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independence5 unconnected
standing

contested · 5 claims against 1

applies to

b2b, no audience needed

confidence

high

evidence

7 claims · 7 articles · 4 receipts

window

2015-02-25 → 2024-07-01

5 builders who never spoke to each other · contested

Budget years, not weeks, before search pays

The link-building routine showed nothing for two months, an article costs upwards of a hundred dollars even valuing your time cheaply, and one affiliate site earned forty-nine thousand dollars across its first three years and over a million in the two after that. Judge a content push on the raised baseline it leaves rather than the spike. Not every page takes that long.

What both sides agree on

  • The value of a content push is the raised baseline it leaves behind, not the spike: expect two sharp traffic peaks and then a sustained increase in signups.

Where this splits

Most of these builders measure the payback in months to years and Zach Swinehart calls content the wrong channel if you need clients this month, while Greg Kogan's competitor alternative page reached the first page inside a month and became a tenth of his search signups.

5 claims against 1

Andrew Fiebert · Cory Zue · Jakob Greenfeld · Zach Swinehart

Expect months or years before search traffic pays

  1. 01Budget months, not days, for search traffic to arrive: the payoff from this link-building routine only became visible after more than two months of doing it.
  2. 02Price content marketing honestly before you commit to it: you pay for a keyword research subscription, you pay per article whether in cash or your own hours, and you need a lot of articles before the traffic amounts to anything.
the objection · 1 claimGreg Kogan

Some pages rank and convert within a few weeks

Expect a single alternative page to become a meaningful share of your search acquisition within weeks, not years.

  1. 03Do not judge an affiliate content site on its first three years: the curve is flat for a long time and then bends sharply.
  2. 04Build the content archive for the authority and the relationships it accumulates, which makes it the wrong channel if you need clients this month.
  3. 05Expect the effort behind a rank-first guide to be measured in tens of hours, and expect a lag between publishing it and Google recognizing it.

What it returned

  • 60

    Zue's click stats only began showing real results past the 60-day mark of following the strategy

  • $100

    He puts each article at upwards of $100 even valuing your own time cheaply, names Ahrefs as the kind of tool you cannot work without, and says it is usually months before you get real signal on whether it is working.

  • $1.2M

    Andrew Fiebert said GiftLab had generated roughly $1.2M in total affiliate commissions, of which only about $49,000 came in the site's first three years, leaving over $1M earned in the following two.

  • 30

    Zue had roughly 30 hours in his Django and Stripe integration guide when he judged it the best resource on the topic and was still waiting for search to catch up.

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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More in seo

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click, and the address is used for this and nothing else.