How My Chia Seeds Makes Money

Christopher McDouglas’s book Born to Run made these little black and white seeds sound like magic freaking bouncing beans.

After becoming entranced by them, I decided to smash a bunch during my marathon last year and thanks to these little seeds – or the 3 aspirins I snuck into my running shorts – I made it past the finishing line.

Anyways, so we have a very niche, but very popular product here in Chia seeds. And since they’ve risen to popularity you’ll see 100,000s of searches a month in Google…368,000 monthly searches to be precise!!

Plus you have all the derivative search terms, like chia seed recipes (14,800), chia seeds benefits (33,100) etc. Huuuuuge traffic.

So that’s why I love this website, My Chia Seeds.

A definite contender for the worst looking site I’ve ever seen, but an absolute little Google monster with it’s long long content-rich (and aged) pages drawing in a ton of traffic.

So this site’s model is simple.

First of all, write the best articles on chia seeds, from talking about the benefits of them to how to use them. Super important note; all their content seems to be 100% unique and original content. This separates it big time from your average ecommerce site, as so many of them tend to fall back on old stale copy borrowed from the manufacturer’s website or some other online catalogue.

As you can imagine duplicate content like this does you no favors in Google.

During the long helpful articles, and at the end too, My Chia Seeds have plenty of plain text links to their ordering page.

To drive conversion MCS also offers two free e-cookbooks containing the best chia seed recipes to anyone who buys.  Brilliant!

A bonus that customers will love (and would typically have to pay $10 to $20 for) and a bonus that costs you practically nothing!

Can you see how great this is.  No more freaking crazy discounting like all those shops do in the offline and online world.  Instead, just add bonus digital downloads to your online stores.

PS This can work for pretty much any niche where users want to learn more about the product (eg online treadmill store giving bonus ebook on how to train for a marathon using your treadmill) or issues closely related to the product (eg online treadmill store giving free 8 week meal plan ebook for runners).

From what I can tell the chia seeds they sell are their own brand – ie rebranded/repackaged plain chia seeds.

I’d hazard a guess they have them all stocked at a full-service warehouse that handles fulfillment for them too.

So a pretty passive income business, especially when you look at their site and conclude it hasn’t been updated for years.

I will say there is a lot more competition for these keywords now (ie in today’s world). And I’m guessing My Chia Seeds, having been around for years and years, gets preferential treatment from Google accordingly.

But still, since Google’s Penguin-Panda changes, any site that focuses on a specific niche and produces deep rich content, will eventually rise to the top.

One more thing to add on this case study; if My Chia Seeds is buying unbranded chia seeds in bulk and at wholesale prices, and is then just chopping them up into small branded bags, they could be making an absolute killing with something like 90% gross margins and something like70% profit margins (ie after paying for storage, fulfillment etc).

If that’s the case there is serious money on the table here, even if the average bag is only selling for say $10-$20.

PS truth be told I have no idea how well this site converts all the traffic it gets. I mean if you check out the site’s layout and graphics, you might just think no one would be crazy enough to trust it in order to click ‘Add to Cart’.

Visit My Chia Seeds