If you didn’t get into paid media before Google changed up the traffic game, you can still get into it now. That’s what Alex Goldberg is showing us on this week’s podcast.
Alex started a site as a side hustle, but it eventually grew into a portfolio of sites. Organic traffic was abundant, but he decided to experiment with paid media arbitrage.
In the end, he built up a portfolio of sites earning $20k/month and then sold it for a hefty sum.
For people who are generating a lot of traffic from SEO or social media, Alex outlines a great strategy to diversify, and for people who aren’t getting as much traffic as they used to, they can also diversify.
Don’t miss this episode where Alex shares a lot of great advice and tips for getting started and succeeding with this strategy.
Watch the Full Episode
Alex starts with a brief introduction of his background, talking about how he always wanted to be an entrepreneur, how he started side hustling, and how he eventually exited one of his main projects, a portfolio of health and wellness sites.
He starts by talking in more detail about his initial site, which he started in 2018 as a side hustle with a colleague. They were reviewing fintech companies, but pivoted to health and wellness when they sensed there was a better opportunity in that niche.
In 2021, he quit his job, eventually bought out his business partner, and went on to create a portfolio of related sites. He also shifted his focus from organic traffic to paid media arbitrage before he eventually sought out, and found, a buyer.
Alex goes into more detail about switching from SEO to paid media arbitrage and why he decided to diversify. He talks about the challenges he faced setting up a paid arbitrage strategy, but claims that once you have a roadmap, it’s easier than SEO.
He discusses the types of keywords he bids on, how to meet the demand of underlying queries, and future-proofing your business.
Alex had experience before he started using this strategy, but for people who don’t usually use paid ads, he shares tips and tricks and challenges people generally face.
He reveals the percentage of campaigns that are generally successful and talks about how to talk to brands about using this strategy, what kinds of niches it would work in, and he compares it to SEO, content creation, and organic traffic.
Alex explains social whitelisting and then goes into a lot of detail on conversion tracking, and he also talks about scaling the business and reaching $20k/month in profit while providing immense value for his clients, which was very important to him.
Towards the end of the interview, he talks about being hit by the HCU and how diversified his sites were, and he also shares some stats: how much his business was earning and how much he sold it for.
Topics Alex Goldberg Talks About
- How he got started as an entrepreneur
- Pivoting into health and wellness
- Buying out his partner
- Building a portfolio of sites
- Shifting to paid media arbitrage
- Finding keywords to bid on
- Challenges using this model
- Ratio of successful vs. unsuccessful campaigns
- Relationships with brands
- Social whitelisting
- Conversion tracking tips
- How he scaled his paid ads strategy
- Selling his site
Links & Resources
Transcript
Jared: All right. Welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast. My name is Jared Bauman. Very excited today. We are joined by Alex Goldberg. Alex, welcome on board.
Alex: Hey, thanks so much. Nice to be here.
Jared: It’s great to have you on the podcast. We’re, uh, I’m very excited because we’re, we’re talking about a, well, really a success story, um, uh, from start to finish to some degree.
Uh, we always love when we get these because we just get to hear about the origin all the way to where you took it. And where it is now, uh, as we do before we get into the nuts and the bolts of this story today, maybe give us some background on yourself and who you are up until the point where this project began.
Alex: For sure. Yeah. So, so I’m Alex. I’m based in Southern California. I moved to the Bay area for college and took my first few jobs up there working in SAS companies, early stage startups, typically as marketing hire number one and gained a lot of, uh, cut my teeth in different organizations learning. Paid, organic, offline, online, a bunch of different kinds of marketing.
Um, but always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I always knew that I wanted to run my own business one day, both of my parents were entrepreneurs. And so I started side hustling essentially on nights and weekends. Um, the affiliate world, the niche site world, the, the, the building online and creating your own empire and your own destiny was really attractive.
So. Yeah, I just started to tinker nights and weekends. I work until five or 6 PM, slam my laptop shut, go and have dinner with my now wife and potentially go for a run and then hop back on my computer and hustle until the wee hours of the morning and do it all for, did it all for a few years. And one of the things that took off in that period was a health and wellness focused affiliate site.
We helped folks understand their options online as well as review and compare different For the most part, telemedicine products, products, but, uh, really a wide range of health and wellness products and a lot of innovation in that space. We helped, uh, folks navigate that and, um, had a lot of organic traffic.
And at some point my side hustle became my full time hustle with full time at the business. Um, I bought my business partner out. I, um, then decided at some point figured out a paid media strategy to compliment the organic traffic, uh, and diversify the business a bit. And, uh, was lucky enough to exit the business in March of this year, um, for, for, uh, attractive multiple.
And I wouldn’t say life changing money, but, um, definitely, uh, uh, a solid exit. So that’s my, that’s my story, you know, kind of at a high level and happy to dive in anywhere that’s helpful.
Jared: Well, we definitely want to get into the nuts and bolts of, if you don’t mind. I mean, I think I first caught wind of this through a mutual friend and you were on, um, you were featured on starter story, the YouTube channel.
Um, and, uh, and you know, it, it did a nice job, but we got more time than they do, so we can really get into some more details. I hope, why don’t you take us back to when this site got started? If you could maybe give us a little bit of over, you told us health and wellness, maybe a little bit more, if you could details on it.
Tell us about the exit, whatever you’re comfortable sharing, and then we’ll get into kind of, you know, the, the details of, of how you got it going. That always gives people some good perspective on the timeframes, um, and just kind of where you landed on the exit
Alex: for sure. Yeah. So to put some more meat on the bones there, I started in 2018 again as a side hustle.
I was working in a FinTech company at the time, so the initial idea was just, Hey, if I’m doing this for my day job, why don’t I start writing about it on the side too? I’m gonna be doing all this research anyway. So comparison comparing FinTech companies is where I started. Um, I started with a partner, somebody that I was working with at the time at that in tech company.
And, um, we started to see a little bit of traction with our inorganic Google. We wrote all the 1st articles ourselves, built the WordPress site ourselves, spent 0. Really a kind of a scrappy start. Um, and the initial impetus was like, Hey, can we just make some side money for, for beer on the weekends? Right.
It wasn’t like, Hey, let’s, you know, replace our income and, uh, and, you know, build a, a long lasting business. That’s going to IPO or be sold one day. Uh, just really, you know, fun project to stay in touch and work together. And. We started to, we pivoted at some point relatively early on because we saw large series, a large venture capital rounds going to health and wellness companies that really seemed crazy to us at the time.
Now it’s, it’s pretty standard for that, for a hundred million dollars series aides to go to, um, fast growing companies. But at the time in 2018, that was pretty, I, I watering some. And so, uh, we thought to ourselves, well, these are really considered purchases. These are these are if I’m going to buy some sort of Rx wellness product, something that requires a lot of research to know if it’s going to work for me, how do I do that alone?
If it’s happening online, I probably need more information and more guidance. So that’s that’s where we pivoted to away from fintech into health. Um, as I mentioned, there’s, uh, there’s quite a few different conditions that we focused on, but for the most part, Rx, for the most part, something that you would normally go to a doctor to get.
But, you know, before the pandemic, and then definitely during the pandemic, this acceleration of, um, of folks getting, getting these products online and needing help making those decisions. So, so right place, right time. Um, and once we found a little bit of traction, so once we started to rank well in Google and start to understand, Oh, this, this traffic is really valuable, both, uh, you know, to the brands and, um, and the, the content itself is quite useful to the users.
We just doubled down, tripled down on that. Um, and, and. Um, yeah, so probably about 2021, um, is when, um, it was too hard for me to, to pay attention in my, my meetings at work. Uh, there was just, you know, too much money flowing in and too much activity. Um, with partners and brands to, to really, uh, care a lot about the meetings that I was in.
So I decided to go full time at it. Um, my partner at the time did not want to go full time. Didn’t want to, uh, kind of forego what he was working on 9 to 5. And so that was fine. And we, we had that arrangement for about a year. Um, and then at some point I, you know, the numbers continued to grow. Uh, it was, it was, uh, as I mentioned, just good timing, right place, right time.
And, uh, so I decided to buy out my business partner and so ran the company by myself or with my small team, I should say for about a year and a half. Um, and we expanded the portfolio as well beyond just one site. So our strategy was. We have all these partners, potentially we can serve these partners with multiple sites and multiple kinds of media, so organic traffic, newsletters, social media, or I should say social posts, um, uh, all of that was, was going on.
But I also felt that, you know, Hey, all of these are more or less tied to some sort of organic algorithm and for the most part, very top heavy, very reliant on Google. Um, and so this is when I really started to tinker. On the paid media side and figure out like, Hey, what’s what, what, how can I double down on the keywords that are already working, um, without being reliant on an organic algorithm?
So that’s kind of up until, uh, I guess I haven’t completed the full story yet. So that’s, um, you know, Up until say 2022. Um, and this is really when I started to step on the gas, uh, figure out, figure out what worked from a paid media arbitrage perspective. Um, and all of a sudden, you know, the business. Was not so reliant on organic anymore.
I’d say it was like sort of 50, 50, and it was very eyeopening to me. Hey, you know, um, maybe I should have started here to be honest with you. I mean, they’re both great. Um, but, uh, great to have sort of two legs to stand on and a more diverse diversified base of, of revenue and earnings. And, um, so with that in mind, I, I was kind of getting tired of, of running this business, getting the itch to start something new and, um, go from zero to one again.
And so, um, I started, I pushed the, uh, I thought, Hey, you know, this would be a good time to sell the business. I went and talked to a few friends who had successfully done that in the past, and they all pointed me towards one brokerage. Um, and, uh, and yeah, I know that there’s different ways to go in court buyers.
Strategic buyers are always best, but it’s more ambiguous timeline, and I wanted to, uh, you know, really push it out on the market and see what the response was. Yeah, there was actually quite a bit of interest in the site, despite being kind of a high interest rate market where, you know, financing was more difficult, uh, as well as just the helpful content update and, um, a lot of changes in SEO.
Um, so it was a relatively difficult time to sell the business, I would say, or not the best market for it. Um, but still tons of interest. And, um, and have different theories about why, why that is, uh, overall, but, but was lucky to, to find a great buyer and, um, and transition ownership in March of this year.
So it was a long process. It took about 4 or 5 months. It was SBA financed. Lots more details can, can share about the actual sale itself.
Jared: Well, let’s get into unpacking things. I mean, you talked about how SEO was a bit of a flagship, uh, for traffic all the way up until 2022. So that would have put it at like four or five years.
You grew on the back of SEO and then you switched into more paid media, arbitrage, that sort of stuff. Can you give us, get into the details about that transition? And I really do want to camp, If we can more on the paid arbitrage side of things, the paid media side of things, because certainly for a lot of people, uh, the HCU has hurt Google traffic and we have a lot of podcast episodes on how to grow SEO traffic, but we don’t have a lot in the paid arbitrage side of things.
I mean, what did that transition look like? What did you, um, how did you go about starting that off?
Alex: For sure. So I have to just give the caveat that I feel quite comfortable with paid media because of my background as a growth marketer. So I think that was a nice advantage. And, you know, a lot of people who are looking at this from scratch and wondering if this is the right strategy for them may not feel as comfortable, you know, with their hands on the keyboards of, you know, an SEM campaign or a Facebook campaign or whatever.
So that aside, or that, that said, it’s very much not rocket science. And if you have good marketing chops, um, already, and you’re already driving traffic and you already have partners, this is a relatively easy to figure out. So, um, yeah, just, just within my journey, I think the impetus was, As I mentioned, really trying to understand how to diversify my business, feeling like things are going really well and this is great, but it could end tomorrow and feeling like every single day is a blessing to be alive.
And in fact, it took me, that explains why it took me so long to go from side hustle to full time, because the whole time I was thinking this could end tomorrow, you know, and, uh, then I’d have to go back to my day job and, you know, I might as well just keep my day job because who knows how long this is going to last.
So that’s kind of the mentality of this early stage bootstrap bootstrapper in general, but in seeking this diversity for earnings and revenue, my first thought was really, hey, I know what works from a keyword perspective right now on organic. What happens if I bid on those key, those exact same keywords from a paid perspective?
So I already know how that they perform well for my partners. I already know the more or less like the click through rate, the conversion rate, uh, the commission rate. I can calculate an earning, an estimated earnings per click. And, you know, it’s pretty hard to rank for these keywords. More and more competition comes in, algorithm updates come and wreak havoc.
But what if you just buy the traffic for the keyword? Because you understand the economics of it on, you understand the throughput of that keyword from an organic perspective. I don’t know how, how different could it be if you, if you just buy, buy traffic to that keyword? So that was the, the impetus, uh, it was kind of like, felt like I, I had to diversify.
One way to diversify that is, is a sound strategy, is to own your audience. So to build a, a following or email following own a social following, all of that seemed way harder to me. Then, then simply buying the traffic and sending it to a landing page and seeing what happened, what happened. So, um, that was, uh, that was really the impetus there.
And, um, and then it took a, it took some, it took a good amount of time of testing and pioneering and tweaking and trying to figure out, um, how this actually works and, and, um, what the best landing page experience is and where, where this enough confidence to go and buy the traffic, even though there’s a lot of competition.
Um, and how do you de risk these tests in a way such that you don’t lose your shirt on, on, you know, when, when you don’t watch the numbers for two days. Um, and you know, there’s, there’s quite a bit of say, conversion tracking is just a really technical process because these conversions aren’t happening on your site.
They’re happening on a third party site. Um, and so how do you pump that data back into your ad platform such that, you know, the bidding algorithm can really get going and the AI machine learning with it under underlying those algorithms can really go to work for you and find the right prospects at the right cost kind of thing.
So all of that is a technical challenge. Getting your partners on board is another huge area. Most partners, most brands aren’t interested in you bidding on their keywords and driving up the cost of their own pay per click. Um, there’s quite a bit of fraud in that category as well. So I think, you know, all of these, there’s different challenges, um, when it comes to setting up a paid arbitrage strategy.
But once you figure out the roadmap, um, it is in many ways easier than building and growing and keeping engaged and own audience, I think.
Jared: Let me ask you a little bit more for a little bit more detail on what types of keywords you’re bidding on just to, to kind of round that out. And then what types of ads were these?
Are these Google ads? Are these social media ads? Are they a collection of ads?
Alex: Yeah, so, um, I personally, so the kind of keywords that we bid on typically are shopping comparison type keywords. So you can start with really high, high funnel stuff, but understanding that by nature of them being high in the funnel.
Um, that means that people aren’t quite ready to buy. So you’re likely earning expected earnings per click on a keyword like that is probably going to be lower. Now the cost for that keyword may be lower too. So you might be able to stomach a little bit less conversion, but where I recommend starting as is kind of where I started, which is, Hey, I have these high intent comparison, shopping keywords.
Best of X versus Y is this thing legit? Uh, you know, uh, some sort of brand alternative, um, these kinds of query patterns generally indicate that somebody is shopping and they have a certain level of brand awareness in many cases. And they’re, they’re getting ready to make a decision. They need some help, but they, they’re getting ready to make a decision.
So that’s where I would start. If those keywords don’t work, it’s unlikely that the higher and the funnel ones are going to work. This is really the way I think about it. So start low and move your way up as you’d like to scale. Um, yeah. And then the kind of ads. So on SEM, they’re just for the most part, text based ads.
You want to match the secret sauce really is you want to match the query. Uh, that you’re, that someone’s typing into the keyword that you’re bidding on to the text in the ad to the landing page copy. And if you’re able to connect those dots. Uh, and match the intent of the underlying query, meet the demand of the underlying query, then, uh, you know, you’ve served that user quite well, and you’ll likely get conversions as a result.
So that’s where I would start with the keywords. Um, that’s kind of what the ads look like. We did do some of this on meta as well. Um, the meta, there’s something called social whitelisting, which actually makes all of this way easier. The strategy is basically you give your partners access to run ads through their own ad manager.
So you don’t, you as the affiliate, don’t even Really manage the ads or impact the ads much where you really just say, you know, Hey, brand partner, you have all the control over this campaign. Um, and, uh, you know, kind of like leverage my third party handle and, uh, you know, send traffic to my site or send traffic to my landing page.
But all the ad spend all the targeting, all the creative comes from your partner, the brand itself. Um, so in many ways on meta, it’s easier. Um, you can do the same, you can do the same strategy or the same setup as you have on Google SEM, which is to say, you know, you as the affiliate can just buy traffic and send that to your own landing page yourself without your, you know, giving your, your partner or your brand control over all of that.
Um, so you can do it both ways, but in many ways, the meta properties make it easier, sort of more streamlined for this kind of activity. And again, both of these strategies, the beauty of them is that they’re super duper aligned with the incentives of the platform itself. So you’re not at odds with the platform that the ad platform, they make money.
They are profit seeking organizations. You’re paying them. So you’re, you’re aligned with them. Uh, whereas in an organic, if you’re relying on an organic algorithm, you are always a little bit at risk. I think there were the days when all of us deluded ourselves a little bit as publishers. And said, Oh, Google desperately needs us because we’re the ones who create the content.
Uh, but in the context of generative AI, that may not be the case anymore. Uh, at least to the same extent. And so, you know, basically trying to align your incentives with the platforms is, is the way to future proof or like ensure that you’re. Your, uh, your business isn’t going to get cut, cut down tomorrow.
Jared: You talked about having experience in paid media, kind of going into this pivot, um, and a lot of people might not. What are the, what are the big mistakes or things to look out for someone thinking to themselves right now? Okay. I can boot up Google search console. I can find the kind of keywords that I get traffic for.
I can. Uh, to some degree, look and see which ones of those are conversion focused and which ones I might be getting my, uh, my highest earnings from. But what are the big things that someone like that needs to look out for as they perhaps transition into a paid media approach?
Alex: Yeah. Um, I think, uh, a couple of things.
So on the one hand, you want to have really high degree of confidence before you spend your first dollar. You want to de risk things as much as possible. You don’t want to just say, well, I don’t know, let’s just spend the money and see what happens. You want to have a really high degree of confidence before you get to that point.
And how do you do that? So on the one hand, it helps if you already know the throughput or the conversion rate, essentially. Um, and so therefore you can have like, you can estimate a very concrete expected earnings per click. And then, you know, you can use Google keyword planner or whatever platform you’re using to see what the cost of traffic to that keyword or to that user will be.
And if there’s enough margin there, I wouldn’t say like, you don’t want it to be one cent more. You want it to be like some degree of higher, um, so that you have a little bit of room to play with because, right? Like things go awry, um, unexpected behavior, small sample size, lots of reasons why. These numbers may not, your plan may not pan out exactly as you hoped.
Um, so you want there to be a significant margin there, maybe 20%, something like that. Um, and then once you map that out, um, I would say you want to get your partners on board, because if, even if the math works out, if your partner says, if the brand you’re working with says, hey, you can’t do this, or hey, I’m going to change your rate, um, all of a sudden, That’s the strategy can be can be put.
So you want to get your partners on board specifically. You’d be surprised how many partners will even fund the strategy. Well, we’ll pay for the ads itself just to test just to allow you to see if this works. And I know that sounds crazy, but basically the pitches. Hey, hey, you know, um, I don’t know for sure this is going to work, but for three to 5, 000 in the first month, we can test together to see if there’s a scalable evergreen channel for conversions.
And we can be your partner to help you stand out versus your competitors. We can be your partner to help shoppers when they’re really confused, whether it’s you or another brand or generally which one to go to. Um, we can help you stand out. And it’s true. We may be bidding on some of the same keywords, but generally in our experience.
That doesn’t impact the cost of ads enough to outweigh the benefits that you get. If you’re worried about that, we can just test it for 30 days. We’ll, we’ll see how much you spent. We’ll see how many conversions you got. And we’ll see, you know, if, if the cost for acquisition went up during that period, um, uh, and, you know, you’d be surprised a lot of, a lot of brands will be open to this, um, and allow you to test into it.
And so that’s great. You, you now haven’t, haven’t risked a single of your own dollars. You’ve only risked your brand partners dollars. And. You know, at the end of that month period, you can switch to a CPA or some other partnership model that works well for both sides. And, and at that point, the brand is really happy because they’re, they know exactly what they’re getting and they know exactly what they’re paying for.
And it’s up to you as the hired hand, the affiliate to, to grow in different ways. So, yeah, um, that’s just kind of, um, how some of the big challenges and getting this off the ground, even before you spend your first dollar, the setting up of the campaigns. Um, has its own nuance and quirks, but for the most part, this is kind of the easiest part.
In many ways. Um, really, it’s this pre work of building your own confidence and conviction around the keywords, doing the math to make sure that that’s, uh, a plausible plan that could actually work and that there’s enough margin there and then getting your partners on board, um, to, to, in a structured way, potentially even fund some of this ad spend or to de risk it enough to, again, Keep your confidence high enough that it’s a worthwhile test.
Uh, but those are, you know, some of the bigger challenges that, uh, the pre work is what I call it. Like even before you, you, you hop into the campaign or, uh, measure the performance on a granular basis. You really want to have a high degree of conviction. So starting where you already know there’s, um, there’s commission on the other side is, is one way it’s, it’s, it’s a way that I recommend you do that.
Jared: Like if you look back at the ads or if you look from a high level, once this was up and running, um, how many. Of the ads and the paid media that you were starting, did you end up continuing? Like, is this a game of, um, of attrition where you’re constantly testing and maybe, you know, 20 percent of the ads end up accounting for 80 or 90 percent of your revenue, or is this something where, because of your measured approach, you’re really able to dial it in and the majority of what you’re launching, partnering and testing ends up being something that’s viable and profitable.
Alex: Great question. So I think, um, the. In my own experience, probably 60 or 70 percent of these campaigns end up being successful. It’s a profitable to some degree. So you do have a solid chunk of these that you, you test for about a month, either with your own dollars or the brand’s dollars. And you determine, hey, We’re a little bit too far away from profitability or efficiency.
This just isn’t going to work. You cut your losses, you move on to other strategies. So to be clear, it does not work in every industry. It does not work in every niche. There needs to be relatively high lifetime value. Therefore relatively high margin, therefore relatively high willingness to pay, uh, you know, for that customer.
Um, and then on the other side, there needs to be relatively low competition. I’ve made this work in like really, really competitive spaces like hair loss and E. D. Um, I’ve made this work in less competitive spaces where the, the lifetime value, the commission rate is lower, but the competition is lower. So it just, you know, kind of depends.
It’s a seesaw that you have to make, uh, make work. Um, but to your point, like of those, say, 60 percent of campaigns that do work, um, or, or do find profitability, There’s not a lot of tweaking to them. They’re pretty evergreen. It depends on the niche. It depends on, you know, is there seasonality in that niche depends on, uh, the, the emergence of new players and the overall market firmness, a lot of different things.
Right. But, um, generally speaking, it’s, there’s like a landing page that you create, there’s a campaign that you create, and there’s not a lot of changing changes that happen to, to either of those assets. And by contrast, you know, let’s think about organic traffic for a second, right? You do create, you do create the, uh, content once and you do benefit hopefully from that with lots of organic traffic and you don’t have to pay for anything.
And it’s true. You don’t have to risk your dollars except for what you spent creating that content. But almost certainly, I mean, I would say a hundred percent. Certainly there will be a bigger publisher that will come in and eat your lunch. Regardless, um, if it’s a lucrative opportunity, somebody else will recognize that the Jeff Bezos line, you know, your, your margin is my opportunity.
Like that will for sure happen in SEO. Um, so, um, and that’s not to say that there won’t be competition in SEM or say, you know, bidding for the same eyeballs on meta competition does creep in and it does eat away your margin there as well. But, um, There’s an auction system. And again, you’re aligning your incentives with Google’s or with Facebook’s.
And they, if you pay them, they understand, you know, you need to be in front of the right user at the right time. Otherwise you’ll turn as a customer to them. So there’s a little bit more of an incentive for Google and for these platforms to spread the love, so to speak, if you’re paying them, uh, in a way that for organic, it’s a little bit more zero sum, you know, you’re either in the top three or you’re not, um, and there’s no shuffling of that top three.
Um, so, or very often anyway, um, as often as, as like the paid side is shuffled. So yeah, that’s a little bit of the difference there. Um, and to your point, like it does require some maintenance, but it’s not, I would say, I would say it’s a much less maintenance than, um, than the organic content creation side.
Jared: You clearly have a pretty. Uh, I guess intricate is probably not the right word, but you have a relationship with these brands that you’re that you have and that you’re, you’re promoting, um, through these ads is this because a lot of people listening, maybe we’ll just have affiliate products that they have an affiliate relationship with.
Is this did you go further than that? Um, and what’s your relationship like in, in terms of getting that dialed in before you start running a paid media campaign, do you need to, or could you just, you know, go to, you know, skim links and you had got some affiliate products in your industry and you start running ads and make it viable that way.
How important is, is a relationship if at all?
Alex: Yeah, great question. Um, so, so definitely you can just go and do this. You might want to read the terms of, uh, without an established relationship or without working directly with the brand. In a non anonymous way, you can go do that. I would probably read the terms of service of each affiliate partnership that you have, because a lot of them will say explicitly do not do paid search, do not do TM plus bidding, trademark plus bidding.
Um, right. There are definitely folks who explicitly forbid you from doing this. And so in those cases, if they’re a really good partner of yours, or, you know, if you want to keep this above board from the get go, which I recommend, it makes sense to talk with them. Explain to them what the value of this is, overcome their objections.
Mention how, you know, you could sort of walk a crawl before you walk, before you run, uh, different ways to sort of push that relationship into a place where you’re, you’re having, uh, pretty, you know, intricate conversations or what have you around, um, how, how to work in tandem or closely together. But theoretically, you can also just do this and ask for forgiveness.
And, um, you know, you, you, let’s say the consequences of that are you either get slapped down and you get pushed out of the program. So if it’s a partner that you’re not really close to, or you don’t really, there’s a lot of them in the market that you can go and, Kind of replace. Um, then that, that might be a viable strategy for you.
But I do think that, um, to really eke out a lot of dollars from this or to scale it up, it makes sense to hold your best, to hug your best partners with both hands, so to speak, um, and really understand what their, what their needs are, and then cater your paid media plan towards their needs. And what I mean by that is it may seem obvious.
So every brand needs the same thing. It’s, it’s actually not true. Um, you know, different brands have different. Initiatives at different priorities at different times. I worked with brand. Every brand wants growth. Of course. Every brand wants more customers for a lower cost. Okay. So if you’re able to, to, um, create that kind of alchemy, then that’s great.
Um, but not everyone has the Midas touch at every point or, you know, there are different initiatives at different times. So. For instance, brands may just feel that they don’t rank well for their review term, or maybe they have horrible, horrible, um, press around their review term, they’ve gotten a bunch of bad press.
And so like, regardless of what the cost per acquisition is, regardless of what the actual efficiency throughput is there, they want to spend money in that category. That’s an example. There’s other brands I’ve worked with that they have spend caps that Facebook or meta is limiting how much money that they can spend on ads in a given day.
That’s just a feature of that, of Facebook or meta. Um, and, uh, and so, you know, if, if you’re, if you know that your next dollar is profitable, but on the platform, but the platform won’t let you spend more money, then maybe you seek a partner out like, like me or like a third party to help you. Run ads as well to overcome those, those spend caps.
So basically my point is is that there’s a lot of things you can learn from talking to your partners And just asking them the question like what are your top initiatives? What uh, What what’s your goal this quarter? How can I help you achieve them? Like i’m a nimble marketer I’m, not just like a one trick pony.
I’m, not just a publisher I do. I’m here to serve you. You’re my customer, basically. Um, and if you do embrace that relationship, then you get, uh, you learn what their needs are, and then you can serve them more. And, uh, basically you stand out. Not very many affiliates are doing that.
Jared: You, you mentioned, uh, a while back, social whitelisting on meta.
Now you might have just mentioned that offhand and we don’t need to spend any time on it, or is there something unpacked there that people can learn more about?
Alex: I think it’s a great way to diversify your traffic away from organic. With your existing partners, and in many ways for people who don’t run ads, it’s the way to go for the for the folks who don’t feel comfortable running ads themselves, because what you’re doing is you’re essentially giving access to your partners to your brand partners who are already assuredly running ads on meta.
I mean, they’re likely spending way more than you think every month, and they’re already doing that. And therefore, they’re already they’re hungry for more creatives. They’re hungry for more ways to convert. Because This is a supply based platform, which means there’s a theoretically infinite amount of demand.
There’s always more eyeballs you could serve. The ads to, um, the question is, do you have more creatives? Have you, have you exhausted your creatives? Uh, have you, um, shown too many ads to too many people? Uh, you know, too much density of your ads basically. And so, you know, these brands are hungry for a new way, new things to test on meta at any given point.
And so you can say, Hey, like I have a new thing for you to test. Um, you can leverage my handle using social whitelisting and you can see how that works for you. Um, and so it’s very hands off, uh, from the perspective of the affiliate or the publisher. And so that’s it’s a great way to get started in this paid media strategy to dip your toe in without having to manage ads, without having to watch the spend and.
Risk really anything on on your side? Of course the other beauty other beautiful thing is that the ad spend is coming out of your partner’s account Off of your at your partner’s credit card and therefore you’re risking absolutely nothing Um, so so yeah, it’s probably the way to start in this category If you’re if you already have great affiliate partners brand partners, and you have um, And you want to diversify away from an organic algorithm Um, yeah, social whitelisting is a great first foray and and There’s many different ways to charge for it.
I think, you know, just again, like embracing your partner’s needs and listening to them and understanding what their goals are. But you can you can sort of I’ve had people pay just monthly a flat fee for access to this. I’ve had, there’d be a really high CPA on the back, so like a flat fee without CPA, I’ve had there be really high CPA, no flat fee, had there be a hybrid of the two, um, I’ve had ad spend plus a certain percentage.
It just, uh, it just depends on the nature of, um, you know, where the budget’s coming from and what your partner needs and how they feel comfortable paying essentially for this or testing into this. Um, But that’s, that’s really the synopsis on social white listing. I think it’s a really great strategy that unfortunately not as not, not enough publishers know about, but it’s really common once you see it out there on your Instagram feed or your Facebook feed, you’re like.
Oh yeah, I see this all the time and hey, maybe as a publisher, I should be doing this too.
Jared: Fascinating. Okay. Um, I can only imagine how messy the conversion tracking would end up being in a model like this from a high level, any tips you can give any thoughts you can share for people so they don’t end up in a quagmire when it comes to all that conversion tracking that you have to do in at least a CPA model.
Alex: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, couple, couple of tips and tricks here to think about the first is that you don’t need it to start. So to launch your campaigns, you’re probably gonna, it would probably be ideal to start with a max click kind of situation, um, potentially. Max conversion bidding strategy. If you have conversion and you can implement conversions as just a click from your site to your partner’s site So like an affiliate click and you can optimize the spend just towards those affiliate clicks So that would be probably the way to start and that’s relatively simple to do But if you’re trying to pass back dynamic conversion values back into google or facebook meaning not just hey Did this conversion happen?
Uh, and was this conversion meaningful? Like, was this conversion a, um, a commissionable event, some, some sort of event that I made money on, but you’re also trying to pass back the actual commission that you made from that, such that you can then allow Google’s algorithms or Facebook’s algorithms to target not just a max number of conversions, but a, a, a, a max ROI, an ROI, like a level of margin that you want to, that you want to target.
That is a huge unlock as you try and scale. So after you prove out the model is basically break even or slightly profitable, then you want to go dive into this very complicated conversion tracking, messy world of figuring out how to pass back the GCLID, Google click ID, or, you know, Facebook click ID, F F B.
Um, back back into these platforms before that, I’d say it’s overkill. Like don’t, don’t waste time over engineering this and then some things that you’ll need, there’s some, some requirements that are necessary in order to pull this off. The first is that your, it can maybe goes without saying, but your partners need to have conversions in a digital source of truth.
I know that sounds crazy to think about, but like. You know, hey, there are some partners I work with that, like, they are the ones to report the numbers. I don’t have access to numbers. You know, they share a screenshot or they, um, you know, they don’t have an affiliate platform that they use. They just, like, go into their own analytics and, you know, tell me, tell me what that is.
So, basically, you need, like, a 3rd party, you need access to a 3rd party source of analytics. That could be an affiliate platform, share of sale, affiliate window, partnerize, ever flow, whatever it may be, something like that. Um. It can also be internal, so it can be on their site as long as you have access to like their API or something.
But you’re really realistically to scale this up, you’re going to need your partners to have a digital record that you can access hopefully by an API, um, of those conversions in more or less in real time. So it can’t just be like at the end of the month, you get this number. No, you need this number every single day.
Um, and you need to be able to access this number every day in an automated way. And so. For the most part, this is not a gating. This is not a, um, a prohibitive item like the vast majority of brands are working on an affiliate platform. So, so that’s great. Um, and then, you know, secondarily, you’re it’s all getting aggregated into this warehouse, uh, or this like source of truth, you could say, and, um.
There’s a couple of scripts that you need to write. There’s really just two. So you need access to a web developer. Very junior web developer. This is not complicated. Um, probably, you know, a web developer can do this in less than a day. Like, really, really simple scripts. But there’s two of them. One is you need to store this Google Click or Facebook Click ID.
When it loads onto your landing page, and you need to append it to each of the links on your landing page. So if you just have one link on your landing page, that’s easy. You append it to the one link. If you have five links on your landing page, like five different partners that you’re driving traffic to, and each of them is on a different platform, a different affiliate platform, then you need to append that gcl, that Facebook id, Facebook click Id.
To each link in a very specific way for each, um, for each, uh, affiliate network, right? There’s a different syntax to get that into some field or some special value, special fields, essentially. So that’s the messiness of it. There’s two scripts. So I just described one script, which is how you append the value to the, uh, to, to the link on the page, and then get that to be passed through into the affiliate platform.
And then you need a second script that once per day queries each one of those affiliate platforms. It could also be your aggregator across those platforms. So I use something called Trackonomics. It’s an aggregator for all of the networks. So I get all of the network’s data into one place. And therefore I can just query this one API and get all the data.
There’s other tools that do this, there’s Lasso, there’s something called WeCanTrack, or YouCanTrack, I can’t remember. There’s different tools that enable this aggregation across platforms, and that’s wonderful to have if you have it implemented. It’s not necessary, as I mentioned, you can query different APIs.
But the second script, as I mentioned, that I mentioned, is basically to query the API of your source of truth, either your aggregated source or multiple sources. And put that conversion data. So it’s basically like the G quid or the Facebook ID, the value of that conversion. So like how much money did you make from it?
A timestamp, that kind of metadata you put it, it queries the APIs. It puts them into a Google sheet. And then from the Google sheet, it gets uploaded into Google or a Google sheet. It gets uploaded into Facebook. That’s the full journey of, of the data. Um, it’s, it is messy. It’s hard to set up as a, as you sort of pointed out or intuited.
There’s, um, there’s different platforms and therefore it gets messy and how you get the data into those separate platforms. And then from those separate platforms into an aggregated source and from the aggregated source, into a Google sheet and then back into, Google or Facebook. So there’s a very long circuitous journey.
It needs to be more or less real time. Another, uh, another gaining item, so to speak, is that you need in order to really enable this. And in order for this to be meaningful for your bidding strategy, you need to get about 30 conversions a month. So if you’re driving less than 30 conversions a month, so you’re selling more You’re referring traffic to pool tables, you know, sale, selling pool tables online.
It’s gonna be hard to sell 30 pool tables in a month, right? Um, so regard, like, don’t set up the conversion tracking. Don’t wade into this, this cesspool, uh, of mess. If you’re not driving a significant number of conversions or conversion volume, uh, because it’s not going to impact the algorithmic bidding anyway.
You need a certain number of signals. So, yeah, anyway, that may have been too much detail. I’m not sure, but it does get messy. I think the thing to remember is you don’t need to set that up to start really to prove this out. You just start with a more simple bidding strategy that doesn’t require any of this.
But when you want to scale it up, this is a huge unlock and it, it really helps Google funnel your ad dollars to the right users.
Jared: No, I appreciate it. It does sound messy, but it does sound intuitive, right? So I do think that there, that, that is something that came out of his. A little bit messy. Definitely got to roll your sleeves up.
Definitely got to lock yourself in a dark room and not come out. They haven’t figured out. And again, just from a high level. So everyone kind of understands. And I’ll, I’ll verbally process this out loud. This is so that Google meta and your advertising platforms learns, not just. Who to send traffic to, but who is actually converting and which users that they are serving the ads to actually end up in conversions.
And you’re actually through that process, not just tying the clicks that go from the ad over to the platform, but you’re actually tied who buys and then Google meta and other platforms are using that data to constantly refine the target audience, therefore making your ad perform better and better and better over time.
Alex: That’s exactly right. Yeah. Basically, you know, you want to give Google or the advertising platform some sort of success metric that is as representative as your real success metric as possible. Right. So when you start, when you start, You may be just saying, Okay, it’s good enough just to get traffic to my affiliate partners, because that’s something that’s easy for me to set up.
I’m going to optimize all traffic to my affiliate partners, but that’s ultimately not where you get paid. Where you get paid is when somebody by someone converts. Someone takes a meaningful commissionable action, which is not on your site, and that’s why this is complicated. It’s because all of this is happening not on your site.
Um, and then one other thing, one other bit of nuance. I just want to add to what you said is that you’re not just measuring when somebody takes a commissionable event. You’re actually giving Google That success signal plus the value, the actual number value to your business. Um, and so if you have different commission events, so let’s just say you have a top five landing page that you’re driving traffic to your top partner pays X number of dollars.
Your second partner pays less and your third partner pays even less. Um, Google, you’re telling Google to say like, yeah, give credit to each of those conversions, but give them in proportion to what it actually is valued into my business. And that is the granularity that really starts to scale things, right?
That’s you’re giving Google, you’re opening the kimono to Google and you’re saying, this is. Everything you need to know, let your big brain algorithms go get after it. And, uh, yeah, that is, that’s a major unlock.
Jared: Going to save this clip right here for anytime I get a reference in the future from someone that we don’t get detailed enough here on the niche pursuits podcast, like, Oh yeah, well, we just got in the weeds, good clarity, good granularity, and I’m sure this stuff really matters when you’re trying to scale it out.
Speaking of scaling out. Let’s maybe transition a bit. I I’d love to hear how this all played itself out. Now, obviously I’d love to hear any revenue kind of stuff you can share with us, but any, just anything like, because this pivot was being made in 2022, we’ve got HCU helpful content update that hit in 2023.
We’ve got subsequent core updates that have gone on to hit organic traffic. Sites right and you’re still to this to this point had organic traffic as a large, uh, traffic source, right? You were transitioning out of that in 2022 to this paid strategy. We talked about in detail, but maybe you can give us some insight.
Some timeframes, some revenue numbers, or just how this grew and then how the organic traffic went. So we can get an idea going into the sale. What, what things were looking like
Alex: for sure. Yeah. So, um, kind of organic traffic wise, things were, were steady. If not growing, uh, still had that engine going, still heavily invested in that side of things.
Um, started to dip my toe into the paid side. Uh, basically, as I mentioned, doubling down on the keywords that already worked with the partners that were our best partners. So really kind of do this, that as much as possible, it took probably three months to find something that was, uh, you know, uh, both profitable and I felt had been running for long enough.
That hey, this is maybe evergreen. This isn’t just like a one month sort of situation. And so, um, after that though, you know, probably you’re looking at something like three to 5k profit, you know, in that range. And then I started to ask myself, well, what happens if I double the budget? What if I just double the budget?
Is there enough? What happens? Like I know that at some point the diminishing marginal returns will eat at my profit, but I will also drive more conversions. And so where is that efficiency point where, you know, it’s basically supply demand economics, one on one where, you know, uh, marginal cost equals the price or whatever.
Um, and, and, and And so. Uh, basically just approaching this as a, Hey, let’s double it to see what happens, let’s double it to see what happens. Uh, and did that a couple of times. And, uh, you know, pretty soon I’d say like, so six months into this strategy, we’re, we’re printing like 20 K plus a month in profit with something like 60 K and revenue kind of, kind of thing.
And, uh, providing a ton of value to our partners. I also want to be clear about that. Like you really start to love in
Jared: life. They’re loving it.
Alex: They’re loving it. They’re like, how do I get more? They sell more
Jared: product.
Alex: Right. And they’re like, wow, you know, this, this, uh, you have more than one trick. Like what’s your other, what other tricks do you have up your sleeve?
So, um, it’s a, it’s a really great feeling. Uh, and also I can sleep better at night. Right. I was like, yeah, I really hope this organic side continues to grow, but. If it doesn’t, you know, it’s okay. Like I can still pay my employees and all that. So, um, so yeah, then, then the thought was, okay, great. So I have like maybe one category or one set of partners that I’m doing this with.
Hey, like, let’s try my second best category. Uh, let’s, let’s try and initiate that. And again, similar process. It takes some amount of months to test, to convince folks that this is a good strategy to test into it, make sure that the numbers work. Uh, but pretty soon now you have to, uh, you have to kind of like, uh, even more diversified because let’s just say competition or maybe the partners themselves decide to call it quits in your one category.
Now you have to, um, so that’s kind of like the broad strokes there of, uh, of how that scales up. Um, at some point you do reach that ceiling, right? You can’t just continuously double forever and ever, at least I haven’t found a category where that’s true. Um, uh, but, but, you know, at some point you go, Oh, okay, wait, I’m spending, I’ve spent more on ads than I’ve ever spent before, but my profit is less, okay, I should probably dial it back.
Uh, or figure out where, where the fat is in my ads. Um, and of course you can do, there’s always more key wording that you can do. So even within your existing categories, uh, you know, maybe you tweet, you add a new competitor to that mix. If you’re bidding on brand names, um, maybe you describe the. Product in a slightly different way.
Um, and to test that keyword, um, and maybe you relax the match types, uh, and let, and let Google do all this experimentation for you, uh, maybe you try a new landing page, right? Like your landing page. Uh, and maybe you reorder the partners on the landing page. Maybe you re re negotiate the commission rates with some of your partners.
Now that you’re driving so much volume to them, like there’s lots of different kind of ways to turn and optimizations to, to make, but, uh, once you find something that’s evergreen. Um, the very first question, at least in my mind was like, Okay, what’s the ideal spend level? What’s the max spend level here?
Um, and then, uh, yeah, and then, you know, kind of trying to optimize each little piece of that experience for the user so that they convert more.
Jared: Yeah, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. Uh, yeah, your affiliates must have loved you, um, or the companies, but, um, let’s talk about the exit if you could, like where maybe as a percentage of earnings was it split between SEO driven earnings?
And, uh, um, uh, sorry, uh, paid media earnings. I don’t know why I blanked. I’m staring at paid media, all of my screen right now. Um, you know, if you can tell us a little bit about how the brands were, the websites were affected by the HCU, um, and, and, and, and how you kind of transitioned into a sale, because I do think that’s important to touch on.
Cause people will ask this question. Like a lot of times when you have declined organic traffic, I’m assuming there was some declines from the HCU. I don’t know what they were. Um, Uh, but with any declines, it can be harder to kind of sell a brand and whatnot. You talked about the challenging climate there were.
So if you could like touch on all that, give us some perspective on what the split was like at that point. And then the challenges in selling the site, given the current climate.
Alex: Yeah. Um, so I, I put the site on the market, uh, kind of right, right before the HCU. Um, so it was, it was, uh, interesting, interesting kind of time to be packaging your business and sort of changing the story a little bit, but at that point, uh, it was kind of 60, 40, I would say maybe 60 percent organic, 40 percent paid.
Um, so still like really massive organic, uh, or organic traffic and then HCU came and it cut probably 30%, 40%, like really steep cut. Almost overnight, right? It’s just really decimated. Um, and so then, uh, but, but I had, I had already been positioning my business when going to market as, Hey, this is a diversified both in terms of no concentration of partners in terms of the traffic itself, in terms of where the earnings come from, it’s, it’s, it’s nicely mixed.
It’s diversified across different sites as well. It’s not just one site. So that was kind of the name of my pitch was, Hey, this is not just a, uh, Uh, just an organic thing. There, there, there’s other aspects that make this. Um, not just a niche site that’s, you know, sitting on SEO. Um, but as, so then, then, uh, think about this being towards the end of the year.
Right. Uh, and it’s also SBA financed, which means you’re relying on a lot of bureaucratic steps, uh, to get this deal done that are way outside of your control. And the holidays, you know, at the end of the year, everything grinds to a halt for everybody, but especially large bureaucracies. So it was, um, it was a challenging period to be sort of like courting, uh, with a buyer and, and reassuring the buyer that yes, 30 percent of the traffic did, uh, kind of like, you know, get, get trimmed overnight.
And it’s kind of starting to slide and other categories too, like the revenue is starting to slide. Um, overall, as a result of that organic traffic decline, and so to tell the narrative that, okay, well, at least you have this paid thing. And also, um, organic traffic is not dead by any means. There’s still ways to grow that, uh, to, to invest in your own audience and your newsletter and things of that nature.
Um, so it was, yeah, it was, it was tricky to, to thread that needle, so to speak. Um, and. You know, I guess the long story short is is diversifying early before you sell is the name of the game. Um, the I will say that the deal retraded once or, you know, in other words, it went down. The price went down, uh, in light of how much, you ’cause you know, it was like four or five months of the, the whole sale and over four or five months, the organic traffic had slid significantly.
Um, so I think, you know, long story short is to say that, uh, the HCU definitely impacted the business. It definitely impacted the overall sale of like the, the price of the business. Um, but what, why the business is still doing well today and why it was able to exit was because of the strategy to diversify.
And so if you know the, the lesson to anyone listening is. Um, pay media arbitrage can be a great place to start. It’s very lucrative, uh, and in many ways, it’s easier. It depends on your skill set and orientation, but it’s easier in many ways than say, building an owned audience. Um, but you know, for the folks who are already kind of entrenched in their, their niche in their business, um, I’d say figuring out a paid media strategy is just really smart, really smart strategy because you’re again, aligning your incentives with the platforms, uh, and therefore future proofing your business in a way that is just not true with organic.
So, yeah, I’d say, like, kind of regardless, uh, where you’re at with your business, just starting somewhere in between thinking about selling, um, the thinking about how to diversify with paid. Uh, or at least layer that on is, is, uh, you really, really smart. It was, was really important in the exiting of my business.
Jared: What kind of traffic and revenue was the business generating when you were, when you, when you sold it?
Alex: Yeah. Um, organic traffic, I think was probably in the 30, 000 a month kind of range, 50, 000 a month. Uh, you can think about, I think of, uh, the queries being really specific though. So not a lot of like display ad kind of monetized content, like information content.
Uh, very, very like conversion focused content. So small number, but, but highly lucrative. Um, and then on the revenue side, uh, we were at a little over a million run rate. So in revenue, revenue wise, and just given them, I guess, uh, as you pay more, paid more for ads or as the business skewed more towards paid media, rather than organic, the margin, the overall margin decreased because you’re paying for ads rather than just getting the traffic or paying for traffic rather than just getting it for free, uh, but still really, really healthy, uh, profit margin there as well.
So, yeah. It was a, was a satisfying exit.
Jared: That’s great.
Yeah, that’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. I mean, like you said, I mean, a 1 million per year run rate for your annual revenue. There are margins that are a little bit different than maybe your classic site that was just earning money from SEO, but you still had quite a healthy EBITDA. So, uh, very well done.
Um, Alex, this is, uh, it’s pretty inspiring. I think for a lot of people listening, just because a lot of people didn’t, didn’t get into paid media before Google has changed the traffic, the SEO traffic game, but there’s still all the reason in the world why someone could get into it now. So for people listening who are generating a lot of traffic from say SEO or social media, you just outlined a great strategy to diversify.
And for people who aren’t getting as much as they used to, you know, You can still diversify, even though you didn’t do it ahead of the curve in this case. But it’s a great story, no matter which side of the coin you land on for this. Um, where can people follow along with what you have going on? I know that you have more as it relates to this paid media strategy.
Alex: Yeah, um, appreciate you teeing that up. For anyone interested in this strategy, learning more, I’m actually launching a course this week. You can go check it out. It’s called paid media affiliates. com and, uh, goes even more in depth than this podcast. I promise you, uh, with visuals and a community and, um, and ultimately.
You know, if this is interesting to you, I think that’s a great place to delve deeper. You can take the course. Uh, and ultimately, if this is a strategy that you, you’re interested in, but don’t want to take it, take on yourself, uh, you should reach out to me. Um, and I am happy to chat with it, chat with you about it.
And you kind of like, determine if this is the right path for you. You can find me on LinkedIn. Um, probably the best place. Uh, email as well is great because contact at paid media affiliates. com Um, but yeah, I appreciate you having me on It’s been i’ve been a huge a huge fan of the pod for a long time I heard been inspired by so many other people’s stories Uh, and, and I also just wanted to say your own stories.
So like, you know, Jared and Spencer, um, you guys are some of the most nimble marketers. I know you are not just SEOs. You’re not just affiliates. Um, you, you really do roll with the punches. And I think that’s, you know, part of my story as well, right. This is sort of like not being satisfied with just your current game.
Always be looking for the future games, uh, to future proof your business, understanding how fast the online landscape moves. So hats off to you guys for kind of showing us the way there for so many years.
Jared: Oh, well, thank you. We’ll, we’ll take that compliment, but I think you summed up perfectly. Not only what, you know, this entire hour has been about, but really what this podcast is about is about, you know, knowing that the online world is, is fickle and success is something to continually build on and not rest on your laurels.
Right. Uh, Alex, it’s been, it’s been great that hour flew by. I love, I was joking when I said it, but I mean, I love getting into the weeds. I love when we have super detailed, um, podcast episodes like this. So thanks for going deep with us on that. So, um, Hey, congratulations again. And until we talk to you next time, all the best.
Alex: Awesome. Thanks again, Jared. Talk to you soon.
