friends at coffeeshops or bars.
Furthermore, I saw myself as a sort of “accidental entrepreneur” who became a businessperson because I love writing — and I’m betting there are many more accidental entrepreneurs out there.
Starting a content site also won in the what-to-do-for-a-side-project-stakes because it allows me to leverage my unfair advantages. “Unfair advantages” is an in-vogue term among startup founders introduced by Ash Maurya — It’s basically the idea that unfair advantages are something your startup offers investors that competitors don’t.
I was bringing plenty of unfair advantages to the table — I’ve worked as a journalist for the past decade, can write a good article in my sleep, have a massive rolodex of contacts from the tech world, understand how publicists like to promote their products and, crucially, work with digital content for a living. If I’m paid as a consultant to help my clients develop editorial calendars and brainstorm ideas for video series, I should probably leverage those skills for my side project.
Lastly, what sealed the deal was being realistic with my financial and time commitments. Whatever my side project was going to be, I wanted something I could bootstrap on launch — if venture capital was going to enter the picture, I wanted that to be later rather than sooner.
More importantly, I wanted a side project I could develop with less than 12 hours a week’s time investment. My work as a writer for Fast Company and other magazines generally occupies 24 hours of my week; consulting and copywriting work generally takes up between 24 and 40 hours a week depending on workload.
Starting a site was something I could do working an hour or two after my day job each night, while still having time to spend with friends and family and even occasionally relax.
So the decision was made: Start a website.
Almost Millions: Initial Costs
One of the appealing things about starting a content site was the low startup costs. I had some strategic advantages right off the cuff: Thanks to my consulting business, I already had access to a coworking space, a professional website with web hosting, a Mailchimp account, and knowledge of Wordpress. My girlfriend works in the advertising world, and was able to assist with branding and graphic design.
I also leveraged my social network; I paid a consultant to help me work through some ideas and connected with friends in the media, marketing, and finance worlds to conduct informal focus grouping.
All of this save web hosting, Wordpress, and Mailchimp, was optional. Or you might want to use alternate vendors like Squarespace or Constant Contact… whatever works!
I registered my domain and set up my site through Dreamhost, who did a great job, and purchased a Wordpress template for less than $100. With my two main assets — a website and a Wordpress setup — complete, I then took two weekends to set the site up and come up with ideas for content.
There were secondary costs spread out among the months following launch. I spent approximately $1500 total on a combination of Facebook advertising, cloud storage, tech support, and consultants helping with tasks I was too overwhelmed to do.
Almost Millions: The Launch Process
Since my background is in the writing world, I assigned myself the task of creating an initial corpus of ~100 articles which would be posted online during a soft launch period. These articles would serve the purpose of generating a bare minimum of incoming organic search traffic, and offer initial backlinking and SEO opportunities.
This soft launch period took approximately six months, before Almost Millions launched in late 2016. During this soft launch period, my duties were split between writing blog posts and creating initial products for monetizations (and more on those in a later story…).
An early attempt to outsource blog post writing failed badly; the first contractor, found through an online marketplace, was a non-native English speaker who made numerous grammatical and factual errors. The second contractor was a local writer who repeatedly missed deadlines — in the end, writing the posts myself was the most time-effective solution.
I made some additional errors along the way: My original user research consisted of a survey that I sent to my in-real life contacts, email contacts, and social media contacts. My respondents reflected my social network — disproportionately white and Asian college-educated city dwellers with white collar jobs… which turned out to be substantially different from the audience that came across my site through Facebook and Google (which we’ll discuss in a coming article).
In addition, I had to pay extra money for a second Wordpress template after serious UI/UX issues came up with the first one I purchased — constantly updating Wordpress with every update of a plug-in would have been a serious cash drain. Lastly, I made a rookie error: Time management.
When you’re running a website as the sole editor, you’re responsible for getting your initial product — the website — to market. Instead of carving in 60–90 minutes daily to work on Almost Millions during each workday, I planned to work in an eight-hour block over the weekend.
You can guess what happened: I spent a long workweek working on my day job, and slept on the couch Saturday or got lost in a Netflix show. Fail.
But I did accomplish the most important thing: Setting up a stack of free or low-cost resources that let me generate content for Almost Millions.
Here’s what I used for Almost Millions (and still use, as of press time) during those early months:
- WordPress.org (Free CMS)
- Buffer (Low-cost social media dashboard)
- Pablo (Free social media image generator, from Buffer)
- Canva (Freemium online graphic design service)
- Todoist (Freemium project management tool)
- Trello (Freemium project management tool)
- Mailchimp (Freemium mailing list tool)
- Privy (Freemium mailing list growth tool)
- Hubspot (Freemium CRM platform)
- Typeform (Freemium contact page management tool)
And in our next installment… how do you make money from a website, anyway? The monetization discussion.
Speaking of monetization, Neal Ungerleider is writing this article for a large audience without getting paid. So why not pay $4.99 to buy him a fancy coffee? He lives in Los Angeles, and coffee isn’t cheap.
