GE 317: How Serial Entrepreneur Bill Widmer Turned a Personal Blog into a 6-Figure Website (podcast)

Eric

5 years ago

Bill Widmer

Hey everyone! Today, I share the mic with Bill Widmer, an SEO expert and a serial entrepreneur.

Tune in to hear how Bill has turned his casual blog for family and friends into a 6-figure blog site, how his site is able to get 300,000 visits a month and what current SEO trends are working.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

[00:41] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
[01:20] Bill considers himself lucky in that his business partner is also his life partner.
[01:35] Bill’s first job was selling Cutco knives door-to-door.
[02:08] That job made him realize he liked being his own boss and setting his own hours.
[02:45] He was surprised to find that people were willing to pay for content.
[03:45] His website “The Wandering RV” receives 300,000 visits per month.
[04:45] Bill and his fiancee lived in an RV for months and the site started as a way to keep friends and family updated.
[05:25] They are currently looking to cut back on ads, as they feel there are too many.
[05:41] Per year, the site makes low six figures.
[07:40] If you create a study around a given keyword that is getting a lot of traffic, you can get a lot of really easy PR links and mentions.
[09:15] Bill and his team spend a good deal of time on link building.
[10:21] Bill doesn’t think word counts should be the same for every article you write.
[10:40] He bases his word count on the top three results for that same topic or keyword.
[12:35] Latent Semantic Indexing is a fancy way to say related or synonymous keywords.
[12:50] Go to LSIGraph.com and plug in the keyword for which you would like to rank; LSIGraph will spit out other related keywords you can use.
[13:10] This helps Google figure out what your post is about.
[16:20] Bill doesn’t have a consistent publishing schedule.
[16:38] On average, it can be 2-3 posts a month (though some months Bill’s company doesn’t post at all).
[18:07] Talk to your network to find good writers or find articles in your sphere and figure out who wrote them.
[19:54] Bill’s company got most of their traffic through content creation and link building.
[20:51] A lot of the trends aren’t new: create great content, build links, etc.
[21:25] Matthew Woodward figured out how to get your FAQ to show up with your search results.
[21:46] It takes up more real estate and will force more views and clicks.
[23:35] Two tools that Bill loves are Ahrefs and SEMRush.
[24:42] Bill loves the SEO blogs by Ryan Stewart and Matthew Woodward.
[25:28] Bill recommends the book How Life Works by Andrew Matthews.

Resources From The Interview:

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