88. How I Built a Multi-Million Dollar Affiliate Business

0:00Seven years ago, three co-founders set out to build the ultimate platform for strength training enthusiasts. In 2022 alone, they had 31 million readers and$19 million of affiliate transactions. I think we need to see SEO less as this black box of tips and tricks and more of a school of thought in making sure your content is findable, accessible, and useful. Don't be afraid to go back with new tools, new expertise, and new perspective and make existing content better. One month of good numbers is not going to convince someone that you're worth a lot of money. But if you show trajectory and growth over years, it will.

0:40Make sure that your business is diversified, right? If all your revenue is coming from a single source, well, that's going to be a little bit less appealing. I'm your host, Alex Freeman, and I'm here with the co-founder of Barbed, undoubtedly the greatest affiliate marketer of our time, David Thomas Tao. David, thanks so much for joining us. I appreciate you having me, Alex. I don't know if I'd say greatest, but I'm very proud of what our team has accomplished in that end. So I'm really happy to be here. Well, I love it. I love the bit of humility there. To get us started, can you tell us how and when you started BarBend?

1:12For sure. Thank you for asking. We started in March 2016. I remember when it went live. And at the time, my co-founders and I, all three of us, were doing a lot of SEO consulting work for clients. And we wanted to shift a strategy toward running and operating sites that we owned. And affiliate marketing was a big part of that strategy and was a big part of our revenue trajectory in that strategy. I am someone who's always been interested in working out. I've had a longstanding relationship with strength sports. I was a competitive weightlifter. I knew the community well. And I thought there was a gap in the market between the information that was available and the information people wanted.

1:49So Barbin started as a blog, really just a small test to see if we could build organic traction. That's really important. Organic traction, not paid. And we basically proved our thesis year one, then decided to go out and raise a small amount of money, which is an interesting story in and of itself. And our team grew from there. And then seven years, roughly seven years later, we were actually acquired. I'm still with the company, not because I need to be. There's no earn out, but because I'm just having a blast. I think we could be the biggest fitness site in the world. I love it. So I'm curious about, you obviously had a passion for weightlifting.

2:20Do you think that's important as somebody kind of looks at this style of business and considers starting it? Should they be passionate about the niche that they choose? I don't think it's necessary, but I think authenticity is very important. And I think the more niche you get, the closer to people's hearts, so to speak, or they're closer to their wallets or their passions, the more authenticity is important and the more it shines through in really great content. So yes, in our instance, it really helped. My co-founders also have interests in physical culture and fitness. For me, strength training was a particular focus and interest.

2:54It was really helpful for us because we were able to position ourselves as the publisher for strength athletes by strength athletes that built a lot of word of mouth credibility. And it really helped us become the publication of record for so much of that space relatively quickly. Now, I think if you don't have a natural passion for a particular subject, but you spot a content opportunity or a gap in the market, I don't think it means you can't go after that. But you do have to find ways or partners or co-founders who are truly passionate about that as a check to build authenticity because that will result in better content.

3:25Now, how do you go about verifying that the gap you're seeing is actually a gap and that there's, you know, demand for that gap to be filled? There are two ways. I'll give the real way and then I'll give the funny answer in a second. The real way is to see if it's a test and see if you can build traction. Now, some people like to test through small paid campaigns. That's completely valid. Some people like to test through organic means, which is more of the focus we had. We were able to see almost immediate traction as soon as we went live. And I simply told some friends I had in the strength industry about it and pushed it out to my social following, which was nothing.

3:58My personal social following is still very small. But we noticed within the first few months, there were certain events that we were reporting on, and that would create a spike in the tens of thousands of readers a day completely organically. And for a brand new site, that's a really good sign. So don't be afraid to test. Don't be afraid to kill your darlings. But I think testing in small scale is something that people can still get a lot of benefit out us. The other marker that I noticed fairly early on is most of the complaints we would get from readers were about us not covering certain things.

4:28Now, we're still not the biggest team in the world. And at the time, we were a very small team. There was a point where I was writing almost all the content that appeared on the site and we would get complaints from folks saying, well, why didn't you cover this event? Why did you cover this event? You know, we can only cover so much. We only had so much bandwidth. But when the main form of complaint you're getting is that you're not producing enough content, that's maybe a good sign. Yeah, I love that. Can you talk about your total startup cost for Bar Bend and what if somebody is interested in kind of going the same organic growth route that you went, what are some of those expenses that they should maybe be planning for and prepared to invest in?

5:01It varies, obviously, for each type of business, even in the content realm, it'll vary from one niche to the next. All in back in 2016, My co-founders and I put up probably around$200 ,000 in personal capital before we went out and raised$800 ,000 roughly in seed capital. I think a lot of it depends on what your initial team is. You know, we had a built-in editorial team. I like to joke when we started because I was it. I was writing sometimes 35 articles a week, really long hours, a real slog, in order to truly test if we could gain traction. My co-founders were taking care of the technical end.

5:34They were taking care of early affiliate integrations as I just started really producing content. And then obviously, as we hired, we were able to spread out that capacity and increase that capacity. So see what resources you have. And then, you know, understand that some tests will truly not get off the ground, at least in the content space, unless you have someone producing content full time. If you don't have that person, that might be your first hire. And that might be necessary to actually see if you have a shot at filling a market gap. Now, I do also want to ask you about that funding that you were able to secure.

6:05But initially, there was a look at venture capital that didn't ultimately come to fruition. Can you talk about that process before we kind of get to the funding that you did actually secure? I appreciate you saying, asking that. You said it in such a nice way. It did not come to fruition. We just failed. We just failed to raise venture capital. We just a big swing and a miss. I think at the time, the climate for venture was a little bit different. We were in a bit of a early web 2.0 boom, I guess you could call it. when people were raising money for content ventures, they were places like BuzzFeed.

6:35They were places like Vice Media. Spoiler alert, a lot of those places are worth less than the money they raised because venture capitalists at the time were looking for tech-sized returns in their content investments. And that's a bit of a rough thesis, right? It's a bit of a rough thesis to think that everything that you start, the content platform you start, is going to be appealing for everyone and it's going to be the size of the New York Times, which is really what a lot of these venture capitalists were hoping. Did not turn out to be the case. And so we were simply too focused, too niche for these venture capital firms and had a lot of very bad meetings and had a lot of very polite and some not so polite rejections along the way.

7:13I imagine that focus and being niche is what ultimately did help you secure the funding that you did secure from other individuals in the fitness space. We did. Now, our seed round was a mix of strategic investors from the fitness space who could see the market opportunity maybe a little better than someone outside of that space. Maybe they were biased or maybe they could see more clearly. It's tough to say which. And it was also friends and family. We really had to, we worked hard to scrounge together that money. And I'm very thankful we were able to. You know, I say scrounge together$800 ,000 or just a little bit over.

7:42That's not chump change. That's a lot of money we were able to secure. That's a pretty big couch if you had$800 ,000 in those cushions. Exactly. That's a lot of money we were able to secure from people who truly believed in us, from contacts and people who had followed me and my co-founders' respective careers, some family members, some college acquaintances. We were taking small checks generally, and we, you know, we worked hard to put that together. At the same time, I'm very grateful because of our personal networks, we were able to secure that funding. And it's not a luxury that every entrepreneur has.

8:11So I do try and retain some perspective there, even though we, you know, failed to raise the institutional cap.

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9:19You lean on your team and you lean on your co-founders. That's what I've always done. I'm someone who had a lot of dark moments on the entrepreneurial journey, and some of them were based on self-doubt, imposter syndrome. This scale and scope of barbend got to the point where it was a lot of pressure. We had 31 million readers, over 31 million readers last year. That's a lot of eyeballs. That's a lot of people we're impacting with content. And I constantly question how could we have done better? Are we doing them a disservice because our content is never perfect, even though I do truly believe we are best in class and getting better?

9:50Working hard is unforgiving and it can be bittersweet because there's a lot of payoff, but you will make mistakes along the way and you will have regrets. You will have perspective and say, oh, I could have done this so much differently. I've been leaning on my co-founders. I've also been leaning on friends who I've made along their own respective entrepreneurial journeys. I'm not necessarily anyone who thinks that you have to become part of a mastermind or necessarily, I'm not saying it's bad. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but I don't think you necessarily have to pay a lot of money to get access to a group of like-minded individuals or for business coaching or anything like that.

10:23Maybe it's useful for some people. It's not something I've done, but I really try not to lose a contact. And I try and stay in touch with folks when I meet people who are on similar entrepreneurial journeys, because even touching base with them and talking about some of these issues that arise and some of the self-doubt that arises makes me feel a lot less alone. And it makes me think that, hey, you know, it has helped me think many times along the way. Maybe we are on the right track, even when that self-doubt wrapped in. I love that. And now I want to kind of shift us out of the failure conversation and the hard time conversation to get to the really great things that you achieved with Barbend and are continuing to achieve.

10:57You know, end of the first year, 1.4 million users. What's the secret? How do we all do that? I couldn't tell you exactly where those 1.4 million came from. And I will say that they were very much backloaded, right? We had many more readers in the second half of that first year than in the first half. So it's not like we started and had 100 ,000 readers in the first month. What I will say is that our timing was fortunate and we learned to capitalize on events. We decided early on that our initial content strategy with Barbed was going to be news based. Now, these days, we write a lot more evergreen content on training, nutrition, reviews as part of our affiliate strategy, all sorts of stuff.

11:33Early on, when I was producing most of the content, we focused on news. We focused on event results. We focused on the sorts of things that I always wanted to get in close to real time, but as a fan of these sports, really didn't have a place to turn to. It just so happened that in 2016, there were a lot of impactful events in the strength sports calendar. That included the World's Strongest Man competition, that included lacrosse games, and that included the 2016 Rio Olympics. I wrote, personally, weightlifting session recaps for every session. I believe there were 16 that year of the Rio Olympics.

12:02Didn't matter what time they occurred. Fortunately, Rio was in a similar time zone to me at the time, so it wasn't so bad. And we wrote recaps and we had the recaps up and ready to go within minutes of the sessions and every single one. And we started getting links because we were putting up these accurate, contextualized event results before everyone else. Before you could get the results on olympics.org, they were on barbed. So we started getting Wikipedia links. We started getting links from other mainstream sports outlets. It made a huge difference. And we learned that we were only going to get so many opportunities in the calendar year to capitalize on that.

12:35And we shot our shot at every one of them. Now I'm going to ask you to kind of take that to somebody who's maybe working in a niche that doesn't have that same kind of built in event kind of momentum that you were able to capitalize on there. What should they be doing to kind of go from that first zero to 10 ,000 kind of phase? I think highlighting stories and content of people who do have followings in the space. I think, you know, you say that they don't necessarily have that new strategy. I think any interest or niche that has personalities, that has people who are either influencers or doing things in the space or making change or pushing a space or hobby or interest forward, there's news in that.

13:15When I first started strength training and lifting weights competitively many years ago, I won't say exactly how many. If you ask people, oh, where do you go for strength sports news? The answer was what? What are you talking about? We tried to define that category and there were some small blogs and there were some forums that where people would post event results. But StrengthsBoard's news was not really a term people were throwing around a lot before 2016 and before Barbin came along, at least not to my knowledge. So when you say, oh, maybe that news opportunity isn't there, maybe double check.

13:47Maybe that's the gap in the field that's missing. Maybe that's the gap. Yeah. Great, great. Obviously, like SEO factors huge into these content based businesses and not to turn this into an SEO seminar. But I guess the question I would ask is what level of expertise should someone aim to achieve in SEO if they want to get into a content based business? I don't know if there's a specific level of expertise. I don't know if there's like a marker that says you are this good at SEO. Feel free to proceed, you know, get out of jail, get out of content jail or something like that. I don't know. That was maybe a terrible example.

14:20But I think that SEO is becoming more accessible. And I think it's something where we can constantly educate ourselves on best practices. And the thing I do like about SEO. So I've been in digital content for well over a decade. And when I got in, SEO was a bit of a dirty word. It was like a lot of stuff that people thought, you know, black hat and gray hat were terms that were thrown around. You know, SEO was something that seemed like it was taking a shortcut. It seemed like it was cheating. But principles of search engine optimization these days, I think, are based around producing quality content for an accessible reader experience.

14:53Is your site loading well on mobile? Is the content readable? Is it informative and actionable? These are all the basic principles of SEO these days. And that's really great. So I think we need to see SEO less as this black box of tips and tricks and more of a school of thought in making sure your content is findable, accessible and useful. And as search engines have gotten smarter, I think that's gotten to be more of the case. And it really excites me, to be honest. So with that in mind, with the idea that the best practices of SEO are create great content, what is great content? How do you create great content?

15:28What are those do's and don'ts for creating content that people want to read and then search engines want to load? Don't lie to people, first and foremost. Write accurately. Write from, if you can get it, from an expert's point of view. Don't misrepresent something or a piece of content as something it isn't, right? If you're writing the ultimate guide to something, you're probably going to have to write more than 300 words. If something needs to go in-depth, work to make it in-depth. And the one answer I love to give to this question is don't be afraid to update your content. Don't be afraid to go back with new tools, new expertise and new perspective and make existing content better, especially if it's evergreen.

16:08That's a huge part of our strategy. We publish a lot of new content, but for a lot of our evergreen content, it's about making sure it's a little bit better every year, getting new expert eyes on it, updating information regarding the latest research because we do write about health, fitness and nutrition. Research is relevant. And the affiliate side, making sure that your products are retested, re-reviewed, reassessed on a somewhat regular basis. All important principles. I just want to ask about the name, Barbend. How did you come up with it? And how important is the name and the brand identity in the building of the audience?

16:44For us, it was crucial. And I wish I had a very glamorous Eureka moment story. But what happened was my co-founder, Kenny, and I had decided that this was a market gap and that we wanted to pursue a site in this space. And we were talking about that on the email thread. And so I started a Google Doc and I just popped some idea names in there as they came to me. And Barbend was the clear winner. I think it was the second or third idea that kind of popped into my head. And the great thing was the URL was available. I think it costs$7. So we kind of had an instant winner on our hands. And in fact, I've looked back at that email thread and I found the first instance of the term barbend to reference what we are.

17:26And that was kind of cool. I think branding is important. And I think that people should often spend a little more time on it because it is very difficult to change a brand mid stride. I think we're seeing Twitter. I mean, sorry, X apparently struggle through that right now. I will say there is no such thing as a perfect brand name. There's no such thing as a perfect brand name. If your brand name is something new, you can do a lot of work to build and shape the perception of your brand. I give the example sometimes Nike conjures an image now, right? It conjures a vibe. It didn't conjure a vibe in the 70s, right?

18:02Yeah. Nike, what's that? People were probably pronouncing it left or right. Nike, what does that mean? It didn't bring the swoosh to mind or anything like that. That company did an immense amount of work over the decades to inform perception of the brand and to change perception of the brand, which is something that can also be done. So branding is important, but it's also something that can be modified and perceptions can be shifted over time. 2017, you became the official media partner of USA Weightlifting. How did you accomplish that partnership? And then ultimately, how did it help Bar Bend grow?

18:33I had a lot of existing contacts in the weightlifting space from my days as a competitive weightlifter. And what was useful was that that helped me get eyes on to Barb End's content very early on within the weightlifting community, which by the way, is still one of these smaller strength sports communities. But within four or five months, we knew that decision makers at USA Weightlifting, at weightlifting equipment companies, impactful and relevant coaches and athletes in the space were reading our content. And so I got a message from Phil Andrews, who at the time was CEO of USA Weightlifting.

19:09Fun fact, he's actually CEO of USA Fencing now, and I consider him a dear friend and it's neat to see him grow so many of these sports in the United States. He reached out one day and said, hey, really loving your content. Good work. I think he even said it, you know, we had a live broadcast or something and he even said it popped in the comments. And I was like, oh, OK, we have something here. And I remember it was over the holidays in late 2016. We were going back and forth and trying to make something work. And I think it was actually Phil who first proposed it because he saw the work we were doing and trying to bring a journalist perspective and a legitimacy to coverage.

19:39And no one had really done anything like this before. So I tapped my business, you know, my co-founder, Kenny, and I was like, Kenny, I know you're with the family for the holidays, but we got to figure something out. And Kenny had some really clever, creative ideas about how to make this partnership work. And by the way, that's a partnership that we've had since then. We've actually re-upped it. So they do partnerships because it's an Olympic sport, most often in four-year cycles. And this is our second four-year cycle with USA Weightlifting. Congratulations. Thank you. And when we started, it lent us legitimacy and we did a lot of content work, a lot of color commentary at events.

20:10a lot of grassroots and ground level work to help bolster USA Weightlifting's media capabilities, that was when USA Weightlifting had more traffic than Bar Bend. Now Bar Bend gets significantly more traffic than USA Weightlifting. And so we're able to support them in a different way by driving traffic and eyeballs to what they're doing while that partnership continues to lend us legitimacy. So this is going to bring us to a section of the show that we call our Fan Blitz Questions. These questions come from our YouTube community. Listeners, you can join us over there at youtube.com slash upflip and post questions to future podcast guests.

20:42David, I've got five questions for you. We're going to try and knock out in about a minute. Are you ready? I'm so excited about this. All right. First question comes from Awesome Profit. How do you continue to innovate to make new content in an extremely competitive space like fitness? We constantly look to other spaces. We constantly look at niches and high performers and niches outside of our own to see what they're doing to try and get a jumpstart on what will be relevant in the fitness community. Kai Shore wants to know, how do you start a content creating publisher company? You're going to probably have to start writing some of it yourself.

21:14So if you're starting one of these, don't be afraid to be a content creator from the get-go. It's what we had to do. And while it isn't a perfect strategy, it worked for us and helped us get to the point where we could hire a full-time team of full-time content creators. How would you feel about working for someone who knows less than you? I'd probably feel pretty good about it because when I was CEO of Bar Bend, I knew less than most of our team members. It was my job to be an intermediary and a communicator. I was not necessarily the subject matter expert. So if it's someone I'm working for who has an open mind and they're good at communicating and they're easy to talk to and they're understanding and empathetic, I think I could really enjoy that, even if I knew more about a particular subject than they did.

21:56What's the most outlandish purchase you have made? I have purchased some very expensive bottles of whiskey. I am on the side of second career. I am a whiskey reviewer and spirits writer for a number of notable publications, which I'm very proud of. And I have spent some amounts on certain bottles of American whiskey that I told myself I never would. So not really holding myself accountable there. What's one sentence you'd like to hear from your employees, people you work with? I'm really glad you started this company. I love it. And that's going to do it for our Fan Blitz questions. Shout out to Jen Chun for leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts saying the guests are really interesting and there's so much to learn from everyone.