3 Lessons learned from growing a dog food blog to 1.8M visits/yr

Helloooo content connoisseurs.

It’s Perrin from Content Bites.

I’d like to entice you with the sexiest possible topic: dog food. And to do that, I’ll tell you the story of how I grew a dog food blog to 1.8M annual visits. Then, we’ll talk about how HelpScout absolutely slays by writing about its competitors.

• Main course: 3 Lessons from growing a dog food blog to 1.8M visits/yr

• Snack: How HelpScout gets 70,000 visits/yr to a high-revenue page by writing about competitors

• Morsels: Links from Marie Haynes, Backlinko, CMI, and more…

Let’s dig in.

Main Course: 3 Lessons learned from growing a dog food blog to 1.8M visits/yr

I’d just started learning about affiliate marketing when I got my first ever dog, Chewie.

And if you’ve never had a dog (or any real responsibility for another living creature), let me tell you: that sh*t is confusing.

I was in love, but I had questions. Lots of questions.

What do I do if she cries? How do you walk a dog? What in the blue hell do I feed this thing, how much, and why?

I’d also just recovered from one of the hardest lessons in professional life: the first and only affiliate site I’d ever gotten to work had just been absolutely walloped by a Google penalty.

So it didn’t take long for the incessant gears of my marketing brain to start turning: if I had these questions, other people probably did, too.

I had a dog. I wanted to launch a new affiliate site.

…what if I made an affiliate site about dog stuff??

That might not seem super groundbreaking, and there are lots of dog-focused affiliate sites out there now, but at the time, there were basically zero.

And I decided to start… with dog food.

So I set out to spin up my site: HerePup.

Here’s the short version of the history of the site: I wrote 60,000 words of content in 3 weekends to launch it. It grew to be a six-figure affiliate site that generated 1.8M visits/yr, mostly from SEO. I almost got sued out of existence by a large dog food company because the first brand I came up with (ChewieSays, after my dog Chewie) was too close to a large dog store brand. I recovered. I eventually sold it to pay off student loans.

(…it’s still out there, by the way, but it’s been bought, sold, and destroyed, so it’s a shell of what it used to be).

But it was a great project, and I learned 3 very important lessons that I’ve taken into almost every other project — for myself and for my clients — that I’ve worked on since.

I wanted to share those with you.

1. No topic is too small to make some money, and lots of small topics can = a library of content that makes a ton of money.

When I started HerePup, the pet industry online was already a super competitive space.

We’re talking PetSmart, Dogster, Chewy, etc.

These were hyper-authoritative sites with extreme amounts of domain expertise. Right from the jump, I knew it’d be extremely difficult to compete directly for any of the big topics these brands were going for.

Big terms like “dog food” is where the war was being waged — a keyword that currently has a search volume of 69,000 and is ultra-difficult to rank for.

I was one guy in a tiny Chicago apartment, hopped up on caffeine and writing in my pajamas. There was just no way.

But as I poked around, I realized there were lots and lots of smaller, way more specific topics that solved the same kind of problem — just for an order of magnitude fewer people, and these topics were way less competitive.

I started testing keywords like “best dog food for mini aussie.” 

Keywords like this were much smaller — “best dog food for mini aussie” has a keyword difficulty of 0 (i.e., very, very easy) and a search volume of just 100, meaning only 100 people in all of the US are searching for that keyword each month (screenshot).

Some of the keywords I targeted were even smaller.

My only rule at this stage was: as long as the search volume isn’t zero, I’ll write about it if it’s easy to rank for.

These keywords were so small, in fact, that it was almost scary to go for them. It felt like targeting keywords this small would mean I’d never get traffic or make any money.

But I knew it’d be much easier to get traction, so I decided I’d just go for it.

I did a bunch of keyword research and came up with a list of 40 small, easy keywords about very specific, high-intent dog food questions and wrote 60,000 words in 3 weeks trying to answer them.

Pretty quickly, I realized that not only were these keywords easy to rank for, but that by ranking for one, I tended to rank for tons and tons of variations of those keywords and similar questions (this is called traffic potential, something I wrote about in my post “Keyword Volume Actually Doesn’t Matter,” if you’re interested).

I started to gain traction, and from those 30-40 or so articles targeting small, easy keywords about dog food, I grew the site to nearly 100,000 visits/mo.

From then on, even for my large, global software clients, I’d almost always start campaigns targeting teensy tiny, high-intent keywords.

2. You can make a lot of money by writing about unsexy topics in a sexy way.

Dog food just… isn’t sexy.

What’s less sexy than dog food? Diapers? Like, there just isn’t much.

But that does not mean that the people who have questions about — and are searching for solutions for — dog food aren’t human-freaking-beings.

And because they are human beings, I wrote about dog food in a way that would be interesting for a human being to read.

I aimed to be: hyper-informative but enthusiastically casual.

I created animated graphs that showed calories for dog breeds. I created cute-but-useful infographics that would later be copied ad infinitum.

I made jokes. I empathized. I researched and wrote about the little nuances of dog breeds that only owners of that breed would understand.

I took a marketer’s approach to a decidedly unsexy topic.

The result?

When people went to Google to ask a question about their dog, they would find content that was both useful and also actually entertaining.

And that meant they would stay, read more, bookmark, join email lists, and so on.

I’ve also applied this lesson to other ultra-boring industries.

I once had a client who sold cryogenic metallurgy services (not even joking). And let me tell you: adding even a tiny bit of sex appeal to something where the rest of the content in the world is unbelievably dry makes you look like Santa Claus.

Just because a topic is dry doesn’t mean the human beings reading about it are dry. They’re humans, and for humans, being entertained is always better than not being entertained. 

3. Tapping into problems and passions is the best way to get people to take action.

Lastly, I realized that the best way to use content to move people to action was to tap into either their problems or their passions.

And really, this is a lesson I learned by virtue of the nature of the dog niche.

People love their dogs. Lots of dog owners basically orbit their dogs. That’s just what their universe is. They spend a great deal of time thinking, talking, and worrying about their dogs.

I’d had other kinds of affiliate sites before the dog blog (men’s razors, continuing adult education). If raw engagement with the content was the KPI, those sites would have been absolutely obliterated by HerePup.

And it was just because people cared so much.

As I started to realize this, I started to try to use it on purpose.

I started to use the natural emotional pain/passion points in my content to direct people to CTAs.

When I wrote about the long-term health effects of subpar dog food, I’d link to a high-quality dog food.

When I found myself writing about the absolute joy of camping with your dog, i threw in a list of products that a beginner could buy on a budget to camp out with their dog that weekend. 

Later in my career, I’d use this tactic for high-level client work: finding the natural pain- and passion-driven emotional spikes in content and use those to drive people to action.

How to use this stuff, like, TODAY.

• Create a cluster of content driven by low-volume, super non-competitive keywords. If you do 50 of these, I absolutely promise you’ll see a bunch of traction.

• Find a boring piece of content you’ve produced, rewrite it in a fun/sexy way, and redistribute. Bonus points if you know it already makes money in its current, boring state.

• In one of your best-performing pieces of content, audit for the natural pain/passion spikes, and add a couple extra CTAs in those places.

• Measure and repeat

Snack: How HelpScout generates 70,000 visits/yr & crazy revenue with one page by writing about competitors

In my career as a content agency owner, I had the same fight with almost all my clients.

I’d tell them that there was an astounding amount of money in producing content about your competitors

That’s not always an easy pill for a business to swallow.

There seems to be this highly instinctive gut reaction against it. Why would I want to give my competitors any exposure at all?

But here’s the thing.

We’re not fooling our customers by pretending our competitors don’t exist.

Our customers are smart.

They’re not going to show up on our website, think we’re awesome, and happily fork over their credit card number.

They’re going to do research. Everyone does.

They’re going to go learn about our competitors somewhere.

Would we rather they go through the exercise of comparing us to our competitors on their own — or even worse, in the hands of our competitors — or would we prefer to guide the discussion ourselves on our own terms?

Moreover, from an SEO perspective, there’s usually a lot of search volume in keywords that compare us to our competitors, and if we can get first dibs on that audience, we can usually give ourselves a pretty crazy advantage.

Let me show you what I mean.

Let’s look at HelpScout.

HelpScout is a knowledge base software. If you search for “knowledge base software” in Google, as of this writing, they’re usually #1.

What HelpScout (and their immediate competitors) realized was that people searching for “knowledge base software” weren’t just looking to be sold; they wanted to understand the landscape of knowledge base software and compare their options.

So, HelpScout decided to help them do that.

The page that currently ranks #1 (this page) exists purely to help potential customers compare HelpScout to its competitors.

It’s set up as a listicle, and it rather honestly talks about the pros and cons.

It’s almost totally honest.

The information is accurate, and you could even call it fair.

But, of course HelpScout lists themselves as the best software, which also gives them a chance to make their case for why they think they really are the best software in this category.

They weren’t the first, by the way. Zendesk actually figured this out first (with this page).

Zendesk used to absolutely crush with this strategy until everyone else caught on, and now, there’s a continual war being waged to capture the attention of customers in the comparison stage of their funnel.

HelpScout is currently winning. Their page generates about 70,000 organic visits per year, and I reckon they’re also distributing that page in lots of other places.

“Best” lists are great ways to write about your competitors, but you can do the same thing with keywords that include other indicators that customers want to compare products in order to make a buying decision:

• “[product] reviews” (write about your own product or your competitors)

• “[product] alternatives”

It’s ultra powerful, and the only thing that stops most people from taking advantage of this tactic is the instinct to pretend competitors don’t exist.

How to put this into play right now.

• Create a “best”-style listicle post about your category.

• Make sure the information about your competitors is accurate and fair, but list yourself first/best.

• If possible, put whatever SEO machinery you’ve got in place behind the post to rank it.

• Distribute in other channels.

• Repeat for “reviews” and “alternative” keywords.

• Measure and repeat.

Morsels: Content marketing links

• Google’s Vision for Search in 2023 and Beyond – Analysis of the Q2 2023 Earnings Call (link)

• Decentralized Media for Creators: The Rug Radio Story (link)

• User Behavior and SEO: A Deep Dive (link)

• The Beginners Guide to Instagram Reels for Business (link)

• Big Bump in Ad Spend May Lead to Better Year for Marketers (link)

That’s the issue.

If you missed the last issue, you can read it here: Why no one can find good writers & how I find them.

Go forth & conquer.

— FNCG