The sneakiest content campaign I've seen in a long time

Helloooo content connoisseurs.

It’s Perrin from Content Bites.

Man I love finding stuff like this. This isn’t content from a big brand. It’s not some viral thingamajig. It’s a smaller business using content in a genius way. Today, I’m going to show you the sneakiest content marketing campaign I’ve found in a very long time.

• Appetizers: Links from CMI, Hubspot, Ahrefs and more….

• Main Course: Breaking down the sneakiest content campaign I've seen in a long time

Let’s dig in.

Appetizers: Content about content 🤯

• The complete guide to TikTok influencer marketing (link)

• 11 Places to Find Scroll-stopping Instagram Templates for your Posts, Stories, and Reels (link)

• The Benefits Of Content Marketing: How It’s An Unfair Advantage (link)

• How To Promote Your Blog | Spend $0 for Guaranteed Traffic (link)

• Continuous SEO: Can You “Complete” SEO? (link)

Main Course: Breaking down the sneakiest content campaign I've seen in a long time

Sneaky?

Or maybe just creative? You tell me. 

Either way, this is a DOPE way to use content, and I’m honestly surprised more people don’t use stuff like this more often. 

I’d say it’s possible that they do, but just from my own experience sitting in on like a bajillion marketing meetings, stuff like this has never been part of the conversation. 

But for my money, it’s not only a pretty sneaky way to do content marketing, but if you happen to be part of a company with a lot of resources, I also think there’s a pretty great way to scale this strategy (more on this below). 

Here’s the surprising thing…

This isn’t some SaaS company. And it’s not some great creator. 

The entity behind this content campaign is a marketing agency. 

And if that doesn’t seem super surprising because marketing agencies are supposed to be good at marketing, let me tell you what it’s like to be a marketing agency competing against other marketing agencies to capture attention (speaking as someone who did that)...

It’s an absolute shark tank. 

Everyone knows the tactics. Everyone knows how to spend money on ads. Everyone already has big in-house content teams. 

It’s really, really hard. 

It’s also basically a cesspool of everyone doing the exact same stuff – but just trying to do more than the next guy. 

So pelase believe when I tell you it’s relatively rare to find a marketing agency doing something genuinely cool.

And not only is it genuinely cool, it’s a tactic I’ve talked about using to launch businesses in my closet, inner circle (don’t worry; I’m going to tell you what it is below).

So it was fun to see it out in the wild. 

Breaking it down: The marketing agency winning business using totally separate websites. 

The marketing agency in question is called imForza (here’s their website if you want to poke around). 

I don’t know these guys, but if you do, please give them a shout for me. 

On the surface, they look like any other agency. They offer lots of the same stuff: PPC, website development, and so on… you’ve see it before.

But they also have a few specific niches (screenshot): 

• Real estate

• E-Commerce

• Professional services

• Legal

• Restaurants 

• Non-profits

Good, fairly typical niches for a marketing agency. 

Here’s the trouble, though: if you’re a marketing agency and you’re targeting multiple niches at the same time, it’s super difficult to use your core website to market to any of them – at least from a blogging & SEO standpoint. 

That’s because one of the things Google cares most about is relevance. And the way Google understands relevance is (in a very basic nutshell) by assessing (1) how much content you have on a given topic, (2) assessing how much coverage you have of the topic, and (3) how big of a % it is of your site content. 

Here’s another way to think about it: if someone was searching for information about pizza ovens, Google would be much more likely to show a smaller site that is ONLY about pizza ovens than they would be to show a  site that is about, say, cat food that published one article about pizza ovens – even if the cat food site were super authoritative. It’s possible, but generally only for sites with MEGA authority (think: Forbes, Wikipedia, etc.). 

And that’s the pickle imForza found themselves in. 

They wanted to market to these niches, but it would have been extremely difficult to do it with their core site. 

So, they did something super cool: they manufactured relevance by creating tightly coordinated websites that were totally separate from their core entity. 

They actually only did this twice (presumably because it’s a ton of work). Here’s the best one: https://www.realestatemarketingblog.org/ 

If you click through to that site, it’s pretty unremarkable (no offense, imForza team, if you’re somehow reading this). It definitely doesn’t carry the luster of the core imForza site, which is super nicely designed. 

But what it lacks in rizz, it makes up for in relevance. 

According to Ahrefs, there are only about 51 pages on the whole site, but 100% of those pages are about real estate marketing. 

The result? The site generates an impressive ~10,000 visitors/mo (screenshot from similarweb). 

If that feels small, bear with me while I break down the math. At typical agency prices, let’s assume imForza charges about $4,000/mo for their services. Suppose 0.5% (just HALF a percent) of the total traffic generated from realestatemarketingblog.org turns into a referral (or lead). That’d be about 50 leads per month. A typical agency might convert 20% of their sales calls to leads. That’d be 10 sales. And clients might stay for about 6 months. 

That works out to a quarter million dollars in lifetime revenue generated every single month from this rinky dink real estate marketing blog – or about $3 million per year. 

That’s astoundingly impactful. 

Relevance is way, way, WAY more powerful than most people give it credit for. 

How can WE do this?

If you have a lot of resources, you could for sure go ahead and build out a micro-niche site in one of your verticals or sub-verticals. But most of the time, that requires a lot of money. 

It essentially means doing the SEO work twice – for your core site and then also for whatever micro-niche sites you build. 

It’s also slow. 

For my money, the better version is to acquire sites that already exist and have traffic, but that aren’t tied to any specific business. 

Buying these kinds of sites can usually be super, super cheap (think <$20,000 that you could chunk out of your marketing spend, and oftentimes, more like $5,000 if the site isn’t monetized at all). 

And it’s way faster. 

The basic process would be: 

• Find a site

• Contact the owner and ask to buy

• Put the deal in escrow using a platform like Acquire.com (formerly MicroAcquire)

• Transfer ownership & tech stuff

• Start using the traffic to promote your site – direct offers, lead magnets, newsletters, pixels, etc. 

Most of the time, the trouble isn’t understanding what to do – hell, give any marketer 10,000 “free” visits/mo, and they’ll figure out how to make money. Most of the time, the primary obstacle is finding sites to buy. 

So let’s walk through one way to do that. 

Step 1: Find lists of blogs. 

Suppose we sell software for product managers. 

We’d want to find blogs in the space that:

• Are run by humans, not businesses

• Have not been updated in a while

• Aren’t super well monetized

• Still gets traffic. 

Usually, the best place to start is to find lists of blogs. 

To do that, you can just google the common sense stuff. Here, I googled “blogs for product managers” and found a bunch of listicles (screenshot). 

I opened this one first, and started scrolling, making basic, subjective judgements based on the titles and descriptions. 

This one caught my attention (screenshot).

Human-created? Check. Not updated in a while? Check – last post is from several months ago. Under-monetized? Check. Gets traffic? Yep – about 40,000 visits/mo. 

Could be a candidate.

It’s honestly not the BEST candidate, because the guy is a higher-level CEO, and this seems more like a place for him to collect personal essays, but you get the idea. 

Still, it’d be worth reaching out. 

I’d put this blog in a list, and I’d try to build that list to 20-30 targets. 

This is generally the first way I try to find sites to buy, but it’s not the only one. Another favorite is to look at old blog directories; it’s just a bit more fickle, and I didn’t have all that much space here. 

Anyway, build the list. 

2. Reach out & inquire about buying. 

You don’t need anything fancy here. 

To find who owns the site, first, use anything you can find on the site (About page, etc.), and if you can’t find anything on the site, use any Whois lookup tool combined with tools like Hunter to find email addresses.

Then, send a super simple script like this:

Subject: interested in selling [site]?

“Hey [NAME],

I’d love to talk about buying [site] if you’re open to it. 

I run a company called [YourCompanyName], and this would be great to add to our ecosystem. 

If you are open to it, I can get a deal done quick and in cash. 

Would you be against me sending more details?

Cheers,

Perrin

Then, follow up like 3-4 times via email and, if you can find it, LinkedIn. 

3. If someone bites, do the deal. 

Lots of ways to get this done. 

I’ve done them all, and please believe me when I tell you that by far the easiest way to do these deals is to just use a platform. Stuff like:

• Acquire.com 

• Escrow.com

• Flippa.com

Then, either tag in your own technical team or hire someone on UpWork to help with the technical stuff – mostly with transferring ownership. 

4. Either start testing marketing or merge into your own site. 

Two routes here.

Either keep the site separate like imForza did, or merge it into your own site. 

With the former, you don’t need much – just go nuts & start marketing with the traffic. You know the drill. 

If you go with the latter, hire a good SEO to help make sure as much of the traffic sticks as possible.

5. Build on the new traffic. 

Now that you’ve got a bunch of traffic in a particular topic, you can build on it. Whether you’ve kept the site separate or merged it into your own, you’ve got a bunch of new traffic, audience members, and authority to leverage.

So you can build on it. Publish more. Convert them to subscribers. Add them to a community. Just build on the momentum. 

Summary of how to use this tactic:

• If you can, buy an existing website in your space (don’t build if you don’t have to, but if you can’t find sites, don’t be afraid to, either). 

• Use deal platforms to get the deal done

• Use tech professionals to transfer ownership and/or merge into your own site

• Market to your new traffic w/ offers, newsletters, pixels, etc.

• Build on the momentum by publishing more content on that topic

• Measure and repeat

That’s the issue. If you missed last week’s issue, you can read it here.

Go forth & conquer.

—Perrin