How Security Guard Training HQ Makes Money
By Richard
This site was born out of the Niche Site Duel, a competition between prominent online marketers on who could make the most money from a new blog. SGT is Pat Flynn’s baby, and thankfully its a passive income business that is not about teaching people how to make passive income. Awesome!
Pat chose security guard training after an insane amount of keyword research.
Importantly, let’s remember he had no freaking idea about this niche or any interest in it for that matter. Which proves the point that you can be successful pursuing a niche that’s outside your passion + expertise overlap.
This should be opening up a whole new host of passive income ideas for you right now!
Also, Pat says he created a lot of the content by simply picking up the phone and speaking to people in the industry, which allowed him to produce some original helpful content for aspiring security guard readers. This kinda scuttlebutt worked for Warren Buffet, and now Pat! I likey.
He then proceeded to implement his well-known content + backlinking strategy (article marketing, spinning, web 2.0, social bookmarks etc) to move the site up the ranks of Google.
In the 2 years since launching (ie 2011 and 2012) he’s devoted a fair bit of time – and paid VAs to do the same – such that it now ranks number one for many big keywords, including ‘security guard training’.
Now many of those of you who know the Pat Flynn backlinking strategy, will also know that it’s pretty dead post-Google’s Panda Bear update. ie article marketing and other backlinking from low quality neighborhoods won’t work as well as it used to.
Thankfully Pat created and had created content that was good enough quality to survive and thrive this algorithm update. So he’s still kicking ass with it.
But yeah, this case study is a good chance for us to remember that seriously, only mad epic mental content will allow you to achieve long term standing on Google – there are no gimmicks, tricks or whatever, so there’s also no need to spend too much time learning SEO beyond the basics.
Okay, so back into the Security Guard website. Let’s talk income streams.
Pat earns almost all his money from Google Adsense (at the minute anyways). With $15,000 in it’s first year online and $27,000 the next year. Great money for a new niche site running only Google Adwords!!
Admittedly, this only flowed in because SGT was bringing in a whopping 150,000 and then 310,000 unique visitors in 2011 and 2012 respectively (craaaazy).
He’s now started experimenting with privately negotiated sponsored adsand a jobs board. These are both pretty passive if you negotiate multiple months worth of advertising at once and create a backend that allows employers to post jobs (and pay) automatically.
Visit Security Guard Training HQ or check out Smart Passive Income where case study originally spotted