2018 is gonna be an interesting year.

I started doing analysis on how much money we're spending to generate the traffic.

And here's what's crazy, most people don't realize this.

We generate, let's say a million visitors a month on Neil Patel.

Do you know what the cost to get there is?

If you had to take a guess, with video, production, podcasting, blogging, promotion, ads, link building, okay.

I'm not sitting there building the links, like, someone's manually doing outreach.

All the social media promotion, what do you think the cost is?

I'm gonna say 100,000 a month.

Yeah, it's close.

It's a bit more than that.

It's a bit more than 110.

That's what it averaged out to for 2017.

And I was looking at this, and you spend the money, there's no guarantee that you're gonna get the traffic.

So our strategy for 2018, we just finished up one deal right now.

It cost us a half a million bucks.

I'm not gonna say the name of the blog.

In which we bought a blog in the marketing space for a half a million bucks.

They already get a million visitors a month and I'm like wait, wait, wait,

It's cheaper to just spend money acquire people who already have the traffic.

So in 2017 we bought Uber Suggest.

I think it was like 110, 120, or 140 grand.

I don't know what we paid.

It was something like that.

I also did experiment with marketing program because they had a lot of back links.

I spent a hundred grand on that domain name.

He barely had any traffic.

At one point he's like oh, I got a hundred thousand visitors a month.

I'm like, all right, whatever.

So I wired him a hundred grand.

I 301 redirected the site, traffic increased.

Guess what happened?

Nothing.

I hoped that my traffic would go through the roof, but nothing really happened.

The Uber Suggest was a good acquisition and what I ended up learning from that is, who cares about links?

Don't buy anything for the links.

Buy it purely based off of traffic.

And just pay a simple metric.

So like, if someone Uber Suggest has roughly 200,000 visitors per month, I paid a hundred and something.

I would have paid 200 grand, the money didn't really matter.

For the blog that I just spent half a million on, their traffic ranges on a really bad month, they'll get around 800,000 uniques.

On a really good month they'll get around, like, 1.2, 1.3 million uniques.

And all I'm doing right now is I'm just buying as many blogs as possible.

I reach out to Search Engine Watch, which is another industry blog.

They do jack shit with their site and it's just crap content.

I tried buying them.

They ignored me.

They're owned by a private equity company.

I had other people hit them up.

Because if I hit them up, most people try charging me more.

And I would have been willing to spend like 2 million bucks.

I hit up the Search Engine Journal guys from 2016 to the end of 2017.

(I) Tried working out a deal.

The numbers just didn't pan out for me.

But, yeah, in general my marketing strategy for 2018 is purely just buy based off of traffic.

And I look at the top posts that they have and how qualified their visitors are.

And be like, all right, can I monetize this or can I not monetize this?

I didn't even care if they have revenue.

If they don't have revenue, even better.

Like Search Engine Journal, the problem with them is, they have conferences, they have advertising, they have contracts for a lot of this stuff.

I don't care for any of that.

I just want the traffic.

So when you buy all these people for traffic and then you put it into your monetization flow, you can easily figure out, all right, what is this worth?

Can I end up making my money back in a year, or three months, six months, two years?

Typically, if I can't make my money back in less than 12 months, I will not buy it.

The other strategy that I use when I'm buying out these sites, I'm looking for the people who haven't monetized well.

So the blog that I ended up buying for half a million bucks, they're not even making three grand a month.

If you're not even making three grand a month, that's a good deal, right?

They're like, you're gonna give me half a million dollars for this?

I'm like, yeah, yeah, no problem.

I'm like, here's the legal work, boom, sign it.

I'll wire it the next day, and I don't care.

But I'm getting really creative with acquisitions.

And if you don't even have the cash, another creative thing that I'm doing right now, I'm trying to buy a really popular marketing tool.

And I don't want to pay them all the money that they want 'cause they want well into the millions.

I'm like ah, this isn't worth it.

But, I'm trying to work out a deal where I give them X amount of money up front.

Let's say like a million bucks, and then give them like a hundred thousand a month over X amount of times or a hundred thousand a year over X amount of times or a hundred thousand a year over X amount of times.

And I learned that strategy from my buddy Edward.

He would acquire mortgage companies, and when you see inefficiencies in their site you'd be like, oh I can double the revenue 'cause they didn't optimize for traffic or conversions.

So you buy it for what it's worth.

You optimize it, and then you use the profits to continually pay them out.

So then that way you're not using all of your money and the business is paying the amount.

And sure you may have spent a bit more money, but personally, you don't have to spend as much money.

And that's my marketing strategy for 2018.

My goal is to spend at least 5 million bucks this year just acquiring businesses purely based on their traffic.